Eating Animals

Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer is an extraordinary book!!! It is not one-sided. He looks at ethical farms and good farmers. If there were more ethical and family farms, I would be more likely to eat meat. However, factory farming has taken over. It's all about the money and how to produce as much meat as possible with as little money as possible. Animals are not treated as living things but as mere objects. Here are some notes I took while reading:

1. The lights are turned on 20 hours a day so that the egg-laying hens think it is Spring.
2. Peta would rather euthanize a dog than have it living its life in a kennel.
3. "When we walk around thinking we have a greater right to eat an animal than the animal has a right to live without suffering, it's corrupting."
4. Every turkey sold in every store and served in every restaurant was the product of artificial insemination.
5. KFC chickens are almost always killed in 39 days. That's how rapidly they're grown.
6. How much suffering will you tolerate for your food?
7. On average, Americans eat the equivalent of 21,000 entire animals in a lifetime.
8. Vegetarian diets tend to be lower in saturated fat and cholesterol, and have higher levels of dietary fiber, magnesium and potassium, vitamins c and e, folate, carotenoids, flavonoids, and phytochemicals.
9. Excess animal protein is linked with osteoporosis, kidney disease, calcium stones in the urinary tract and cancers.
10. Vegans have lower blood cholesterol levels, lower risk of heart disease, lower blood pressure, lower risk of hypertension, lower risk of type 2 diabetes, lower BMI and lower cancer rates.
11. The highest rates of osteoporosis are seen in countries where people consume the most dairy foods.
12. In the National school lunch program more than half a billion of our tax dollars are given to the dairy, beef, egg and poultry industries to provide animals products to children.
13. Nearly 1/3 of the land surface of the planet is dedicated to livestock.
14. Animal shit seeps into rivers, lakes and oceans killing wildlife, polluting air, water and land in ways devastating to human health.
15. Farmed animals in the US produce 130 times as much waste as the human population.
16. Less the 1 percent of the animals killed for meat in America come from family farms.
17. 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 humans who are living in dire poverty?