 | Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com | 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 intellectual, psychological, and emotional expertise over the last twenty years into the pivotal book of the food revolution. . |
Average Customer Rating:   a seminal book for the cause of veganism i've read all the prior, excellent reviews & have little to add about the contents of the book but i wanted to add some general comments.
i'm glad books like this are finally out. this & Why We Love Dogs & Eat Pigs will be seminal to bring awareness of this issue to more people. it's good to have the facts & opinions laid out in one place.
this is a good first book to introduce friends to an overview of the issue (less in your face than Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs). it's tone is warm & compassionate & the book is simply divided into 5 chapters covering ecological issues, animal suffering, aquaculture, denial & vegan living.
i think the aquaculture chapter is unique to this book & helpful. i have koi & saltwater fish & shrimp & they do have some personality & bond especially during feeding time. my koi were very shy at first but after a week they became very friendly & now rush to the surface everytime i walk by (i dont think out of love but for food which still means positive for them).
before i read this book i gave up red meat on my own, but after reading this, i'm inspired enough to become totally vegan & give up poultry, fish, eggs & dairy.
A little too naive I was surprised to reach the end of this book and discover this author is 68 years old; the entire book is written in such a nimbus of glorious naivete, that I felt positively old and jaded in comparison. It's nice that he believes that if we outlaw the commercial slaughter of animals for food that society will turn instead to the complex and earth-friendly gardening methods he describes as alternatives. In reality, the commercial farming of plants is every bit as horrible for the environment (and the consumer) as the farming of animals. And who among us jaded people (in an age where "organic" often does not mean organic at all) truly believe that commercial farmers aren't going to follow the easy and cheap path to food production whether it's of animals or plants?
The naivete continues throughout the entire book. He compares eating meat to the evils of slavery, but is happily complacent that just as slavery is "universally condemned" with "no one left to defend it", one day omnivores will disappear as well. Well, I'm sorry to say that slavery has plenty of people left who still defend it. There are more enslaved people today than there were at any other time in history. And not just in countries like India. Slavery still exists in America.
He says that children today are brainwashed not to believe that meat is animals, and that all children have a "terrible awakening" when they discover they have been eating animal flesh. Maybe that happens for some children, but not for me, and not for anyone I've spoken to. I don't remember a time when I wasn't perfectly aware of what "bacon" meant, or that the chicken leg I was eating was an actual chicken's leg. From the time I could walk, I've hand-raised chickens and rabbits for pets while at the same time being perfectly content to eat chickens and rabbits.
He says that being a vegan has kept him healthy and strong and out of hospitals. I've never been in a hospital, never had an illness worse than the common cold. I've been perfectly healthy all my life (and so were/are my parents, siblings, and grandparents) and we are all carnivores. He says his diet is heavily dependent upon soy, and spends several pages convincing us soy is healthy. Look it up for yourself. There are many schools of thought about soy, and the most convincing (to me) say that its a harmful substance and should be avoided.
However, the author is right that the way we raise and slaughter our meat does need to change, and that is the only small value of this book. The rest is pie-in-the-sky environmental dreaming and attempts to cause Freudian-based guilt in carnivores. Come to think of it, it's fairly fortunate for him that he's not some 20-something just out of college. Considering the fact that he went from a vegetarian to a vegan, and now won't eat maple syrup products because gathering the syrup causes the tree "a wound", in a few more years he will be completely unable to eat anything at all. If eating syrup causes a guilt-inducing wound in a tree, what does he think happens when you pick leaves off a lettuce plant? Or uproot a carrot? Not too good, not too bad. The author's discussion of the various reasons to become vegetarian/vegan are spotty in quality. There are better sources for detailed analysis of the ecological impact of meat and dairy production, the health aspects and the moral/ethical issues.
His most annoying trait his enthusiastic embrace of all things politically correct--even if they aren't on point with the subject matter at hand. I also found his inclination to name drop to be off putting.
This is a fairly slim book once you remove the footnotes and the bibliography, yet in the "Denial" chapter the author engages in an excessively long discussion of Freud. Apparently, the author had once been a psychoanalyst. I suppose he couldn't resist the temptation. Though I think this excursion added little of value to the book.
The author is a big fan of tofu and soy milk and he indicates that he consumes a lot of both. There are many who regard consumption of tofu and soy milk as a potential hazard. I wish he had included a discussion of this issue. Though, in fairness, he did have a few words to say about the hazards of processed soy products.
Oddly, his discussion of raw food veganism was no more than a sentence or two. Yet, Raw is probably the fastest growing segment of veganism. A discussion of the health and ecological aspects of a Raw vegan diet would have been welcome.
While I would not discourage anyone from reading this book, I did not warm up to the author and his approach to the topic. So, I did not find it as motivating as other apparently have. To each their own. covers the subject This book is thoughtful and covers quite a few aspects of the subject. However, it is a little too personal to the author, and about a third of the book is footnotes. A beautiful , important book THE FACE ON YOUR PLATE is a book overflowing with insight, passion, information and empathy. Any human being could learn from it. Masson's style is both lyrical and accessible and he handles even the weightiest material with a light, sure touch. His advice about vegan eating is helpful and tantalizing. The world would be a kinder,more beautiful, and more permanent place if everyone read this book, and acted on its loving message. |  |
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