“How is it that Americans, so solicitous of the animals they keep as pets, are so indifferent toward the ones they cook for dinner?,” asks Elizabeth Kolbert in this review of Jonathan Safran Foer’s latest nonfiction work, Eating Animals. According to Kolbert, Foer attempts to tackle this inconsistency through a series of vignettes exploring the human relationship to food animal production and criticizing the impact of so-called factory farms on “inter-species alliances.” The novelist also takes issue with food writer and activist Michael Pollan’s support for non-industrial livestock practices, describing the argument in favor of responsible meat consumption as “unpersuasive.” Foer maintains that an emphasis on organic or humane animal husbandry serves only to obfuscate the moral issues at stake. “Although he never specifically equates ‘concentrated animal feeding operations’ with the Final Solution, the German model of at once seeing and not seeing clearly informs Foer’s thinking,” notes Kolbert. “The…
Tag Archives vegetarian/vegan
According to the president for the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM), a nonprofit vegan group founded in 1985, recent, unpublicized studies have suggested that “cheese, chocolate, sugar, and meat all spark the release of opiate-like substances that trigger the brain’s pleasure center and seduce us into eating them again and again.” Neal Bernard also discusses research showing (i) “participants moving to a vegetarian diet have a harder time giving up cheese than almost any other food”; (ii) “the principal protein in cheese, casein, breaks apart during digestion to produce abundant amounts of morphine-like compounds called casomorphins”; and (iii) naxolone, an opiate blocker used to treat morphine and heroin overdoses, reduces the desire for chocolate, sugar, cheese, and meat suggesting that their attraction does indeed come from druglike effects caused within the brain.” Bernard asserts that “just as Big Tobacco intentionally manipulated the addictive qualities of its products, Big Food…
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