Jonathan Safran Foer

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.

Literature has drawn a funny perimeter that other art forms haven't.

If the thrill of hunting were in the hunt, or even in the marksmanship, a camera would do just as well.

Consumers are going to have get used to eating less meat - to paying more for better quality meat and eating significantly less of it.

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.

These little daily choices that we're so used to thinking are irrelevant are the most important thing we do all day long.

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.

Why does watching a dog be a dog fill one with happiness?

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.

Fiction works when it makes a reader feel something strongly.

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.

My children not only inspired me to reconsider what kind of eating animal I would be, but also shamed me into reconsideration.