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34 of 36 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
VERY engaging, March 14, 2009
When I first picked up this book I thought I already knew everything there was to know on the issue. I was wrong. Especially on the fish chapter of the book. I'm not really into fish. They're so strange, so different, but I respect them and I learned a lot about them. For instance, We share 85% of our DNA with fish (98% we share with primates). Crazy, right?
I also believed the myth that fish have a teensy memory span. Not true. Fish have a memory span of at least 3 months and probably much longer (it hasn't been tested further than three months). Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson quotes Culum Brown, (U of Edinburgh biologist) "Fish are more intelligent than they appear. In many areas, such as memory, their cognitive powers match or exceed those of 'higher' vertebrates, including non-human primates."
Fish are freaky, they made no sounds but their sporadic out-of-water wriggling and flopping seem unnatural and clearly anguish-driven. The author says, "It is a bit puzzling why we feel that something not like us deserves less respect. That it's death is less troubling." Here, here. Some people think fish are vegetables. You know those people who say, "I'm a vegetarian but I eat fish." Those people really need to read this book.
And this book explores the lives of all the animals we eat. Pigs, cows, chickens. Creatures great and small-this book explains why they matter and why we have a moral responisiblity toward them and toward the environment. This book can be heartbreaking but I'm very glad I read it. It had me gasping with surprise which I really didn't expect. I wish it could be required reading for everyone. Unfortunately, I'm afraid that the only people that will pick it up will be vegans, vegetarians, or people already interested in vegetarianism. That's a shame because this is really good stuff.
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30 of 32 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A thoughtful and important book on a complex moral problem, April 24, 2009
Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson is well known for exploring the emotional lives of animals, and in two previous books, "Dogs Never Lie About Love" and "When Elephants Weep", has presented a very convincing case that there are few differences between what we and non-human animals feel. In "The Face on Your Plate" he extends this argument to the animals we eat--particularly farm animals and fish--bolstering his case with a wealth of new scientific evidence showing that even dumb-looking turkeys and cold-blooded salmon are more thoughtful, introspective, and emotionally rich than any of us have imagined.
However, whereas his previous books inspired delight at the emotional landscape that we share with other animals, "The Face on Your Plate" provokes discomfort, as it was designed to do. No matter one's dietary preferences, it's impossible to read Masson's descriptions of cows separated from their calves at birth, of salmon mindlessly swimming away their lives in fish-farm pens, and of chickens and pigs sequestered in the equivalents of concentration camps without being repulsed by the profound cruelty associated with the making of our food.
What then can someone who reads this well-documented book do to rectify this situation? We can turn our backs upon it and ignore the cruelty, as Masson points out that many of us do, or we can follow his lead and become vegans. This is the central theme of the book: that the vegan lifestyle--consuming no meat, dairy products, or eggs--not only reduces the suffering of other sentient beings, but also helps to alleviate global warming while spreading agricultural resources to hungry humans instead of to methane-belching livestock. To sweeten his point, Masson spends the latter part of his book extolling the culinary delights of veganism as well as its health benefits, suggesting that we take a very pure line: it would be best if we gave up all animal products, even honey.
Some readers may find him a bit precious in this regard--do bees really care about their hives being "robbed"? I did not find this to be the case. Once you engage the map Masson draws--that all animals have feelings--(and it's hard not to), it's difficult to fault the logic of his position, especially when he bolsters it with such good biology, impressive logic, and admirable passion. All that acknowledged, I wish he had also discussed the notion that veganism may not be the only morally and environmentally sound way of eating, and, in fact, may not be universally adoptable. His not addressing these issues seemed like an omission in an otherwise wonderfully thoughtful and provocative book, and I hope that he and others will participate in the conversation that I would like to open up. (Full disclosure: I say this as someone who hasn't brought factory-farmed animals into his kitchen for over thirty years and also does not use dairy products.)
This discussion would begin with the challenges veganism poses for those of us who do not live where many vegetables and fruits grow. For example, I had to grin while reading Masson's glowing accounts of his papaya breakfasts, avocado lunches, and tofu dinners--he grew up in California and lives in Auckland. But while reading these passages, I could see ten feet of snow outside my windows in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and this was in April. If one of Masson's points is that veganism allows us to eat locally and low on the food chain, so as to reduce our carbon footprint, the practice must also acknowledge the inherent transportation costs and increased carbon footprints of transporting these kinds of foods to distant, faraway places that have short growing seasons.
A better choice for people in these places, at least environmentally, might be to eat locally grown wheat instead of tofu and keep a pig or two. Of course, keeping livestock, even if the animals can roam, fails one of Masson's most telling critiques of the relationship between humans and farm animals: that we betray the trust of those whom we feed when we kill them for food.
Years ago, I myself faced some of these quandaries when I adopted vegetarianism for three years: I felt uneasy about eating produce grown faraway because of the costs involved in transporting it. My solution was a different one than the one advocated by Masson: I went back to hunting the animals who lived nearby me. In three of my books ("Bloodties", "Heart of Home", and "Merle's Door"), I've explained this position to greater and lesser extents, and I'll briefly summarize its main points here.
Wildlife, being free, has not entered into a compact with humans. Species like deer, elk, moose, and bison view humans as they view wolves, coyotes, bears, and mountain lions--we're another predator to be wary of. Therefore, when one hunts them, one isn't betraying a trust, as is the case when one kills a domestic animal who one has cared for. One is engaging animals who are as suspicious of humans as they are of the other predators who eat them, and one meets them on their home ground, not in an abattoir.
If one hunts locally, one's carbon footprint is also small. In "Bloodties", I employed the same scientist whom Masson quotes--Dr. David Pimentel, of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Cornell University--to calculate the fossil fuel costs of three different diets. The first consisted of the elk I annually shoot and eat in Jackson Hole, an elk whom the Yellowstone ecosystem has grown in the same way since Pleistocene times, without hormones, antibiotics, and pesticides. The second diet was a calorically equivalent amount of potatoes grown just over the Teton Mountain Range in Idaho, and the third was a calorically equivalent amount of rice and beans grown in California. For the elk, Dr. Pimentel and I factored in the cost of my driving to and from nearby roadheads, the manufacture of my rifle and clothing, and the electricity to run my freezer. For the potatoes, it was the cost of producing and running the farming machinery and trucking the potatoes from Idaho to Jackson Hole. For the rice and beans, it was the use of fertilizers, irrigation, and farm machinery, canning the beans, and transporting them and the rice 900 miles to Wyoming.
The results of this exercise were instructive: My hunting an elk costs planet Earth 79,000 kilocalories annually. If I ate 150 pounds of elk in the form of potatoes, the cost would be 151,000 kilocalories. For rice and beans, it would be 477,000 kilocalories. Clearly, eating what your home place grows cuts down on your carbon footprint.
But there was another message buried in the data that Dr. Pimentel and I generated, and it was a counterintuitive one. Eating a big charismatic animal like an elk can be, when all is said and done, the dietary choice that causes the least amount of suffering, if one lives in a cold, northern place, where many vegetables aren't native.
The reasoning goes as follows: When crops such as wheat, rye, and sugar beets are harvested (to name but a few crops for which this holds true), rabbits, mice, snakes, and ground-nesting birds are killed by the harvesting machinery. Wildlife is also lost in oil spills (think seals, whales, and sea otters), and wildlife is then killed on our highways when our food is transported from farms to stores. Who hasn't seen the carnage?
In addition, deer love salad greens as much as we do and must be fenced out of farms. Fencing, of course, puts the problem of marauding deer onto someone else's farm. Eventually, the deer have to be "controlled," a euphemism that means killed, usually by public hunters. There would be no agriculture, organic or otherwise, if deer were given free rein to eat as they would.
This ongoing cull of innocent wildlife from the wellhead to the farm to the grocery store is almost universally ignored, yet it goes on every day. Tellingly, being a vegan doesn't remove one from the process of wildlife being killed so that one may live; it simply shifts the deaths over the horizon and makes them invisible, unless one takes the time to think about what is entailed in growing food upon and transporting it through landscapes that still belong to wild animals, not only to us.
One of the reasons I returned to hunting after having tried vegetarianism was, first, to be more personally honest about the wildlife deaths that were supporting me and, second, to see if I could reduce them. Both Masson's and my data show that if you eat locally you reduce the wildlife deaths associated with your diet. If my home place grew elk, well, that's what I should eat and diminish the wildlife deaths implicated in bringing vegetables to Wyoming. I also based my return to hunting on a Buddhist notion concerning the taking of life to survive: One ought to take as few lives, as few consciousnesses, as possible, since all consciousnesses are equal. Thus it's better to eat a yak, or a water buffalo, or an elk rather than five hundred chickens, or ten thousand shrimp, or, as is the case with all of us who buy food in a grocery store, indirectly killing so many cottontail rabbits, mice, and songbirds, who are the collateral damage involved in growing and transporting our produce. In the final analysis, as a Buddhist would say, each of these beings has a consciousness that is lost and a face you must acknowledge.
Because I kill the elk myself, and take her apart with my own two hands, and carry her meat out of the mountains on my back, there is indeed a face on my plate. She's not someone I care to deny or am squeamish about acknowledging. She is the face to whom I give my thanks, the being to whom I send my blessing, for having brought me through another year. Every hunting-gathering people with whom I have lived and...
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14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Making me think about going BACK to vegetarianism..., April 10, 2009
As a *former* vegetarian, I was hesitant to pick up this book. What caused me to hesitate is EXACTLY what this book it about -- if you lift the veil of denial, how can you ever go back? I was a vegetarian from 15 to 27. At 27, I began eating fish again. It never sat well w/me when people described themselves as vegetarians who ate fish (since when is fish a vegetable??). At 30, I began to eat chicken and poultry and since then, I have reintroduced all meat.
To be fair, I was not the healthiest vegetarian, eating a great deal of simple carbs and processed food along with soy/tofu, fruits and vegetables. As a result, my cholesterol was high. People thought I was crazy -- a vegetarian w/high cholesterol? Yup, it was 272 at its highest (at age 30!). I embraced a diet of lean meats/fish & whole foods (nuts, veggies and fruits) and my cholesterol went down to 170.
So, while my heart and my conscience were feeling horribly guilty for eating animals again, my body (and my doctor!) were thrilled.
But, no matter how "healthy" I've become, the horror that I KNOW I must deny in order to eat meat again is there. It's just a millimeter away from my consciousness every minute of the day. The teenager who one day looked down at her plate of steak and realized what she was about to eat is STILL inside of me. The adult who recycles and uses cloth grocery bags KNOWS that supporting factory farming (by eating its meat products) is actually worse.
Masson writes beautifully and with heart. He writes in a way that does not preach, does not judge and does not bore. His combination of facts and figures with personal anecdotes and emotion is for me, the perfect balance.
I can't recommend this book enough. However, I know that it is human nature that many people (omnivores) will hesitate or refuse to read this. As Masson says, this does not mean that they are insensitive people. Rather, they are usually -- often -- well-meaning, conscientious people. But, old habits die hard.
I was cooking a chicken last week and honest to God, I began to cry. I've never been much of a cook, so truthfully, I'm not that used to handling meat. This was prior to purchasing the book. I kept telling myself that with practice, this would get much easier. I tried to "tough it up" and do it and somehow I got thru it. But, as I write this, I have to wonder -- does everyone who prepares chicken cry? Is this a sign that I've come to a point where I can no longer deny my feelings? My concern for innocent animals who just happen to be a different species than me? I really don't know, but all I can say is that without looking for it, I found this book the next week and had a really hard time putting it down.
I wish everyone could read this book. I wish there were a law that said if you choose to eat meat, you MUST read this book first. I think people need to be making fully informed decisions about what they eat. If people are "ok" with what might be in their meat, if they're "ok" with the way the animals are UNDOUBTEDLY mistreated, and if they're "ok" with the fact that they are contributing to the pollution/destruction of the planet, then that's their choice. But, I think MANY, MANY people -- especially young ones -- would seriously reconsider their eating habits (dairy/eggs included) if they truly knew what was behind them.
Do not hesitate to get this book!
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by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson
