[Green Thursdays] Eating Animals

I was a vegetarian for a couple of years before two cute boys took me to Betty's Burgers and I had a juicy, juicy burger. And then later than day, one of them made me a steak. So now I'm a carnivore. Just kidding. I don't eat meat every day or even every other day. I usually have meat once or twice a week. I'm trying to get back to vegetarianism but dealing with the guilt whenever I reach for bacon has continually worn on me. However, I attended a lecture by Jonathan Safran Foer on his new book, "Eating Animals," and it made me much more comfortable with my choices. The fact is that, yes ideally, for the world, we would all be vegans. And the truth is that you can be happy, healthy and make easy choices when being vegan, despite the propaganda against such a life choice. But you can also help on a daily basis when you do eat meat. Cutting down meat consumption and being aware of where your meat comes from is an important first step and an easy one at that. And I shouldn't feel that if I have bacon for breakfast, that the rest of my day is shot and I can eat meat like a starving lion. Every choice is an individual one and keeping this in mind has made me an "ethical omnivore."

Check out Foer's book here.

"Like many others, Jonathan Safran Foer spent his teenage and college years oscillating between omnivore and vegetarian. But on the brink of fatherhood—facing the prospect of having to make dietary choices on a child’s behalf—his casual questioning took on an urgency. This quest ultimately required him to visit factory farms in the middle of the night, dissect the emotional ingredients of meals from his childhood, and probe some of his most primal instincts about right and wrong.

This book is what he found. Brilliantly synthesizing philosophy, literature, science, memoir, and his own detective work, Eating Animals explores the many stories we use to justify our eating habits—folklore and pop culture, family traditions and national myth, apparent facts and inherent fictions—and how such tales can lull us into a brutal forgetting.
Marked by Foer’s moral ferocity and unvarying generosity, as well as the humor and style that made his previous books, Everything Is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, widely loved, Foer’s latest tour de force informs and delights, challenging us to explore what is too often conveniently brushed aside. A celebration and a reckoning, Eating Animals is a story about the stories we’ve told—and the stories we now need to tell."