bodhi tree swaying

Another HuffPo article, this time a review of Jonathan Safran Foer’s new book, Eating Animals:

Making a different choice for dinner is the most powerful individual thing we can do to reduce global warming, as Foer points out. How big a sacrifice is that? To just reduce what we are consuming, say by going meatless one night a week as a starter? Remember our grandparents’ dinners. Meat was a special once-a-week treat, for economic reasons and availability reasons. Today we are going in the opposite direction eating it sometimes three times a day, at breakfast, lunch and dinner. The more we eat, the more factory farms have to produce, the further we get from core values of stewardship and morale responsibility.

How we treat our chickens, pigs, fish and cows affects everyone. Whether you eat animals or not, they have an impact on your life in the pollution they create, and

…

Jonathan Safran Foer has a piece in HuffPo on vegetarianism. The guy’s everywhere these days, and you might think it was his book launch I was pimping and not my own! (The launch of the second edition of “Vegetarianism: A Buddhist View” is this Friday, November 13. And you’re invited to my online launch party.)

Here’s an extract:

Mark Twain said that quitting smoking is among the easiest things one can do; he did it all the time. I would add vegetarianism to the list of easy things. In high school I became a vegetarian more times than I can now remember, most often as an effort to claim some identity in a world of people whose identities seemed to come effortlessly. I wanted a slogan to distinguish my mom’s Volvo’s bumper, a bake sale cause to fill the self-conscious half hour of school break, an occasion to get closer

…

Natalie Portman has a piece in the Huffington Post responding to Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals, a book she credits with moving her from being a vegetarian to being a vegan activist. I’m experiencing a bit of that myself, having recently returned to veganism, even though I haven’t yet read the book and won’t have time to for months yet. (I’m writing a book of my own).

This is just an extract — do read the whole article.

The human cost of factory farming — both the compromised welfare of slaughterhouse workers and, even more, the environmental effects of the mass production of animals — is staggering. Foer details the copious amounts of pig shit sprayed into the air that result in great spikes in human respiratory ailments, the development of new bacterial strains due to overuse of antibiotics on farmed

…