3 December 2020 Jonathan Safran Foer Literature has drawn a funny perimeter that other art forms haven’t.
3 December 2020 Jonathan Safran Foer There’s never been a culture that wasn’t obsessed with food. The sort of sad thing is that our obsession is no longer with food, but with the price of food.
3 December 2020 Jonathan Safran Foer 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.
3 December 2020 Jonathan Safran Foer Maybe one day the world will change, that we’ll be in a luxurious position of being able to debate whether or not it’s inherently wrong to eat animals, but the question doesn’t matter right now.
3 December 2020 Jonathan Safran Foer The question, I’ve come to think, is not what inspires one to change, but what inspires one to remain changed.
3 December 2020 Jonathan Safran Foer When it comes to meat, change is almost always cast as an absolute. You are a vegetarian or you are not.
3 December 2020 Jonathan Safran Foer There’s no being wrong in seeing something in art, only being disagreed with.
3 December 2020 Jonathan Safran Foer Food is not rational. Food is culture, habit, craving and identity.
3 December 2020 Jonathan Safran Foer Words are capable of making experience more vivid, and also of organizing it. They can scare us, and they can comfort us.
3 December 2020 Jonathan Safran Foer I first became a vegetarian when I was nine, in response to an argument made by a radical babysitter. My great change – which lasted a couple of weeks – was based on the very simple instinct that it’s wrong to kill animals for food.
3 December 2020 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.
3 December 2020 Jonathan Safran Foer I’m not funny. People assume that because my books are funny, I’ll be funny in real life. It’s the inevitable disappointment of meeting me.
3 December 2020 Jonathan Safran Foer I’m less worried about accomplishment – as younger people always can’t help but be – and more concerned with spending my time well, spending time with my family, and reading, learning things.
3 December 2020 Jonathan Safran Foer Writers now are putting total faith in designers at Apple and Amazon. It’s almost like a race-car driver having no input into how cars are designed.
3 December 2020 Jonathan Safran Foer I usually write away from home, in coffee shops, on trains, on planes, in friends’ houses. I like places where there’s stuff going on that you can lift your eyes, see something interesting, overhear a conversation.
3 December 2020 Jonathan Safran Foer There is a glaring reason that the necessary total ban on nontherapeutic use of antibiotics hasn’t happened: The factory farm industry, allied with the pharmaceutical industry, has more power than public-health professionals.
3 December 2020 Jonathan Safran Foer The purpose of the Seder to my mind is to inspire conversations with your family about the human drama and hopefully transmit values to the next generation. I’ve always felt like this could be better.
3 December 2020 Jonathan Safran Foer I know lots and lots and lots of vegetarians who think it’s perfectly all right to kill animals for food to eat, but don’t do it because they think all the ways in which it’s done are wrong.
3 December 2020 Jonathan Safran Foer I’m interested in the kind of religion that makes life harder. I’m not so interested in the comforting kind of religion.
