Food is not rational. Food is culture, habit, craving and identity.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Why does watching a dog be a dog fill one with happiness?
There is no greater gift than time.
The question, I've come to think, is not what inspires one to change, but what inspires one to remain changed.
Books are slow, books are quiet. The Internet is fast and loud.
It seems entirely possible to me that horrible things can be going on without us becoming horrible people.
There are two kinds of sculptures. There's the kind that subtracts: Michelangelo starts with a block of marble and chips away. And then there is the kind that adds, building with clay, piling it on. The way I write novels is to keep piling on and piling on and piling on.
There is a glaring reason that the necessary total ban on nontherapeutic use of antibiotics hasn't happened: The factory farm industry, allied with the pharmaceutical industry, has more power than public-health professionals.
These little daily choices that we're so used to thinking are irrelevant are the most important thing we do all day long.
I first became a vegetarian when I was nine, in response to an argument made by a radical babysitter. My great change - which lasted a couple of weeks - was based on the very simple instinct that it's wrong to kill animals for food.
It's not worth getting too excited about thinking about the larger picture. The larger picture doesn't come into focus for an awfully long time.
I have made my own choice, which is vegetarianism, but it's not the choice I'm imposing on anybody else.
The more exposure people have to the realities of factory farming, the more we will see people rejecting it. It's already happening.
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.
The French, who love their dogs, sometimes eat their horses. The Spanish, who love their horses, sometimes eat their cows. The Indians, who love their cows, sometimes eat their dogs.
I'm less worried about accomplishment - as younger people always can't help but be - and more concerned with spending my time well, spending time with my family, and reading, learning things.
Kids are a great analogy. You want your kids to grow up, and you don't want your kids to grow up. You want your kids to become independent of you, but it's also a parent's worst nightmare: That they won't need you. It's like the real tragedy of parenting.
When we talk about protecting our right to have guns, we are talking about protecting our right to shoot bullets. So what is it that's so important to shoot at?
How could this world be so unlike the world that I believed I was living in? I can't describe it. Do I not want to describe it, or do I simply not possess the vocabulary?
People who care about animals tend to care about people. They don't care about animals to the exclusion of people. Caring is not a finite resource and, even more than that, it's like a muscle: the more you exercise it, the stronger it gets.
The purpose of the Seder to my mind is to inspire conversations with your family about the human drama and hopefully transmit values to the next generation. I've always felt like this could be better.
Every factory-farmed animal is, as a practice, treated in ways that would be illegal if it were a dog or a cat.
If the thrill of hunting were in the hunt, or even in the marksmanship, a camera would do just as well.
Literature has drawn a funny perimeter that other art forms haven't.
The Torah is the foundational text for Jewish law, but the Haggadah is our book of living memory. We are not merely telling a story here. We are being called to a radical act of empathy. Here we are, embarking on an ancient, perennial attempt to give human lives - our lives - dignity.
Writers now are putting total faith in designers at Apple and Amazon. It's almost like a race-car driver having no input into how cars are designed.
We say no to lots of things that would please us. I would like to punch people every now and then, but I don't. I would like to have something for free rather than pay for it. I would like to skip to the front of the line... I don't mean to brush aside the taste of meat, which is a powerful attraction. But its power is not without limit.
Feeding my children is not like feeding myself: it matters more.
We eat as sons and daughters, as families, as communities, as generations, as nations, and increasingly as a globe. We can't stop our eating from radiating influence even if we want to.
As a writer, putting words on the page is how I pay attention.
My children not only inspired me to reconsider what kind of eating animal I would be, but also shamed me into reconsideration.
For a long time, I thought I would like to be a doctor. Such a good profession. So explicitly good. Never a waste of time.
I usually write away from home, in coffee shops, on trains, on planes, in friends' houses. I like places where there's stuff going on that you can lift your eyes, see something interesting, overhear a conversation.
Fiction works when it makes a reader feel something strongly.
To remember my values, I need to lose certain tastes and find other handles for the memories that they once helped me carry.
We shouldn't be intimidated by someone else's idea of perfection if it will prevent us from taking steps we actively want to take.
As I've grown older, I've grown more convinced there's nothing that shouldn't be talked about. If we think we're protecting each other, we're not.
It's hard to draw clear lines between writing and life and I don't think it is necessary to or necessarily good to.
Food is not just what we put in our mouths to fill up; it is culture and identity. Reason plays some role in our decisions about food, but it's rarely driving the car.
Consumers are going to have get used to eating less meat - to paying more for better quality meat and eating significantly less of it.
My wife and I have chosen to bring up our children as vegetarians. In another time or place, we might have made a different decision. But the realities of our present moment compelled us to make that choice.
The kind of funny irony is that a lot of people talk about ethical meat eating as if it's a way to care about things, but also not to alienate yourself from the rest of the world. But it's so much more alienating than vegetarianism.
Look, taste is clearly the crudest of our senses: this is scientifically, objectively factual. It is less nuanced. Eyesight is extraordinary - hearing, touch. I find people who devote their whole lives to taste a little strange.
We need a better way to talk about eating animals, a way that doesn't ignore or even just shruggingly accept things like habits, cravings, family and history but rather incorporates them into the conversation. The more they are allowed in, the more able we will be to follow our best instincts.
I am an on-and-off vegetarian. Sometimes on, mostly off. I think it is better to be a vegetarian but occasionally, the call of the hot dog overpowers my ethics.
It would be refreshing to have a politician try to defend guns without any reference to the Second Amendment, but on the merits of guns.
I think there's going to be something that happens now, where books move in two directions, one toward digitized formats and one toward remembering what's nice about the physicality of them.
There is an overabundance of rational reasons to say no to factory-farmed meat: It is the No. 1 cause of global warming, it systematically forces tens of billions of animals to suffer in ways that would be illegal if they were dogs, it is a decisive factor in the development of swine and avian flus, and so on.
I'm not funny. People assume that because my books are funny, I'll be funny in real life. It's the inevitable disappointment of meeting me.
I see bad stuff on the street all the time that I don't do anything about. I do bad stuff myself all the time. The goal is not to somehow be perfect - that's silly, that's naive. The goal is to just recognize there are choices in front of us, and to try to make better ones.
