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Jonathan Safran Foer “Quitting Meat Is A Process”

Written by Vegetarian Star on Friday, November 13th, 2009 in Authors, Food & Drink.

Jonathan Safran Foer "Eating Animals" Interview

Jonathan Safran Foer "Eating Animals" Interview

Author Jonathan Safran Foer says that for people, including himself, going vegetarian is a lot like Mark Twain described quitting smoking.

“Mark Twain said that quitting smoking is among the easiest things one can do; he did it all the time. I would add vegetarianism to the list of easy things. In high school I became a vegetarian more times than I can now remember…”

Whether you’re trying to go vegetarian, vegan, or flex the process can result in multiple attempts to “get it right” whether the failings are brought on by cravings, environment, financial issues or pure convenience.

The strictest of vegetarians would like to call anyone who even ingests the occasional animal byproduct no longer vegetarian, but is that the best approach to take?

Jonathan gives his take on alternet.org:

“But I wonder if more of the difficulty doesn’t come from the ways that we talk and think about change. When it comes to meat, change is almost always cast as an absolute. You are a vegetarian or you are not. It’s a strange formulation, and it’s distracting. (Those who profit from animal suffering and environmental destruction want us to think in dichotomies, rather than practical realities.) Imagine someone asking you, “Are you an environmentalist or not?” For most of us, caring about the environment isn’t an on-off switch, but a set of daily choices that we try to respond to as best we can. I buy energy-efficient products, and turn off lights when leaving a room, and recycle and so on. But I also fly on airplanes. Does my occasional flying completely undermine my identity as someone who cares and tries? Should I, faced with my inability to live consistently, make no efforts to live better?”

Is being a vegetarian a continuous “process” that none of us should expect to get 100% correct?

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Kinky's Celebrity Pet Files

Kinky's Celebrity Pet Files

Kinky Friedman has just released a book, Kinky’s Celebrity Pet Files, that gives the lowdown on all the four legged celebrities and their human counterparts.

Kinky writes about historical individuals like Mark Twain, Winston Churchill and Ernest Hemingway as well as celebs of today such as Brian Wilson and Willie Nelson.

One of the more humorous parts of the book include the captions under the pets indicating what the animal is thinking.

One such photograph is of Phyllis Diller dressed in a fur coat holding her cat with the caption above the cat reading, “How many cats did it take to make that jacket?”

What better way to illustrate moral schizophrenia than to have kitty tell it like it is.

Kinky Friedman is an animal advocate and founded Utopia Animal Rescue Ranch in Texas (cute photo alert on Utopia’s home page).

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