"... if someone offers to show us a film on how our meat is produced, it will be a horror film..." another quote for the day

If there's any justice in the world, then Jonathan Safran Foer's first work of nonfiction (after the brilliant novels Everything Is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close) will do to factory farms what Rachel Carson's Silent Spring did to DDT. At least it should turn a significant percentage of its readers into vegetarians and vegans. Or at the very least it will create more conscious eaters.

I finished reading this book on the train from work tonight. I couldn't return it to the library without sharing at least one quotation:

"Perhaps in the back of our minds we already understand, without all the science I've discussed, that something terribly wrong is happening. Our sustenance now comes from misery. We know that if someone offers to show us a film on how our meat is produced, it will be a horror film. We perhaps know more than we care to admit, keeping it down in the dark places of our memory -- disavowed. When we eat factory-farmed meat we live, literally, on tortured flesh. Increasingly, that tortured flesh is becoming our own."

-- Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals(p. 143)

But please consider reading the entire book. It should be widely read and it deserves to have a place in our national conversation.