In your face about food: reading (2)

Do read Jason Epstein's memoir 'Eating' after you read Jeffrey Moussaief Masson's 'The Face on Your Plate'. While the former may serve as easeful antidote, the latter aims at viscerally letting the reader feel how painful it is for animals to be forced into our food chain.

Unlike the hapless animals he describes, Masson has had a few lives, notably as a golden academic unearthing ancient texts, and digging up material in the Freud archives. The conclusions he drew about Freud's work were met with such controversy by dour members of the human species, that Masson turned to animal rights and a vegan lifestyle in a remote green corner of the world.

Masson knows a thing or two about doggedness himself. 'The Face on Your Plate,' as the title indicates, is no picknick. What ends up on our plate is a sentient being, capable of a great range of instinctual reactions and emotions, and poignantly so, of bonding with the human species. Within chickens for instance are "giant characters inhabiting small bodies."

Using scientific evidence to back up, Masson relentlessly demonstrates that animals suffer in the service of our sustenance. Domesticated animals and farm animals do not live in conditions that allow them their natural behavior.

Animals in different industries are held captive, often in conditions so unsavory, that they present a direct health hazard to the environment and to human beings even without being eaten. The Chinook salmon is able to travel more than 10,000 miles in the Pacific before it returns to spawn - imagine this creature in a fish farm.

Animals are tortured, maimed, and killed, and in this process do feel pain, contrary to what is thought. All of this is done without much consideration by humans who are weaving a rich web of denial.

Masson hopes that his reader will feel aversion, and even without a real factory experience in situ of how animals are killed and handled to end up as food, one does shudder and whince. He's realistic enough to realize that his book won't change human habits, but perhaps some people will at least make choices based on consciousness.

In the last chapter Masson states that a vegetarian and/or vegan lifestyle actually has great health benefits. But you can be just as unhealthy as a vegan or vegetarian if you don't eat well.

Here are a few practical tips for good eating:

1. Eat fruit and vegetables;
2. Eat produce as fresh as possible;
3. Eat local food (be a "locavore")

And I would add, with The Swiss Guy (see posts with that label): 4. Right preparation.

Photo credits: thanks to cousin T. and her photographer brood who daily capture wild fowl and other animals in their garden - on pixels only, mind you.