NPR's Talk of the Nation

March 2010

I have to wonder what Amy Sutherland's bias is towards keeping animals in captivity for our own amusement, because I found her comments misinformed, naive, and even insulting, especially when Neil Conan asked what her views were on the movie, The Cove and former dolphin trainer Ric O'Barry's opinion that animals should not be kept in captivity to be trained for humans. Never having even seen the film, she made a flippant comment, saying that "it's easy to say animals shouldn't be in captivity; you know, if you're at a dinner party, it's just easy to say that." Excuse me, Ms. Sutherland. Ric O'Barry did not conclude that animals should not be in captivity based on his attendance at cocktail parties. His direct experience led him to believe that it's ethically problematic because of the high intelligence of these animals and because of abuses that are inherently part of training these animals - whether they're captive-bred or taken from the wild.

Concluding that because it's problematic to release captive animals into the wild, this red herring diverts people away from the solutions we should look to. After all, we have more options than "keep them captive" or "release captive animals into the wild." If we, as a compassionate nation, decided that it's not right to train wild animals just to perform for us, then we would stop breeding and capturing them in the first place.

Her conclusion that captive and performing animals have been part of human history and therefore should continue to be is a lame (dare I say, pathetic) excuse for any behavior. Murder has also been part of human history since early civilization, but that's no reason to try and do what we can to stop it now.

Please consider continuing this important discussion with experts who have been on the front line and who are willing to forego their own biases to do what is right for the animals.

NPR's All Things Considered

February 2010

As I sat in traffic listening to NPR on Wednesday night, I couldn't help but feel ill at ease with the way you reported the story about squid. The way Robert Siegel talked about the delight people find in "hooking the animals" who "put up quite a fight" was macabre at best and offensive at worst. Not all of your listeners consider killing animals - whether they're on land or in the water - "good sport," and I'm very disturbed by the casualness with which you talked about it.

San Francisco Magazine Sept/Oct 2009

September 2009

I find your romanticizing of killing incredibly disturbing. You don't get to usurp compassionate ethics just because you touch your heart after slitting an animal's throat. The higher compassionate ethic is to not slit an animal's throat at all. We have no physiological requirements for the flesh of another animal; we eat it because we like to - bottom line. To romanticize it to such a degree belies the need to turn something unnecessary and ugly into something beautiful in order to feel better about what we're doing.

Los Angeles Times

April, 2008

While I appreciate your story that (finally!) focuses on how our food choices contribute to global warming, I was disappointed by the overall tone of the piece, which emphasized that people have to sacrifice and be disappointed when they make healthful and eco-friendly (not to mention humane) food choices. Also, I was surprised that vegetarians were mentioned only to point out that they're responsible for greenhouse gas emissions, too (which is true), only to stop short of mentioning the fact that a whole foods local plant-based (i.e. vegan) diet has the least impact all around. It is so important to convey the right information to the public so they feel empowered to do the right thing, and I encourage you to take the next step in telling them not only the why's but the how's. (That's why I do what I do.) Thank you for taking the first step to helping educate people; I look forward to many more stories like this.

Contra Costa Times

April, 2008

I am sure you're receiving a mixed bag of letters from people about your article, and I'll just have to add mine to those who are tired of reading about people romanticizing the consumption of animal. Unfortunately, you failed to point out that the victims of the Chino slaughterhouse abuse were dairy cows - not "beef cattle." Most of the "downed animals" at slaughterhouses are dairy cows, whose bodies give out after years of abuse and exploitation. If it's not enough that we give cows osteoporosis after impregnating them and depleting them of their own calcium for several years, we then send these broken bodies off to the slaughterhouse to be ground up for hamburger meat and drag them to slaughter when they cannot walk, a pitiful end to a pitiful life. Eating "humanely raised animals" is a misplaced response to this unnecessary atrocity. The logical response would be to stop consuming the milk of cows.

The abuse that takes place in slaughterhouses - where ALL animals end up, whether they're dairy cows or egg-laying hens, whether they are from "small happy family farms" or "factory farms" - is endemic and inherent. Even the "compassionate carnivores" (or rather, the excuse-itarians) still have difficulty talking about this "ugly" act. And that's the bottom line. It's ugly, and it's unnecessary.

The excuse-itarians have come up with some brilliant justifications for dining on animals (and that's all they are: excuses and justifications), but one of the best is their argument that we're all just innocently participating in the "food chain" of life. Humans breed animals only to kill them and then have the nerve to say that we're honoring some sacred food chain? It's just another lie we tell ourselves so that we can have our meat and eat it, too, and unfortunately millions of people live by this lie, while billions of animals are dying by it - each and every year. If it's so compassionate to hug a lamb three times a day before slitting his throat, isn't it even more compassionate to hug a lamb three times a day and NOT slit his throat?

Northern Express

November, 2007

I read your article on foie gras and appreciate your attempt to work out the "controversy," but there was a fundamental problem with your desire to seem unbiased: you eat animals. You look through a particular lens that enables you to eat animals (and their organs, as you attest to), which renders you unable to really truly offer an unbiased picture of animal cruelty. The truth is all of us our biased, but some of us need our biases more than others when we want to justify our behavior. The scales that weigh the opinions of people who kill and serve animals for a living against those who seek to protect animals are inherently tipped to begin with. Animal advocates have nothing to gain by opposing cruelty, and citing a few large national organizations does not a "gain" make. Animal advocates don't get into this work for the money. But supplies, processors, butchers, sellers of "delicacies" such as foie gras have everything to gain. Even the journalists from the NY Times who saw nothing wrong with the practice HAVE to see nothing wrong if they don't want their entire world rocked. As a meat-eater, to admit there is something unethical about breeding and killing animals for human consumption is to question the very foundation of people's comfort zones. Tradition and culture are just excuses, as we now oppose many things today that we once thought were acceptable - slavery, child labor, women viewed as property as their husbands and fathers.

The highest expression of human beings is that which compels us to remain open, willing to learn, willing to do better once we know better. There is no justification for breeding, force-feeding, and then killing another living creature just so we can enjoy a delicacy. We have no nutritional requirement for animal flesh, and certainly you would agree we have no need to consume the fattened livers of ducks and geese. To do so is to close our eyes to that which makes US uncomfortable but which continues to desensitize us to the needless suffering of living, feeling beings who, if they had a choice, would never put themselves in such a predicament.

In many ways, we have advanced as a species, but in many ways we have grown very little since people watched lions tear Christians to pieces and families gathered to watch criminals drawn and quartered. We should take "human" out of the word humane, because we have little claim to it.

The Atlantic Monthly Magazine

August, 2007

I cannot thank you enough for publishing B.R. Myers' wonderful article ("Hard to Swallow") in your September 2007 issue. It is a powerful truth-telling piece that finally sheds light on the spurious claims and specious arguments of Michael Pollan and other "excuse-itarians," whose romantic depictions of something so ugly belies a pathological denial of reality. I've been writing about this for years, likening the public's response to his justifications for eating meat to Hans Christian Anderson's fable, The Emperor's New Clothes. In Anderson's morality tale, it takes a child to say what everyone knows is true but nobody would admit. The child's declaration that the emperor is wearing no clothes at all makes the public feel as duped as the emperor feels naked. Myers is the child in our own very real morality tale and skillfully reveals the gaping holes in Pollan's logic and the troublesome degree to which Pollan makes poetry out of pig slaughter. I have been waiting for a very long time for just one reviewer to take Pollan to task, and I am very grateful to Myers for doing so.

New York Times (in response to their gross negligence in printing a scathing anti-vegan Op-Ed, which the Public Editor of the newspaper ultimately admitted was a mistake)

May, 2007

I am so gravely disappointed in your misguided decision to run such a hateful, misinformed Op-Ed about the dangers of eating a plant-based diet. Despite the fact that children (and adults) in this country are sick, overweight, and overfed because of the typical meat- and dairy-based American diet, you chose to run a piece that chastised a healthful, ethical, sustainable way of eating and living. To allow that person to have any space at all to vent her animosity is simply irresponsible. Those parents [who killed their baby] weren't "vegan" - they were neglectful and abusive. One might say that the way most people are feeding their children today (saturated fat, cholesterol, sugar, processed foods) is also abusive considering the state of children's health. I wonder when you'll print the Op-Ed that focuses on the real dangers facing children. Imagine the headline: Meat-eating Parents Create Clogged Arteries in Child. Now, that's news. AND it's true. Unlike what you ran today. Vegans aren't the problem. A plant-based diet is a compassionate, responsible and healthful response to the unethical, unsustainable, unhealthful meat- and dairy-based diet most of us were raised on. But you've just set us back about 5 years. Shame on you.

KQED's Fresh Air with Terry Gross

May, 2007

I want to thank you and commend you for your 5/14/07 interview with Melinda Merck. I actually cried when I heard you introduce the show and use the word "murder" to refer to the unjust and violent killing of animals. The word "murder" is usually reserved for the killing of humans, and I was moved to hear you use it to refer to non-human animals. I listen to Fresh Air every day, and I've often lamented that there are so few interviews with champions for animals and vegetarianism. When the latest cookbook comes out celebrating the sauteeing and fricasseeing of animals, Terry has been there to interview them, but I have yet to hear an interview with chefs who spare the animals and celebrate instead the array of plant-based foods. Hearing the story about the puppy that was baked alive was difficult and painful to hear, and yet, similar horrific abuse takes place every single minute of the day to "farmed" animals who are just as capable of feeling pain and fear as that little puppy. I am very grateful to you for airing that show, difficult though it was for many of your listeners to hear, I'm sure, and at the same time I encourage you to expand your notion of who deserves our voice. Lambs, chicks, turkeys, pigs, calves, geese, ducks, and rabbits don't deserve to be hurt for our gustatory pleasure anymore than that puppy deserved to be tortured and killed. I respect you and your show immensely and appreciate your consideration and open-mindedness. I have hope that someday we'll look back on the cruel treatment of ALL animals as an abomination and hope that Fresh Air can help pave the way.

Marin Independent Journal

March, 2007

Thank you very much for your story about Marin County's Farm Day (3/23/07) and how the Marin Vegetarian Education Group is closely monitored by the organizers of the event. I was struck by the comment by Ellen Rilla, who said that the event "is not the place for politics." The implication is, of course, that the promotion of meat and dairy is a neutral, apolitical act and that only vegetarianism is political. I beg to differ. Food is political. Meat, dairy, and eggs are political. (Just try to find a broccoli lobby on Capitol Hill.) Statements like Rilla's, meant to claim status of the innocent victim, dishonestly represents the issue and ultimately manipulates an already misinformed public. Teaching children to consume animals and their secretions is anything but neutral. Brava to the Marin Vegetarian Education Group for offering a compassionate perspective to those children.

San Jose Mercury News

October, 2006

I was thrilled to read that the city of Mountain View has taken a different approach for dealing with the "squirrel problem." I commend the officials for taking other avenues to curb the interaction between wildlife and people and for taking seriously the concerns of those who didn't believe crushing the squirrels to death was a compassionate solution. The only thing I take issue with is your use of the term "animal lovers" in describing those who opposed the traps. I realize this is a semantics issue, but our use of language certainly reflects our perceptions. The term "animal lover" implies that we are emotional, impractical saps who just love furry little animals so much we can't stand to see them suffer. The truth is I am an advocate for animals because they need my voice. It's true that I abhor the suffering of any living creature, and that includes people as well, but when journalists describe those who step in on behalf of humans, they're never called "people lovers." They're respected as the committed advocates and activists that they are. Please consider that the people who speak on behalf of animals do not deserve to be written off as fluffy bunny lovers, a depiction that minimizes the important and serious work of animal advocacy and ultimately undermines the inherent value of the lives we are trying to protect. When officials make a compassionate decision, such as public education over lethal traps, everyone wins, including the humans who realize that the humane route is actually a reflection of the values of compassion and kindness we say we have. Until we learn to live with others who share this Earth with us, we will be compromising our own values for naught.

Natural Home and Garden Magazine

August, 2006

I know you're not a vegetarian magazine, but I've always appreciated the care you take to point out when products you promote may have caused harm to animals and when you include vegetarian and vegan recipes. However, I was gravely disappointed at the celebration of "wild game meat" in your Sept/Oct 2006 issue. Because you felt the need to reprint Matthew Miller's justification for eating animals, I suppose you already understand my concern. "Wild game," "mindful meat," "humane meat," "meat from animals that have been prayed over" - none of these offer a solution to the dilemmas we face choosing to eat the flesh of the animals we simply don't need to survive. We do it for pleasure, but we find every other reason in the book to justify it instead. No matter what we call it, we are unnecessarily harming and killing living, feeling animals who would choose to live if given the choice. I'm just so sorry to see you hop on the "conscious meat-eating" bandwagon, once again pushing a plant-based diet further into the recesses of your readers' minds.

San Francisco Chronicle

August, 2006

I'm so disappointed that you contribute to the anti-soy (READ: anti-vegetarian) movement with your article that gives so much weight to a researcher whose pro-meat bias is known to many. Because people automatically identify soy consumption with vegetarianism, you have given people another reason to fear eating a plant-based diet. Not only are people (unnecessarily) concerned about not getting protein on a vegetarian diet, but now they point to the evil of soy. Haven't you heard that the consumption of meat and dairy has been unmistakably linked to heart disease, breast cancer, prostate cancer, diabetes, and other preventable diseases? I have yet to see a cover article on these facts. Soy is not magic - but neither is it poison. Just as we embraced olive oil because of its high amounts of monounsaturated fats and started drinking it by the vat, we tend to go overboard when something seems to be the "magical solution." Enter soy. It, too, was touted for its "amazing" health properties, but it's just a bean, neither magic nor toxic. You said it yourself many times: processed soy is in processed foods. Encouraging people to eat foods in their whole form is the answer - not demonizing soy. It's great you included Marion Nestle's input but at the very end of your article. Those of us who advocate a whole foods plant-based diet are constantly clearing up the myths about vegetarianism, and you've just added more work to our already taxing list of "myths to debunk."

Washington Post

July 27, 2006

Thank you for your article on how eating a vegan (plant-based) diet provides benefits in both the prevention and reversal of heart disease and diabetes. I appreciate your addressing what so many of us have known for years, but I must disagree with your perspective that a vegan diet is "very difficult to stick with." It's true that learning new recipes and resources requires a little time, but like with any habit, once the new one is formed (it takes about 3 weeks), it becomes second nature. I have been teaching vegan cooking classes for over six years, and I have the joy and privilege of watching people improve their health and make new food choices that reflect their ethics and values. What hope is there for humans if we think having our chests cut open for bypass surgery and living on pharmaceuticals is normal but eating delicious, healthful vegetables, fruits, grains, nuts, seeds, and beans is a hardship? I can tell you quite the opposite is true.

Contra Costa Times

May 5, 2006

I was disappointed to read yet another laudatory article about sustainable animal agriculture and Saint Niman. Thanks to such tributes, this trendy, elitist food system has usurped its way into people's consciousness as the "ethical" way to eat. The lionization of people who raise living, feeling beings to be killed to satisfy peoples tastebuds is surreal. And of course there is no mention of the terror animals experience as they are violently slaughtered. Even Niman Ranch animals experience the terror of mechanized murder, and it's not pretty.

If it is "ethical" to live off of the bodies of animals who are harmed a little less than others, isn't it still more ethical not to live off their bodies at all? Why is it that vegetarians are often ridiculed for their choices, while "sustainable" ranchers are celebrated as "ethical? I look forward to the day when your paper writes an equally enthusiastic article celebrating that crazy eco- and animal-friendly concept of NOT eating animals at all.

Only a plant-based diet is truly sustainable - using fewer resources, being affordable for everyone, protecting rather than denigrating our health, and making us truly compassionate people, not being responsible for the death of animals - just because to satisfy our tastebuds. What a shallow, selfish reason to end lives.

New York Times

March 27, 2006

There is no doubt we humans are flawed animals, but one defect seems to stand out among the rest: our arrogance. It is this fault alone that causes more harm than any other - not only to ourselves but to all of the creatures with whom we share this planet. It is our perception of our own superiority that compels us to act with unnecessary cruelty and gluttony when it comes to our treatment of animals, but worse yet, to justify our actions with specious rationalizations.

I regretted to observe this in Michael Pollan's 3/26 article in a number of places; first, when he declares that animals have "no concept of death" and "don't give it nearly as much thought as we do," a groundless and arrogant conclusion that conveniently assuages him of any guilt for being the cause of an animal's death. At another time, he concludes that because she happened to be chosen as the quarry of a "thrilling" hunt, the sow he shoots "has lived, and arguably even died, in a manner consistent with its creaturely character." When he goes on to say that the sow's death, "by the standards of animal death" was a "good one," you'd think he believed he actually did her a favor by terrifying her and ending her life in such a way.

The height of Pollan's arrogance, however, is when he writes that, though he sometimes envies the "moral clarity of the vegetarian," he also pities them, because vegetarians live in "dreams of innocence" predicated on a "denial of reality." With all due respect, this smacks of yet another attempt to mollify any discomfort he has with his own dietary habits.

It is precisely the ethical vegetarian's awareness of animal suffering that enables us to live fully and painfully awake in this age of institutionalized animal abuse. Pollan's romanticized vision of humans hunting animals or eating "grass-fed beef" is just that. Neither reflects the reality of the 10 billion land animals confined, mutilated, and killed each year in the U.S. merely for human consumption. I don't need to kill an animal to fully know that I live by the grace of nature as I thrive on plant foods, and I'm grateful that I don't have to make any excuses, as I did when I ate animals and their products.

I long for the day when a publication as prestigious as yours features a cover story not about the joys of hunting but about the joys of not killing - or paying for the killing - of animals. Though I appreciate Pollan's attempt to thoroughly experience the topics about which he writes, I find his methods as well as his conclusions unsatisfying and disturbing. I fear, because of this lengthy article, the animals have lost yet again. That is the "true cost of our food." They pay - unnecessarily - with their lives.

Washington Post

March 12, 2006

People wonder why vegan fare isn't more "mainstream." Well, I don't wonder at all, and Bridget Bentz Sizer's little contribution, Vegan Venture: Going All-Veggie in the Company of Carnivores (March 5), confirms my theory. An article about a non-vegetarian who wants to "see if a vegan could dine with carnivores" was doomed before it was even written. Of course preparing a vegan menu for non-vegetarians is a challenge; so is asking a fan of Hollywood blockbusters to sit through Michelangelo Antonioni's "L'Avventura" or Federico Fellini's "8 1/2 ." It's just not familiar fare.

I've been teaching vegan cooking classes for many years, and one thing I know for certain: The way we eat, the way we learn to cook, the palates we develop -- these are all habits. And habits are meant to be broken, but that takes time. I encourage you to accept more articles about the joy, versatility and ease of eating vegan -- written by vegans. Sizer's article proved nothing about how easy or difficult "vegan food" is. It just proved that she's got some practicing to do (and that she has a silly friend who thinks human incisors are equivalent to the flesh-tearing teeth of carnivores). Perhaps we should coin a new adage: "Judge the cook, not the cuisine."

Oakland Tribune

June 18, 2005

I was quite taken aback when I saw the photo and article in Wednesday's (6/15) Food section. I lament the desensitization that has occurred in human beings when it comes to our celebration of meat; i.e. dead animals. A disturbing amount of violence takes place to turn beautiful, living animals into the carcasses your subject is proudly displaying - so much so that most of us don't want to know what the animals go through during their sad, imprisoned lives or during the slaughter process. At a time when violence consumes us on our streets, in our hearts, and in faraway battlefields, I encourage you to rethink your celebration of violence. Cesar Chavez, the late great human rights/labor activist (and vegan) said it better than I ever could. He said "Kindness and compassion towards all living beings is a mark of a civilized society. Racism, economic deprival, dog fighting and cock fighting, bullfighting and rodeos are all cut from the same defective fabric: violence. Only when we have become nonviolent towards all life will we have learned to live well ourselves."

Oakland Tribune

January 9, 2004

The 450 calves that were killed (or to use the USDA's pathetic euphemism, "de-populated") as a result of the mad cow scare died for nothing. These babies were brought into this world simply to be killed, but their time came sooner than usual: at 30 days old. The 35 million beef cattle killed in the U.S. for human consumption also die for nothing.

They die for human appetites, human gluttony, human habits. It has been well-established that humans do not need to eat other animals to survive. We have no nutritional need for meat, and we have no survival need for meat. The death of those babies -- and of all 10 billion animals killed in the U.S. for consumption each year -- is casually mentioned as if they were inanimate objects. They are living, feeling beings whose lives we unjustifiably take simply for human pleasure. They die for nothing.

In the end, the animals unnecessarily suffer and are unnecessarily and brutally killed. The most effective way to end their suffering is to end our own -- stop eating the very food that is killing them (and killing us).