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The Un Special Envoy On Food Called It A 'crime Against Humanity' To Funnel 100 Million Tons Of Grain And Corn To Ethanol When Almost A Billion People Are Starving. So What Kind Of Crime Is Animal Agriculture, Which Uses 756 Million Tons Of Grain And Corn Per Year, Much More Than Enough To Adequately Feed The 1.4 Billion Human Who Are Living In Dire Poverty?

-Jonathan Safran Foer

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The Un Special Envoy

Jonathan Safran Foer

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The Un Special Envoy On Food Called It A 'crime Against Humanity' To Funnel 100 Million Tons Of Grain And Corn To Ethanol When Almost A Billion People Are Starving. So What Kind Of Crime Is Animal Agriculture, Which Uses 756 Million Tons Of Grain And Corn Per Year, Much More Than Enough To Adequately Feed The 1.4 Billion Human Who Are Living In Dire Poverty?

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The Dissolution Of A Family, Global Crisis Creates The Massive Fracture, Not Only In The Middle East But Between America And Israel, Between Europe And Israel, Between American Jews And Israeli Jews. The Distances Seem To Be Widening Wherever You Look.

But When, At The End Of My Sophomore Year, I Became A Philosophy Major And Started Doing My First Seriously Pretentious Thinking, I Became A Vegetarian Again. The Kind Of Willful Forgetting That I Was Sure Meat Eating Required Felt Too Paradoxical To The Intellectual Life I Was Trying To Shape. I Thought Life Could, Should, And Must Conform To The Mold Of Reason. You Can Imagine How Annoying This Made Me.

She Wanted Nothing More Than Someone To Miss, To Touch, With Whom To Speak Like A Child, With Whom To Be A Child.

I Know You Look Both Ways Before You Cross The Street, But I Want You To Look Both Ways A Second Time, Because I Told You To.

Why Do Beautiful Songs Make You Sad?' 'because They Aren't True.' 'never?' 'nothing Is Beautiful And True.

The Only Thing More Painful Than Being An Active Forgetter Is To Be An Inert Rememberer.

If We Were To One Day Encounter A Form Of Life More Powerful And Intelligent Than Our Own, And It Regarded Us As We Regard Fish, What Would Be Our Argument Against Being Eaten?

Brod Discovered 613 Sadnesses, Each Perfectly Unique, Each A Singular Emotion, No More Similar To Any Other Sadness Than To Anger, Ecstasy, Guilt, Or Frustration. Mirror Sadness. Sadness Of Domesticated Birds. Sadness Of Being Sad In Front Of One's Parent. Humor Sadness. Sadness Of Love Without Release.

Memory Was Supposed To Fill The Time, But It Made Time A Hole To Be Filled.

It's The Tragedy Of Loving, You Can't Love Anything More Than Something You Miss.

The Mistakes I've Made Are Dead To Me. But I Can't Take Back The Things I Never Did.

You're Incredibly Beautiful,' I Told Her, Because She Was Fat, So I Thought It Would Be An Especially Nice Compliment, And Also Make Her Like Me Again, Even Though I Was Sexist.

There Are A Lot Of Things That We Crave, There Are A Lot Of Things That Would Make Us Perhaps More Fulfilled In A Sensory Way That We Just Say No To.

I Started Inventing Things, And Then I Couldn't Stop, Like Beavers, Which I Know About. People Think They Cut Down Trees So They Can Build Dams, But In Reality It's Because Their Teeth Never Stop Growing, And If They Didn't Constantly File Them Down By Cutting Through All Of Those Trees, Their Teeth Would Start To Grow Into Their Own Faces, Which Would Kill Them. That's How My Brain Was.

It Was The First Time I Had Ever Made Love. I Wondered If He Knew That. It Felt Like Crying. I Wondered, Why Does Anyone Ever Make Love?

Let Love Write On You For Awhile.

Ninety-eight Percent Of All The Soy That's Raised Goes To Livestock. So People Make Fun Of Vegetarians For Being Tofu Eaters, But No One Eats Tofu Like Steak Eaters, By A Long Shot. It's Also Funny That Tofu Is Held Up As What A Vegetarian Eats. I Mean Maybe I Eat Tofu Once A Month, But Other Than That, Never. All Of It, Statistically Speaking, Is Going To Livestock.

She Was Not Crying Which Surprised Me Very Much But I Understand Now That She Had Found Places For Her Melancholy That Were Behind More Masks Than Only Her Eyes

How Beautiful Is Forgetting! What Relief It Would Be For The World To Lose Some Of Its Contents.

Only Humans Can Cry Tears.

Was His Death An Essential Stage In The Continuation Of His Life?

One Of The Things That I Love About Writing Novels Is That It Really Doesn't Matter What Next Step You Take As Long As You're Pursuing Some Intuition Or Instinct. Of Course, Then, Intuitions Or Instincts Don't Make For Great Novels, But They Often Make For Good First Drafts.

Food Is Not Rational. Food Is Culture, Habit, And Identity.

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.

I Would Have Done Anything For Him. Maybe That Was My Sickness.

How Did Her Life Live Itself Without Her.

Once You Hear Something, You Can Never Return To The Time Before You Heard It.

I Don't Mind If Smiles Come At My Expense, I'm A Small Price To Pay.

I Tried The Key In All The Doors, Even Though He Said He Didn't Recognize It. It's Not That I Didn't Trust Him, Becuase I Did. It's That At The End Of My Search I Wanted To Be Able To Say: I Don't Know How I Could Have Tried Harder.

I Believed Him. I Was Not Stupid. I Was His Wife.

A Few Days After We Came Home From The Hospital, I Sent A Letter To A Friend, Including A Photo Of My Son And Some First Impressions Of Fatherhood. He Responded, Simply, 'everything Is Possible Again.' It Was The Perfect Thing To Write, Because That Was Exactly How It Felt. We Could Retell Our Stories And Make Them Better, More Representative Or Aspirational. Or We Could Choose To Tell Different Stories. The World Itself Had Another Chance.

Then I Have Some Bad News For You, Because Humans Are Going To Destroy Each Other As Soon As It Becomes Easy Enough To, Which Will Be Very Soon.

I Didn't Feel Empty. I Wished I'd Felt Empty. ... I Wanted To Be Empty Like An Overturned Pitcher. But I Was Full Like A Stone.

(what Are Your Ghosts Like?) (they Are On The Insides Of The Lids Of My Eyes.) (this Is Also Where My Ghosts Reside.) (you Have Ghosts?) (of Course I Have Ghosts.) (but You Are A Child.) (i Am Not A Child.) (but You Have Not Known Love.) (these Are My Ghosts, The Spaces Amid Love.)

I Didn't Intend To Write About Totems Or People Searching. I Tried Not To Constrain Myself, And This Is What I Ended Up With. There's This Great Auden Quote: "i Look At What I Write So I Can See What I Think."

It Is Better To Lose Than Never To Have Had.

Every Night Before Putting Her To Sleep, Yankel Counts Her Ribs, As If One Might Have Disappeared In The Course Of The Day And Become The Seed And Soil For Some New Companion To Steal Her Away From Him.

He Was Not Such A Special Person. He Loved To Read Very Much, And Also To Write. He Was A Poet, And He Exhibited Me Many Of His Poems. I Remember Many Of Them. They Were Silly, You Could Say, And About Love. He Was Always In His Room Writing Those Things, And Never With People. I Used To Tell Him, What Good Is All That Love Doing On Paper? I Said, Let Love Write On You For A Little. But He Was So Stubborn. Or Perhaps He Was Only Timid.

The Only Way To Overcome Sadness Is To Consume It.

It Might Sound Naive To Suggest That Whether You Order A Chicken Patty Or A Veggie Burger Is A Profoundly Important Decision. Then Again, It Certainly Would Have Sounded Fantastic If In The 1950's You Were Told That Where You Sat In A Restaurant Or On A Bus Could Begin To Uproot Racism.

Everything Is To Protect You. I Exist In Case You Need To Be Protected.

Something Having Been Done Just About Everywhere Just About Always Is No Kind Of Justification For Doing It Now.

I Regret That It Takes A Life To Learn How To Live.

These Little Daily Choices That We're So Used To Thinking Are Irrelevant Are The Most Important Thing We Do All Day Long.

Grandfather Informs Me That Is Not Possible.

Stories About Food Are Stories About Us-our History And Our Values.

I Always Write Out Of A Need To Read Something, Rather Than A Need To Write Something.

I'm A Vegetarian. You're A What? I Don't Eat Meat. How Can You Not Eat Meat? I Just Don't. He Says He Does Not Eat Meat. What? No Meat? No Meat. Steak? No... Chickens! No... And What About The Sausage? No, No Sausage, No Meat! He Says He Does Not Eat Any Meat. Not Even Sausage? I Know! What Is Wrong With Him? What Is Wrong With You? Nothing, I Just Don't Eat Meat!

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Geoffrey Boycott

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