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"The far reaching problems caused by industrial farming are staggering and upsetting, but as Masson points out, none of it is controversial. He argues, then, that the reason these unhealthy and unethical systems persist is that the majority of people are in denial. He actually includes an entire chapter on the subject, which shows his two-pronged expertise in human psychology and animal advocacy." Sheila Ashdown, Powells.com (read the entire Powells.com review)
Synopses & Reviews
Publisher Comments:
The best-selling author of When Elephants Weep explores our relationship with the animals we call food.
In this revelatory work, Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson shows how food affects our moral selves, our health, and the environment. It raises questions to make us conscious of the decisions behind every bite we take: What effect does eating animals have on our land, waters, even global warming? What are the results of farming practices — debeaking chickens and separating calves from their mothers — on animals and humans? How does the health of animals affect the health of our planet and our bodies? And uniquely, as a psychoanalyst, Masson investigates how denial keeps us from recognizing the animal at the end of our fork — think pig, not bacon — and each food and those that are forbidden. The Face on Your Plate brings together Masson's intellectual, psychological, and emotional expertise over the last twenty years into the pivotal book of the food revolution.
Review:
"'Each bite of meat involves the killing of an animal that did not need to die,' Masson (When Elephants Weep) reminds readers, and if the advocacy of a completely vegan diet (neither milk nor eggs, in addition to giving up meat and fish) is not particularly new — even Masson acknowledges that he is following the path laid out by authors like Temple Grandin and Michael Pollan — the passion with which the argument is made is immediately apparent. Masson explains the scientific background in simple, effective prose, pointing to the vast environmental damage caused by the modern agriculture-industrial complex, then slams the emotional point home by underscoring the plaintive cries of a calf separated from a mother cow or the psychological stress that hens endure when thrust into small cages. Masson argues that a vegan diet is sufficient to provide us with all the nutrients we need to thrive, using his own daily menus as an example, but his most powerful argument calls upon the power of empathy and a refusal to put animals through suffering. It probably won't convert many confirmed meat eaters, but it should provoke serious deliberation about how our food choices reflect our values." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)
Review:
A friend of mine who waited tables at a French restaurant had a faux menu he liked to recite. It began like this: "Pate de foie gras — made from the liver of a small goose who's had its foot nailed to the floor and food stuffed down its throat through a tube until its organs explode." That is not a precisely accurate description of gavage — the ancient art, if we can call it that,... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) of force-feeding geese and ducks to enlarge their livers for our delectation — but it sums up the general feeling, on this side of the Atlantic, that foie gras crosses the line between delicious and decadent. People who will happily tuck into a rare steak, never giving a thought to the killing floor of the slaughterhouse, dislike the idea of torturing waterfowl to turn their organs into super-fatty treats for dining elites. A local foodie fight got Mark Caro, an entertainment reporter for the Chicago Tribune, interested in whether foie gras lives down to its reputation. In 2002, Charlie Trotter, one of the Windy City's celebrity chefs, quit plating the stuff at his eponymous eatery. This is a man who "serves up just about anything that once drew breath," Caro writes in "The Foie Gras Wars," his entertaining if overcooked and overlong look at the foie-gras follies. What put Trotter off his fancy foie? "It's done in a mass-produced farming style where literally there's tubes being jammed down their throats," the chef told the reporter. "We have cases of ripped esophaguses, chipped and broken beaks and ripped feet." Another chef, Rick Tramonto, took Trotter to task for hypocrisy: "Either you eat animals or you don't eat animals." Then Trotter got out the steak knives: "Oh, OK. Maybe we ought to have Rick's liver for a little treat. It's certainly fat enough." That salvo sent Caro off on a foie gras fact-finding mission. If there is a culinary equivalent of shoe-leather reporting, our enterprising reporter has done it for this book. He toured the handful of U.S. farms that produce the stuff. He hung out with animal-rights activists who see foie gras as an easier target than, say, hamburger. He traveled to France to see gavage as it has been practiced on small farms for generations. While there, he took part in a "foie gras weekend" where guests eviscerated and dismembered birds and boiled the fatty, fleshy bits into potted treats. He ate foie gras mi-cuit, sliced on toast, whipped up with a dash of pig's blood, potted in creme brulees, even, in one chef's misguided attempt at creativity, put through a cotton-candy machine. As a vegetarian, I was predisposed to find the subject upsetting, but Caro's descriptions of foie gras production and preparation were less gruesome than I anticipated (though mention of pig's blood did make me wince.) What that says about the cruelty of foie gras I don't know, and Caro doesn't either. He describes himself as a "trying-to-be-ethical meat eater," which means that he has put some thought into how much his food may disenjoy its journey from the farm to the dinner table. That puts him ahead of our culture's prevailing "don't-ask/don't tell policy." "We don't associate chicken with an animal kept in an overcrowded barn; we think of it as a pink slab laying on cellophane-wrapped Styrofoam or as something molded into a 'nugget'" he writes. "Collective denial has been our modus operandi." If you are looking for an animal-rights manifesto, however, or a ducky cri de coeur, Caro is not your man. He doesn't document mass avian distress on the farms he visits (although one is tempted to ask him how he'd like to have a tube shoved down his throat three times a day.) He does see a few "unpleasant sights," i.e., dead or obviously injured birds. Ducks and geese cannot tell you what gavage feels like. Do they suffer? Is it cruel? After 300-plus pages, Caro still isn't sure what he thinks. He may chalk it up to objectivity. It feels more like a cop-out. As Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson points out, the last stop for foie-gras ducks, and for most farmed animals, is slaughter. Masson is not as entertaining a writer as Caro, and he has too heavy a hand with the new-age seasoning. But "The Face on Your Plate" is far more upsetting than Caro's book. Masson, a vegetarian turned vegan (no dairy, no eggs), wants us to call a chicken a chicken, not just chicken. Don't fool yourself into thinking that it's OK to eat because said chicken was raised "humanely." It probably wasn't, as Masson describes in a painful chapter called "The Lives They Lead," which talks about the cramped, unnatural, traumatized, diseased and short lives of broilers and egg-layers, dairy cows, salmon and other factory-farmed animals. And there are billions of them, all sentient creatures, all capable of suffering. In the milk industry, for instance, unwanted male calves born to dairy cows are carted off to slaughter, often before they can walk. "The worst thing you can do is put a bawling baby on a trailer," says Temple Grandin, the well-known autistic researcher who has worked with the meat industry to improve slaughterhouses. "It's just an awful thing to do." I had a hard time pouring myself a glass of milk after I read that section. Masson's message is, Think before you eat. If you believe that eating free-range or organically raised animals and animal products lets you off the ethical hook, think again. My conscience is not clear just because that milk comes in a glass bottle from a local dairy where the cows get to see sunshine and fresh grass. That's a happier lot than dark barns and hormone-laced feed, but I doubt the cows have pensions to look forward to. "We have split something in two that belongs as one: the animal who provides the food," Masson argues. "We rationalize her death by claiming that she had a good life and we are therefore guiltless and entitled to eat her." The average American will eat 22,000 animals over the course of his or her lifetime, according to one of Masson's sources. That's a lot of critters, and a lot of suffering to have a hand in. Because you do have a hand in it. "We put our forks into something or someone three times a day," Masson writes. "We cannot disengage ourselves, even if we wanted to. We are all involved in agriculture on a daily basis. We vote with every meal." Pass the soy milk. Jennifer Howard, a former contributing editor of The Washington Post Book World, is a staff writer for the Chronicle of Higher Education. Reviewed by Jennifer Howard, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group) (hide most of this review)
Review:
"Eat your way to Eden or Armageddon, Masson writes convincingly, but bystander status no longer applies." Kirkus Reviews
Review:
"Masson's newest volume marshals the historic arguments against eating meat and adds to them contemporary concerns about the environment." Booklist
Synopsis:
'It"s a challenge to create transformative moments with books, but [Masson] does it."Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times
Synopsis:
The best-selling author of When Elephants Weep explores our relationship with the animals we call food.
Synopsis:
In this revelatory work, Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson shows how food affects our moral selves, our health, and our planet. Masson investigates how denial keeps us from recognizing the animal at the end of our fork and urges readers to consciously make decisions about food.
Synopsis:
In this revelatory work, Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson shows how food affects our moral selves, our health, and the environment. It raises questions to make us conscious of the decisions behind every bite we take: What effect does eating animals have on our land, waters, even global warming? What are the results of farming practices'"debeaking chickens and separating calves from their mothers'"on animals and humans? How does the health of animals affect the health of our planet and our bodies? And uniquely, as a psychoanalyst, Masson investigates how denial keeps us from recognizing the animal at the end of our fork'"think pig, not bacon'"and each food and those that are forbidden. The Face on intellectual, psychological, and emotional expertise over the last twenty years into the pivotal book of the food revolution.
Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson is the author of the best-selling When Elephants Weepand Dogs Never Lie About Love, as well as The Pig Who Sang to the Moonand The Assault on Truth. An American, he lives in New Zealand.
amabre, June 20, 2009 (view all comments by amabre)
When I first picked up this book I thought I already knew everything there was to know on the issue. I was wrong. Especially on the fish chapter of the book. I'm not really into fish. They're so strange, so different, but I respect them and I learned a lot about them. For instance, We share 85% of our DNA with fish (98% we share with primates). Crazy, right?
I also believed the myth that fish have a teensy memory span. Not true. Fish have a memory span of at least 3 months and probably much longer (it hasn't been tested further than three months). Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson quotes Culum Brown, (U of Edinburgh biologist) "Fish are more intelligent than they appear. In many areas, such as memory, their cognitive powers match or exceed those of 'higher' vertebrates, including non-human primates."
Fish are freaky, they made no sounds but their sporadic out-of-water wriggling and flopping seem unnatural and clearly anguish-driven. The author says, "It is a bit puzzling why we feel that something not like us deserves less respect. That it's death is less troubling." Here, here. "Vegetarians" who eat fish are not vegetarians. Fish are not vegetables.
This book explores the lives of all the animals we eat. Pigs, cows, chickens. Certain chapters had me gasping with surprise which I really didn't expect. I wish it could be required reading for everyone. Unfortunately, I'm afraid that the only people that will pick it up will be vegans, vegetarians, or people already interested in vegetarianism. That's a shame because this is really good stuff.
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ann_locates, March 25, 2009 (view all comments by ann_locates)
Portland is the city of roses and wish a rose
to Jeffrey and Powells. Does not mean that this book
captures the truth. Come to the wide open prairies
and note the grass waving like an endless sea.
Does it need to be harvested and converted to protein needed to sustain life?
That is the question and won't be answered in this book. Read it and see.
Was this comment helpful? | Yes | No (1 of 8 readers found this comment helpful)
animaladvocate, February 26, 2009 (view all comments by animaladvocate)
I'm looking forward to the release of this book. Portland is one of the most progressive cities in America, and yet the local food culture is, by and large, unable to accept veganism as a culinary moral baseline. What we have instead is the sort of culture that decries factory farming but embraces the notion of raising and slaughtering organic heirloom turkeys, provided that you're buying these turkeys from a local farmer or a locally owned store.
Although I respect certain aspects of the locavore movement, I sometimes think that this feel-good approach to the omnivore diet lulls people into thinking that the politics of food begins and ends with human health and economic considerations and environmental considerations. But where is the concern for animal rights?
Small-scale animal agriculture may be less horrific than factory farming, but it is still morally problematic. In the end, there is no such thing as humane slaughter or, to use the preferred euphemism of omnivore apologists, humane "harvest" of animals.
The American Dietetic Association has a position paper in support of veganism as a healthful diet, so we know that we don't need to eat animals or their eggs and milk in order to be healthy. What we do need is a more enlightened look at our long-standing cultural predilection for eating animal-based foods.
Was this comment helpful? | Yes | No (25 of 35 readers found this comment helpful)
"Publishers Weekly Review"
by Publishers Weekly,
"'Each bite of meat involves the killing of an animal that did not need to die,' Masson (When Elephants Weep) reminds readers, and if the advocacy of a completely vegan diet (neither milk nor eggs, in addition to giving up meat and fish) is not particularly new — even Masson acknowledges that he is following the path laid out by authors like Temple Grandin and Michael Pollan — the passion with which the argument is made is immediately apparent. Masson explains the scientific background in simple, effective prose, pointing to the vast environmental damage caused by the modern agriculture-industrial complex, then slams the emotional point home by underscoring the plaintive cries of a calf separated from a mother cow or the psychological stress that hens endure when thrust into small cages. Masson argues that a vegan diet is sufficient to provide us with all the nutrients we need to thrive, using his own daily menus as an example, but his most powerful argument calls upon the power of empathy and a refusal to put animals through suffering. It probably won't convert many confirmed meat eaters, but it should provoke serious deliberation about how our food choices reflect our values." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)
"Review A Day"
by Sheila Ashdown, Powells.com,
"The far reaching problems caused by industrial farming are staggering and upsetting, but as Masson points out, none of it is controversial. He argues, then, that the reason these unhealthy and unethical systems persist is that the majority of people are in denial. He actually includes an entire chapter on the subject, which shows his two-pronged expertise in human psychology and animal advocacy." (read the entire Powells.com review)
"Review"
by Kirkus Reviews,
"Eat your way to Eden or Armageddon, Masson writes convincingly, but bystander status no longer applies."
"Review"
by Booklist,
"Masson's newest volume marshals the historic arguments against eating meat and adds to them contemporary concerns about the environment."
"Synopsis"
by Hold All,
'It"s a challenge to create transformative moments with books, but [Masson] does it."Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times
"Synopsis"
by Norton,
The best-selling author of When Elephants Weep explores our relationship with the animals we call food.
"Synopsis"
by Hold All,
In this revelatory work, Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson shows how food affects our moral selves, our health, and our planet. Masson investigates how denial keeps us from recognizing the animal at the end of our fork and urges readers to consciously make decisions about food.
"Synopsis"
by Hold All,
In this revelatory work, Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson shows how food affects our moral selves, our health, and the environment. It raises questions to make us conscious of the decisions behind every bite we take: What effect does eating animals have on our land, waters, even global warming? What are the results of farming practices'"debeaking chickens and separating calves from their mothers'"on animals and humans? How does the health of animals affect the health of our planet and our bodies? And uniquely, as a psychoanalyst, Masson investigates how denial keeps us from recognizing the animal at the end of our fork'"think pig, not bacon'"and each food and those that are forbidden. The Face on intellectual, psychological, and emotional expertise over the last twenty years into the pivotal book of the food revolution.
Powell's City of Books is an independent bookstore in Portland, Oregon, that fills a whole city block with more than a million new, used, and out of print books. Shop those shelves — plus literally millions more books, DVDs, and eBooks — here at Powells.com.
