Book Review: The Accidental Buddhist

So remember back in September when I mentioned a growing interest in Buddhism? Yeah still interested. In fact I have joined a meditation group that meets in Old Town on Sundays. My legs fall asleep, my monkey mind chatters, but it gets me out of the house and into a group setting every Sunday morning.

As usual, I have turned to books, and a growing stack of them at that, of Buddhist philosophy and musings to explore this interest. Upon finishing The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying I realized that this was a huge thing to undertake alone. All the culture, tradition and Tibetan words were kind of overwhelming and while excitingly foreign, still very foreign. I wanted to write about the book a bit but really felt like I had no grasp on the subject to do so. So I'm backing up, taking it light and moving in slowly.

So I chose a softball book to start. The Accidental Buddhist was an incredibly quick read. If I hadn't started that book at 10pm I easily would have crushed it in a day and even starting it that late I was done with it by early afternoon the next day. But this book, while humorous and silly a lot of the time, packed a whole lot of ideas in one quick punch.

While there is a beautiful, exotic quality about Buddhism, yoga and meditation there are times when it strikes me as so very un-American. And I don't say that in a "Well if you don't like it you can..." kind of way, just...well.... it's not what I grew up with and its certainly not a language I'm familiar with. And I have been to Buddhist meetings or done chanting and thought to myself "What the heck does that even mean?"

Dinty Moore talks about this a lot in the book. As a man who was raised Catholic, turned apathetic to all religion, turned accidental Buddhist, he goes through the process of trying out lots of different forms of Buddhism searching for an American style. He questions the practice of dokusan (basically a private meeting with your teacher that is proceeded by a series of complicated bows and prostrations and has specific rules for where you can sit, when you can speak and when you must leave), he questions the intersection of Christianity and Buddhism (he meets with several practitioners of meditation that hold positions of leadership in the Christian faith) and he questions the possibility of our American gusto marrying with such a calm and careful lifestyle.

The whole concept of an American style of Buddhism can have people up in arms. You'll get people all in a tizzy bringing it up and they'll start defending the tradition for traditions sake. Listen people - I don't buy eating meat just because it's traditional so I'm not going to fall for this "you must sit on your uncomfortable cushion and chant these unpronounceable words because that's the way it's always been" kind of attitude. It seems that the reason "American style" is unappealing is that it seems to translate to a Buddhism that is cheap, self-obsessed, stripped away of all substance, and is brimming full of misguided egos buying every accessory and looking for the magic instant cure to help them relax after a traffic jam while totally missing the point.

But does it have to be that way? Does it have to be traditional strict Buddhism or nothing? Do we who want to practice Buddhism need to turn our back on our culture, throw up our hands and say "Americans are too shallow to get it so I'm going Tibetan." I really don't think so and while Moore doesn't find a definitive answer or American style on his quest he does run across some interesting ideas. At one point Moore actually gets a chance to speak with His Holiness the Dalai Lama and he asks him where he thinks Buddhism fits into modern American culture. The Dalai Lama gives a surprising response. Basically - it doesn't.

While I perhaps wouldn't go as far as that (no disrespect to His Holiness of course) I do feel like Buddhism will need to be adapted to our culture some - while still retaining the things that make it so attractive and worthwhile of course!

In looking at American culture there are several things right up front that clash with Buddhism. For example we are a status driven society. Those who don't strive for more, those who don't compete are seen to not be making progress. Progress is everything in the US - from how we go through school to our jobs to our relationships and whether we have children or not. Those following an "alternative" lifestyle - for example those who don't want a car or those who would rather live with friends in a group rather than with a partner - are often pitied in our society. They are seen to be "failures."

So how can a society with such a competitive drive approach the world without expectations as the Buddhists teach? How can they be mindful, compassionate, even present when we are so consumed with our neighbors car, when we can take our next cruise, or whether or not the color of our jeans is still in style?

Moore writes "By expecting things to deliver everlasting delight, we are setting ourselves up for a fall" He uses the example of wanting a new job and how we are so sure that a new job will fix things. But the excitement of the new job is fleeting and then the cycle starts again. Moore terms this "feeling vaguely dissatisfied." Buddhists call it samsara.

My roommate and I have talked about this in relation to travel. We both are attracted to this idealized dream of a traveling lifestyle but my personal fear is that the NEED for that lifestyle, the fact that it seems IMPORTANT to be somewhere else, only really means that I'm grasping. That I'm placing expectation on it. Moore says "It is the same thing with marriage - we expect marriage to make us happy, and it does for a while, then our problems creep up again, and we think, "Gee, I guess I married the wrong person."

Sitting in meditation, for an American, fights against all our upbringing. We are pushed from a young age to participate, perform, and multitask to our highest potential. And in mediation...well you just sit. And that's it. Don't think. Don't try. Just sit.

Moore gives a perfect example of how our American brains rebel from this idea of just sitting without expectation and instead tends towards setting up mental checklists of progress. Shunryu Suzuki, founder of the first Zen training center in America and author of Zen Mind, Beginners Mind talks in his book about what he calls mind weeds. Mind weeds are the distracting thoughts in your head. The Monkey Mind as it is also called. Suzuki says that these weeds are in fact a good thing. He says just as weeds can be composted to nourish a garden, sitting and watching your weeds can turn them into nourishment for your practice. In response to this Moore writes:

"So here I am, it seems, with a mind full of dandelions and crabgrass, worrying about it, and once again missing the whole point. Weeds are good. Weeds aren't what's stopping me, it's just my Monkey Mind insisting that weeds are somehow bad. If I let the Monkey Mind pronounce me an abject failure before I even begin, what chance will I have against him? ...Quit worrying so much and just do it. Just sit. ... Now I see. The difficulty I have with Buddhism is that it's just too damn simple."

In general I found this book to be engaging and thought provoking. When I finished my roommate and I had a good hour or so conversation about it and the concept of an American style of Buddhism. She brought up the fact that one of the things she appreciates about Buddhism is that it teaches you to question everything, even Buddhism. With that point out in the air I postulated "And why not Buddhism in America then? Why can't we question the chanting and the language?" Im not saying tear it all down and start from scratch. The lessons are there - the teachings are there, but at what point do you continue with the trappings of the rituals when they have no cultural significance? Buddhism has adapted many times. The Japanese have their own style of Buddhism, why not the Americans?

Learning the traditional ways is of benefit for sure. But blindly following a practice that holds cultural significance for a people you are not a part of seems counterproductive. It seems like a story we are telling ourselves. Like a beautiful picture. Like an obsession with the exotic qualities of a tradition that have led us to accept all the bowing and bell ringing as the teachings itself, rather than seeing this for what it is, a cultural manifestation of the root ideas. And in this vein of talk - the root ideas of Buddhism are in so many ways similar to the root ideas of Christianity. In the book Moore draws a link between the ideas of Nirvana and the Holly Spirit.

Father Kennedy, a Jesuit priest as well as being an ordained Zen teacher that Moore meets says "The very meaning of Zen is not to imitate anyone, because there is nothing to imitate, but to be yourself, so it is rather silly for Americans to continue to imitate Japanese, or Tibetan, customs. We respect our teachers and respect the forms that they bring, and we keep them up to a certain extent, but always it has to be an integration with the present moment."

In my newly developed interest in Buddhism, I found that this book had a lot to offer. Not only did it help expose me to some different style but it did so in a modern context.

In the end though I will just have to sit and see. One of the quote I really liked from the book came from Geshe Lobsang Tenzin Negi. He said "All of this talking, this is not really Buddhism. You can get instructions for swimming, but if you want to learn to swim, you have to get into the water."

Eating Animals: A Book Review

I bought this book on a whim during my lunch break months ago and even though I was excited to read it at the time I somehow let it sit until now. I suppose in a way I thought I already knew what would be in it - what it would be about. I've been reading animal activism, vegan revolution, and vegetarian theory books almost non-stop recently, and this book, with its simple title and well known, vegetarian, novelist writing author just seemed predictable. Turns out, it wasn't what I had expected.

Foer begins his story by giving us a little history on himself - his childhood memories of his grandmother's peculiar relationship with food brought about by her experience with starvation during the war, his flip-flopping vegetarian college life and his strengthening commitment to vegetarianism when he and his wife got married. But even then he said, they still ate meat on occasion. At the time he thought "I assumed we'd maintain a diet of conscientious inconsistency. Why should eating be different from any of the other ethical realms of our lives? We were honest people who occasionally told lies, careful friends who sometimes acted clumsily. We were vegetarians who from time to time ate meat." This was something that resonated with me. Indeed! Why should it be different? Few or perhaps no religious people can say they have lived life to the book - to their God's highest standards. Everyone has slipped up somewhere and had to ask for forgiveness - but despite the mistake were still considered a Christian or a Jew or a Muslim. Yet it seems that with things like vegetarianism - or really just anything that isn't mainstream, something you chose but didn't necessarily grown up with (westerners becoming Buddhist is another example) seems to be scrutinized without remorse. Vegetarians are taunted by meat eating friends (I remember teasing my vegetarian friends myself back in high school) and whenever one of us "falls" and rejoins the mainstream, those friends are there to say "I told you so" and pat themselves on the back for calling your bluff. Now I'm not promoting that vegetarians start eating meat once in a while, but I agree with Foer that we are human, and no part of our life can be perfect, ethical or otherwise. So that was his stance - I'm a vegetarian but when I feel like it, I might eat meat.

But all that changed when Foer and his wife had a baby. Foer writes "Feeding my child is not like feeding myself: it matters more. It matters because food matters (his physical health matters, the pleasure of eating matters), and because the stories that are served with food matters. These stories bind our family together, and bind our family to others. Stories about food are stories about us - our history and our values... We need to explain that the parsley on the plate is for decoration, that pasta is not a "breakfast food," why we eat wings but not eyes, cows but not dogs. Stories establish narratives, and stories establish rules."

And so Foer spends the next three years researching and studying the concept of eating animals. What will he feed his son? How will he explain his food choices to him? Will he be prepared with honest information for all his son's questions? These are his concerns.

The next part of the book I found really interesting is his section entitled "A Case For Eating Dogs." Foer admits that he "spent the first twenty-six years of my life disliking animals. I thought of them as bothersome, dirty, unapproachably foreign, frighteningly unpredictable, and plain old unnecessary. I had a particular lack of enthusiasm for dogs." Doesn't sound like your typical vegetarian huh? But then he fell in love with a stray puppy on the street. He still finds her foreign, he doesn't claim that she has all the same emotions as him though he can tell that she does have emotions even if he doesn't understand them - but he starts to question the idea of food taboo. Specifically dogs being taboo to eat. He tells the reader "I wouldn't eat George, because she's mine. But why wouldn't I eat a dog I'd never met? Or more to the point, what justification might I have for sparing dogs but eating other animals?" And so he decides to develop a case for eating dogs (which is legal in 45 states). And, while obviously, this case is horrifying to us and disgusting even for non-vegetarians, it can't be denied that he makes a strong case. Dog meat is just as healthy as any other meat - there is nothing nutritionally wrong with eating dog meat. Eating dog meat is actually more a part of human history than NOT eating dog meat (the Romans, the Hawaiians, the Dakota Indians, Asian cultures, Indian culture, the Aztecs). The argument of his that I like best - it's local and environmentally conscious. Think of all the stray animals that get picked up in our cities and then euthanized in our shelters and then what? Why not eat them? They had a painless death. Little to no shipping would be involved. Nothing would be wasted. So for all the yuppies that flock to Whole Foods to get their environmentally friendly chicken dinner - why not a stray dog Foer asks. Now obviously he is not actually suggesting this but he's making a point - one that won't go unnoticed.

Next Foer goes into a whole discovery process of the words we use for our food, our relationship with animals, and that the farming industry uses for the practices they use. Alphabetically he defines words. Words like anthropocentrism, comfort food, battery cage, CAFO and so on. Some of his definitions are al little surprising - mostly because in general Foer doesn't use the tone or language of your typical vegetarian (or "animal people" if you're talking to Pollan). But occasionally he busts out with things like this:

BULLSHIT:
1) The shit of a bull (see also environmentalism)
2) Misleading or false language and statements such as:

BYCATCH
Perhaps the quintessential example of bullshit, bycatch refers to sea creatures caught by accident - except not really "by accident," since bycatch has been consciously built into contemporary fishing methods...

And from there he goes on to destroy American's image of fish and seafood as being somehow more humane food to eat - pescatarians take note. Like when he lists all 145 other species of sea animals that are killed (caught in nets or on lines, dragged behind the ship until they die, and are then pulled up, sorted, and dumped back into the ocean dead or dying) while fishing for tuna. While I already knew that fishing for seafood was by no way humane (in fact it made sense to me without having to read any vegetarian propoganda that sea animals may suffer the longest, worst death of all the animals we eat) I somehow was surprised to learn the sheer number of animals that are caught and then thrown back overboard while trying to fish just one species. It does make sense though. The ocean is full of life - how can commercial fishermen charged with the task of serving up our favorite cuts of sushi or our "healthy" steaks of fish possibly bait and catch just one type of fish. Of course other animals would find their way into nets - or be forced into nets such as the trawling nets used to catch shrimp - a miniscule animals that can't be caught any other financially viable way.

But lest you think he spent all his time looking up words online and adding his own witty commentary to what he could safely find from the comforts of his office - the rest of the book proves rather interesting. Throughout the rest of the book he meets with people on both sides of the meat issue and even some people who strangely don't quite fit into either. He joins a young girl who routinely breaks into factory farms on a rescue mission, he includes a letter of a factory farmers defending his lifestyle, he visits a farm where the rancher is a vegetarian, and he spends time on a heritage turkey farm where a vegan is designing plans for a slaughterhouse. Crazy right? Throughout the book he lets these story characters speak to the audience in their own words, publishing their letters to him in each chapter.

In these chapters he examines much of the same area that Michael Pollan did in The Omnivore's Dillema - though I was disappointed to see that both authors spent little to no time talking about dairy farms, the inextricably way in which it is connected to the veal industry (male offspring of diary cows ARE veal) and the way that milk and cheese products (cheese isn't even vegetarian technically) are pushed on americans by our government and their advertising support for the farms. One thing that was interesting though is that he published a letter from the turkey farmer Frank Reese in which Reese points out some interesting things about Polyface Farms - the farm that Pollan so admires and talks up in the Om's D. Reese points out that those animals on Polyface are pretty much the exact same as the animals in factory farms. The chickens on Polyface are bred to develop quicker than normal - meaning they HAVE to be slaughtered sooner than they usually would (usual being how farming was before factory farms and us messing with the DNA of the animals) before they lose the ability to walk when they get top heavy. "Everyone is saying buy fresh, buy local. It's a sham. It's all the same kind of bird, and the suffering is in their genes...So he puts them on pasture. It makes no difference. It's like putting a broken down Honda on the Autobahn and saying it's a Porsche. KFC chickens are almost always killed in thirty-nine days. They're babies. That's how rapidly they're grown. Salatin's organic free-range chicken is killed in forty-two days. 'Cause it's still the same chicken. It can't be allowed to live any longer because it's genetics are so screwed up. Stop and think about that: a bird that you simply CAN'T let live out of it's adolescence."

So what he's saying is - and what I hadn't really thought about before - is that even if we buy free-range organic chicken (which in our heads we think is good and humane and all that) put aside the fact that the animal is killed in the end and the ethical jumbled mess that comes with that, just as an animal, even being free-range and organically raised - the animals starts out its life already messed up. Already bred for meat. Oh and also...they can't sexually reproduce anymore. Not possible. We artificially inseminate our chickens. How many American's know that? Not many I'm willing to bet and how did we even get to this point where animals can't live past a certain age? Foer gets into some interesting history and reveals the humble and naive beginnings of the factory farm and the modern broiler chicken.

During Foer's break-in to a poultry farm he speaks about something that I have been thinking about a lot lately. He writes "everyone has a mental image of a farm, and to most it probably includes fields, barns, tractors, and animals, or at least one of the above. I doubt there's anyone on earth not involved in farming whose mind would conjure what I'm now looking at. And yet before me is the kind of farm that produces roughly 99 percent of the animals consumed in America." What I have been thinking lately is...where are these factory farms? Take a drive in almost any direction from where I live and you will see farm after farm of cows and goats and horses out on the pasture - big silos and barns and gorgeous old farm houses. But they only produce 1 percent of the nation's meat. So where are the factory farms and would I even know it if I saw one? So I googled Factory Farm Maryland. Turns out there are factory farms in Maryland -Perdue Chicken at least and they have a pretty bad rap. The point is the pretty little picture we have floating around in our heads when we think of a chicken just isn't true any longer. In place of the big red barn and the chickens happily pecking at the grass stand mutant chickens with their beaks and toes cut off packed into a building so tight that they can hardly move. But sadder still is that even on farms that offer the chickens a more humane and "chicken-like" life - they are still mutant chickens. It's worthwhile to consider what we have lost in gaining such efficiency in raising and slaughtering animals.

Another topic Foer covers in the book - one that was a welcome surprise to me - is the link between animals on factory farms and the epidemics and possible future pandemics such as swine flu and bird flu that have been moving through the population. In 1918 the Spanish flu ripped through the world sickening an estimated one quarter (50million to 100 million dead) of the world's population. If you want to flip your shit - flip to the part of the book where Foer tells us about the World Health Organizations prediction for our future as far as Influenza is concerned. "Recent history has averaged a pandemic every twenty-seven and a half years, and it's now been over forty years since the last one." Perhaps you are thinking - well that's because we are so advanced now and stuff.... " The director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO) has said simply, 'We know another pandemic is inevitable...It is coming.'" Very end of the world sounding and for someone who just watched 2012 (yeah I know it came out a while ago but whatev) and is currently reading books about Colony Collapse Disorder and the coming demise of our agricultural system - this is all coming as a bit of an overload, scary movie, better travel the world and see the sights before we all die, shock to me.

Much of the rest of the book is split between visiting slaughterhouses and visiting what Foer believes to be good examples of farms and the raising of animals for slaughter.At some point I became aware while reading this book that Foer is not doing what I thought he would be doing. He's not making a case for cutting animal products out of our lives. Foer tells us in the beginning of his book that "a straight forward case for vegetarianism is worth writing, but it's not what I've written here." But even after reading that, I still expected it to be a case for vegetarianism. Well...he actually comes to a conclusion that I had been mulling around in my head since reading the Omnivore's Dillema. A conclusion that put things in the right words and with the right tone so that no one would feel slighted or judged (I'm looking at you Pollan). His conclusion is actually much the same as Pollan's conclusion.

There are good farms out there. It's not realistic to believe that all the world will one day be vegan or vegetarian. It's not logical to hold firmly to a viewpoint that the only thing we should fight for as animal lovers is the abolition of eating animals. There will always be meat eaters. In the end of the book Foer talks about his son's first Thanksgiving in which he will participate and eat with the family. It will be a vegetarian Thanksgiving. After 3 years of research and writing Foer decides to remain firm in his vegetarianism and to pass that on to his son - but he also expresses a huge amount of respect and admiration for the "characters" in his story who showed him that having a title such as vegetarian, rancher, vegan, slaughterhouse designer, doesn't firmly plant you into one camp or another.

The day before I finished this book Pang sent me a message offering me a photography job that she wasn't sure she would be able to take. An old high school friend of her's was opening a butchering shop for deer and wanted her to photograph scenes of butchering and meat. Pang offered the job to me. I struggled with the decision. One would think that given my lifestyle choice it would have been an easy decision but it wasn't for several reasons. One consideration was just that there aren't that many jobs around. Turning down a job almost seemed reckless. But a more bothersome idea floating around in my head was that in a way - I wanted to help this project. After reading about Frank Reese's farm and reading Ben Goldsmith's reasoning behind being a vegan who is helping Reese build a slaughterhouse - I started to feel that just being a vegan or vegetarian isn't enough. As Nicolette of Niman Ranch said " I used to think that being a vegetarian exempted me from spending time trying to change how farm animals are treated. I felt that by abstaining from meat eating, I was doing my part. That seems silly to me now. The meat industry affects everybody in the sense that we are, all of us, living in a society in which food production is based on factory farming. Being a vegetarian does not relieve me from a responsibility for how our nation raises animals - especially at a time when total meat consumption is increasing both nationally and globally." This quote came back to me when I got the text from Pang about the job. In a way - it's a great thing that this person is opening a independently owned butchering shop. The fact that they are opening it either means they see a need in their community for such an establishment or that they are simply passionate about the lifestyle that they have chosen. In either case it is a step away from the direction of factory farming - and that's a good thing. In the end I did turn the job down. I felt that the shoot would be too gruesome for me to complete and still remain composed and professional.

I guess what I got out of this book is that - yes - an animal free lifestyle is for me. It feels right and I can't see myself turning back now - not with all I know and not with the way my compassion for animals has grown since becoming vegetarian. But in the very back of the book - in the Reading Group Guide - Foer talks a little about the difference between animal rights and animal welfare - and I, like him, am not sure exactly where I stand. I think I stand in the middle somewhere.

Anyone else who read the book (or not) want to comment?

The next book I will talk about (I don't know when my blog became a book review site and not a recipe and foodie blog but there you have it) will be:

The Great Oom: Book Review

Well...unsurprisingly (since the exact same thing happened last time I tried to start a book club) the first book I picked for a group of people to read turned out to be a dud of a book. When I saw this book at the library and read the tag line of the title "The Improbable Birth of Yoga in America" - I assumed - wrongly, that this book was about yoga. Welllllllllll...it's not. It's actually about this dude - The Great Oom, who went by Pierre Bernard. It's a biography and it spends more time talking about the Vanderbilts and Pierre Bernard's groupies than it does yoga. The book mentions the occasional headstand and gets into the rumors of the groups (who called themselves the Tantriks) wild orgies and secret doings. There are some interesting aspects to the book - it's one of the those "self made man" stories that makes you feel like if only you were more motivated you could make things happen. It IS interesting to see how he swindles millionaires out of their money and builds himself an empire of cars and property and circus animals and pretty girls. Also the stories about Bernard being able to control his breath to the point where he could "put himself under" and literally have a needle passed through his cheek and tongue without the least amount of pain. What wasn't interesting...most of the book. A lot of the book seems to revolve around who was interested in who, who gets married to who, what kind of scandals the group was involved in or reputed to be involved in. So on a scale of enjoy to hate - what did I think of this book? I stopped reading after more than 200 pages. I invested myself into 3/4ths (!!) of the book and yet still decided to put it down. I got bored. Towards the end there were only sparse mentions of yoga - most of the talk centered on parties and circuses. I skipped to the last chapter hoping to read some revelatory last few pages about how he went on to found some incredibly well known yoga group that defined modern yoga as we American's know it. The last chapter is entitled: Family Man. I gave up and moved on. Sorry group - I should have done a little more research before suggesting this book.

This next book SHOULD be more of a success - it has been getting rave reviews and to at least two of the "group", it's a topic we can show some enthusiasm for. The next book I would like to propose to read and discuss is Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer - who also wrote Everything is Illuminated.

The Omnivore's Dilemma

Before I go into way too much detail about this book and how I feel about it - just wondering, just throwing this out there - would anyone like to start a book club? I know I tried this already with Pang and it was only kinda....ok not really successful - but I think it would be really cool to have a dialogue going - more than me just yammering. It can be informal to start. I will just start announcing what books I will be reading/reviewing next. If you wana get the book and read it too so we can chat, great! If not I will just keep ranting on my own. I think the next book I plan to read and review is The Great Oom: The Improbable Birth of Yoga in America by Robert Love. It's brand new in the library and it looks pretty interesting. Now on to the current book!

The Omnivore's Dilemma. It's certainly an interesting book, a well written book - but one I feel a little....ambivalent towards, an ambivalence that has grown and stretched and now threatens to schizophrenically dictate this review. I will try to hold it together but...well I have a dilemma! Im really really not sure how I feel about this book. Perhaps it's because some of the topics covered in this book are becoming increasingly nearer and dearer to my little heart, and it's as if I can see us on opposite sides of the line, and he's just staring me down, "pitying" the poor vegetarian who is in" denial of reality." Or perhaps I'm upset that it's not the happy ending I had hoped for - that in spite of all he witnesses and even participates in - he's pretty much just as close minded and stuck in his ways as when he started the journey. Perhaps I'm torn between the fact that I did indeed learn tons of interesting facts from this book (like yeast can be harvested in your own backyard!) but that at the same time Pollan almost blatantly overlooks going into a deeper exploration of what would support what he might call a "sentimental" or "animal people" lifestyle.

Pollan's book follows, to a certain extent, four meals. The industrial agricultural meal of corn to Mcnugget,the two different kinds of organic - the industrial Whole Foods bought meal and the "local" Polyface farms meal, and the foraged and hunted meal he cobbles together from the general surrounding area of Berkeley California.

The first part of the book I really dug. It was interesting! He explains how corn has become such a huge huge crop in the United States and how it has found its way into so many of our foods - becoming the building blocks of the bulk of our processed food (yogurt, ketchup, candy, cheez whiz - the list goes on) to the point that its almost impossible to eat a packaged food that doesn't contain corn! And it doesn't end at just food, corn is a part of "disposable diapers, trash bags, cleansers, charcoal briquettes, matches, batteries, right down to the shine on the cover of the magazine." He even reveals the identity of the elusive and mysterious Xanthan Gum. He digs into the mystery of why corn has been grown and used so widely.

He then starts talking about how corn is used in the meat industry as feedstock for the animals. I was surprised to learn (I'm not sure why really because it does kinda make sense) that cows cannot digest corn. Ruminants, which are animals that have rumens (cows, llamas, deer, sheep, giraffe, camels, ect) are grass eaters by nature. What happens when you feed ruminants grain? They get sick. Pollan says that "virtually all of them [feedlot cattle] to one degree or another, according to several animal scientists I talked to - are simply sick." Bloat is a concern for ruminants eating grains and is described as " a layer of foamy slime [which] forms in the rumen and can trap gas. The rumen inflates like a balloon until it presses against the animal's lungs. Unless action is taken promptly to relieve the pressure (usually forcing a hose down the animals' esophagus), the animal suffocates." Another common side effect of the animals diet is acidosis. The basic symptom of acidosis is "bovine heartburn that in some cases can kill the animal" or cause the animal to "pant and salivate excessively, paw and scratch their bellies, and eat dirt. The condition leads to diarrhea, ulcers, bloat, ruminates, liver disease and a general weakening of the immune system." I've always heard that cows (and industrial livestock in general) were pumped full of antibiotics but I didn't fully know why until reading this part of the book. Pollan also inspects the other aspects of the cow's diets and finds...well cows. The cows on the farm he is exploring are fed "blood products and fat," or in other words the steer that Pollan bought and is following through it's life is being fed "beef tallow recycled from the very slaughterhouse he's headed to in June." Also in cattle feed are "feather meal and chicken litter (that is, bedding, feces, and discarded bits of feed) " as well as "chicken, fish and pig meal. Wait these herbivores are eating animals and animal waste and even their own species?!

I found this particular meal - from corn to McDonald's to be pretty fascinating. Pollan artfully lays out the history behind the present state of things (the over-production of corn and soy and the mass production of animals for slaughter) and makes links to our current bulging waistlines, all while setting up things for the next two chapters. He accuses (rightfully) American's of being out of touch with their food (a sentiment I assume he handled heavily in his other book In Defense of Food, which I haven't read but have read reviews on, so I know the general punch-line) and says that if we are what we eat, then Americans are unknowingly walking, talking bundles of corn and petroleum (petroleum being the fertilizer, the harvester, the processor, the transporter, and even some of the ingredients of our food).

Pollan is far from the first person to attempt to turn American's off to fast food - but I feel like he does a thorough job of creating a story with which to bind his message in. Not only do we learn about the weird list of ingredients that goes into a chicken nugget but we also learn about the struggle of the corn and soybean farmer who no longer have the option of playing by the "supply and demand" rule we all remember memorizing for our Econ101 classes. Up through this point, I'm pretty pleased with the book. I'm enjoying reading it and I'm looking forward to more.

Next Pollan goes into the organic meal - but as he is soon to find out, organic has different meaning to different farmer and consumers and so he is forced to break down the term a little bit and he explores the industrial organic farm and then a more small scale organic farm.

For the industrial organic farm he compiles his meal from the vast array of organic and natural treats at a Whole Foods supermarket. He describes the shopping as a "literary experience." Marketers in the food business have a tough job - how do they get us to spend more money on items that may look and taste exactly alike? How can they assure us that the organic chicken breast we are buying is more nutritious, more ethical, or more tasty? Pollan wittily names this sort of writing - the work of the food marketer- as "Supermarket Pastoral," and the questions he draws, while walking through the Whole Foods reading pamphlets and labels and comparing organic products that boast different but both alluring aspects (he cites two organic jugs of milk, one ultra pasteurized - touting its long shelf life - the other company said no to ultrapasteurizing and claims they have a fresher, less processed product because of it) exemplifies just how confusing and slippery shopping can be. The recent trend in the United States it to buy natural, organic, and local foods - but Pollan points out that those words are defined differently by different companies and its hard to know, as the consumer, just what you are buying.

So he goes back to the source - the farms - and tries to discover where his chicken (Rosie is her name according to the package) actually came from, and if her described living conditions matched his expectations. I wont ruin all the surprises for you in this book but suffice it to say that the label "free range" didn't quite mean what we would all expect. Something interesting I learned from this little section - the life of a chicken on the Petaluma Poultry farm is only 7 weeks long. Only 7 weeks to produce big juicy breasts of meat. Surprisingly short really!

In this section Pollan also talks about little farms who made it big - like Earthbound Farms who pretty much have a monopoly on organic baby greens - which perfectly segways into his next section - the little organic farms.

Pollan spends a little less than a week on Joel Salatin's Polyface Farm in Virginia to find out what this self professed "grass farmer" is all about. Salatin, and a small group of hired hands and family members, run a pretty fascinating and well orchestrated choreography of animals at Polyface based on Pollan's description. This is what people think of when they think of "free range" or "humanely raised" animals. Salatin's secret to success: letting the animals do what they do best while working within the cycles of the grass. The cows are moved around the pasture to systematically eat the grass, the chickens move three days behind the cows to pick the insects out of the cowpaties, the pigs turn the stacked cowpoop from the winter shed into rich compost. Salatin has all kinds of little inventions and time tested rules that make this dance run on schedule. It's obvious from the way Pollan writes about this farm that he is pretty impressed by it, but at the same time he paints Salatin in an occasional condescending light. I get the feeling in this chapter that Pollan is really looking for a finished meat product that is "good to think" - meaning he can still eat the meat without feeling bad about killing an animal for it.

The chickens at Polyface are killed and prepared and bought right on the farm - and Pollan describes his experience working at the "killing station" and the evisceration part of the job. For the average American, this is not a process we are at all familiar with. Part of what makes Polyface so special is that the slaughter is done out in the open. Salatin encourages his buyers to come witness the process and even participate if they choose. Pollan admits to a fair amount of disgust at the whole process and wonders if he will be able to cook and eat one of the birds he just helped turn from a living animal into a brined chicken carcass. He writes in several parts of the book for the need to have more connection with our food and the processes they go through. He says that if the raising and slaughtering of animals was as accessible and transparent as the process at Polyface people would either stop eating meat or would demand more humane practices. While I can get behind this statement (although for me it wouldn't matter if it was "more humane" or not - it goes beyond that for me, so I still wouldn't eat it) I was disappointed that Pollan didn't spend a bit more time talking about the pigs on Polyface. What kind of life do they lead? How does he feel about animals that are raised in a more humane situation like this but still go to the same slaughterhouses as industrially raised animals?

Pollan's meal from the Polyface farm is shared with some friends nearby (he considered taking it back to California but thought that might tarnish the local sustainability value of it) and both he and the guests proclaimed it to be more chickeny flavored than most chickens. Everyone except one of the son's "Mathew, who's fifteen and currently a vegetarian." Here is where I flinch a little bit. Why currently? Is Pollan suggesting that Mathew is part of some fad - as if he is currently wearing the latest jeans - and his choice (a pretty important and mature choice to even consider at a young age) shouldn't be taken seriously? Turns out that's exactly what he is insinuating as he makes more clear in the last chapter of his book - the self made meal.

In Pollan's last meal he decides to shoot a pig, harvest mushrooms (sounds like hard work but could be fun too!) capture his own yeast, and collect salt. Before shooting a pig Pollan decides (after reading Animal Liberation while eating a steak) that he has to examine his feelings about taking an animal life and the only way he can do so is to become a "reluctant," and "fervently hoped, temporary vegetarian." It's in this section - The Vegetarian's Dilemma - that he start referring to vegetarians and vegans as "animal people." He says that in the first month of eating vegetarian he is still feeling reluctant. "I find making a satisfying vegetarian dinner takes a lot more thought and work (chopping work in particular); eating meat is simply more convenient." What really really irks me about this sentence is that it's just exactly what non-vegetarian's want to hear to pat themselves soothingly on the back and say - see, it's just not realistic. Eating meat is convenient and therefore ok to do. Also, why doesn't he describe any of his vegetarian meals? He goes at length to describe the Polface chicken: "The skin had turned the color of mahogany and the texture of parchment, almost like Pekind duck, and the meat itself was moist, dense, and almost shockingly flavorful. I could taste the brine of the apple wood..." Not one single description of a vegetarian meal. I am forced to believe (not only because of this, but because of the obvious disdain he has for the experiment as well as the practicers of the lifestyle) that he didn't really take this "challenge" from Peter Singer seriously.

He talks a bit about animal suffering too - and says the idea is vexing to him because "in a certain sense it is impossible to know what goes on in the mind of a cow or pig or ape." Sounds like a copout to me. Oh well its impossible to know what animals are feeling so can we really say they are suffering? Nope - lets eat steak. Yet in another place in the book he talks about how pigs are shown to be just as intelligent as some breeds of dogs and he questions why most dogs in America are given Christmas presents yet no thought is given to the pig served as Christmas dinner. He doesn't take it to the next step though - why don't we eat our dogs after they die? Because they are intelligent and sensitive creatures with emotions and bonding abilities? So are pigs but we don't give them that chance. While Pollan admits that animals do feel pain he says that it is not equal to human suffering and should not be viewed as such because their pain is not "amplified by distinctly human emotions such as regret, self-pity, shame, humiliation, and dread."

This I just don't buy as an excuse to eat animals. So I looked to see what others were saying about animal feelings. I came across Arran Stibbe's article Dignity Beyond the Human World of the Human Dignity and Humiliation Studies group. Stibbe write this:

Undoubtedly there are situations where animals feel emotions similar to humans feelings of humiliation, but it seems anthropomorphic to assume that other animals experience dignity and its loss in the same way that humans do. Perhaps, in many cases, the animal in question is feeling pain and distress rather than a loss of dignity.
However, looking at the other side, the human side, it is clear that strategic attempts to humiliate another party differ little whether that party is human or not. It is the same cultural script found throughout the human world: words and actions are used to systematically lower the social status of one party in order to feed the other party's desire for superiority. The mastery and control of animals, demonstrated through confining them, distorting their bodies, or making them perform unnatural feats, delivers at best a very fragile sense of self worth. The fragility occurs because the very act of having to humiliate another in order to gain a sense of self-worth simultaneously reveals deep insecurity.

And here is something I can agree with. Ok Pollan - so humans and animals don't experience the world in the same way - I will give you that. But does that mean we should take advantage of them? That we should inflict pain on them just because their experience of pain is different from ours? Stibbe's article also made me realize what I was trying to grasp as I read Pollan's "arguments" against Peter Singer's points and while I gritted my teeth through Pollan's admission that he "pities" vegetarians. Pollan is insecure. Really insecure obviously. He goes so far as to taunt vegans in the section The Vegan Utopian by saying "the farmer would point out to the vegan that even she has a 'serious clash of interests' with other animals. The grain that the vegan eats is harvested with a combine that shreds field mice, while the farmer's tractor wheel crushes woodchucks in their burrows and his pesticides drop songbirds from the sky." Really Pollan? Really? So it's all or nothing is it? Are you suggesting we adopt the "no shadow" diet now if we really want to be vegan? And why is the vegan a "she"? Is that to underline the opinion that you have that "animal people" are sentimental and out of touch with reality? He goes on to say that "if our goal is to kill as few animals as possible people should probably try to eat the largest possible animal that can live on a the least cultivated land: grass-finished steaks for everyone." Oh how convenient seeing as though you obviously love eating steak. I don't think you really thought this one out. You just let your stomach do the thinking.

Unsurprisingly he decides to go through with the pig hunt and finds in the end a mixed bag of pride, shame, elation, and disgust. But not so much disgust that when he smells the leg of pig roasting that he can't bring himself to eat it.

The most disappointing part of this book. There is no conclusion. He doesn't give us much of anything. He lamely closes out the book with a description of his last meal and thanks the people that made it possible and ....that's it. For as many times throughout the book as he urges us to look at, really look at what we are eating, Pollan fails to see the meal in front of him for what it is, the rotting decomposing corpse of another living species. Or I suppose he does - but chooses to accept that and keep on chewing.

So what are we left to think? He admits that both the McDonald's meal in the beginning of the book and the hunted boar meal at the end of his book are unrealistic - and should perhaps only be indulged once a year. His disdain for the vegetarian diet certainly doesn't lead me to believe that he would promote that option. So we are left with the Whole Foods option and the grass fed animals. Now maybe I'm wrong about this but I'm willing to bet that those two options are the foods that Pollan was probably already eating given the fact that he admits to shopping at Whole Foods and lives in Berkeley, which is known for its foody, local, natural, somewhat elitist cuisine. Unfortunately - American's interested in the subject, perhaps questioning their impact on the environment, their relationship to the animals they eat - will learn a good deal of information about this book. But at the end they will be able to reassure themselves that no one is asking them to give up anything really. No one is trying to "trick" them into thinking vegetarianism or even just eating a heck of a lot less meat can still lend itself to delicious and varied food (I eat a wider variety of food now, with animal products stripped out, than i ever did before). And worst of all, they will probably walk around parroting Pollan talking about how out of touch vegetarians are and may even go so far to say they too pity us.

As you can see, Im confused about this book. Pollan is a masterful storyteller. His writing style is enjoyable. He does quite a bit of research on both sides of the issue. But, for me, I can't get myself behind a book written by someone so insecure that they attack others who are doing someone that he obviously just doesn't have the selflessness or the courage to do. He's too concerned with being ostracized at a dinner party to really look at all the information he has gathered and follow it to it's logical conclusion.

The Kind Diet: A Book Review

As I mentioned in my last book review, I have a whole pile of vegan lifestyle books waiting for me to tackle, so after Thanking the Monkey I moved right on to Alicia Silverstone's book, The Kind Diet. I had seen this book online before when someone had posted her recipe for Mochi Waffles (pictured below) so I had always wanted to get my hands on it and check it out for myself.

The checking out has been done - and Im even preparing to make one of the recipes from her book today - and I must say.....hmmmm. Yeah. Let me just say before I get into this that I did read the book the whole way through AND I checked out her blog/website AND I watched several videos on youtube of the making of the book, her food adventures in NYC and her little video welcome to the Kind Life.

Alright lemme break this book down for you. The book starts with a short preface written by Paul McCartney - who yes, is an animal lover and longtime vegetarian, but, does not actually display the characteristics Alicia Silverstone is trying to convince you will save your life and the planet. He's not vegan - but - he is a celebrity. Now this isn't me getting up on a high horse and saying "Hey, he's not good enough because he's a vegetarian," Im just pointing out that rather than choose perhaps a less famous vegan, Alicia decided to go for the star factor here and choose a way famous vegetarian. Lets keep this in mind as I go through the rest of the book.

Her first chapter is called Kind Versus Nasty. In this chapter she starts by telling us about how her own "journey" began as a child who one day connected her lamb chop dinner with its animal counterpart. Being only 8 years old, her conviction to go vegetarian was, while heartfelt, unsuccessful. It wasn't until her twenties when she decided to go vegan, after bringing home 11 dogs in one day, all of whom had been scheduled to be euthanized. She then describes how the decision to eat vegan changed her life. She talks about how in just two weeks people were commenting on how great she looked, how energetic and spunky she felt and how she felt her heart opening and felt more in touch with her "truest self and deepest beliefs." She then shifts gears and starts talking about how she and her husband went to see a macrobiotic counselor who pointed out that Alicia still had rampant acne and would benefit from a macrobiotic diet with better skin and more energy. She talks about how she overhauled her diet to include grains and whole foods rather than sweeteners, processed food and white flours and pastas. She even claimed that this helped her "feel things more acutely and sense [her] intuition." While most of this I was able to easily digest (despite the fact that it seemed a little contradictory that her friends all noticed she was looking so great on a vegan diet, yet still had the acne problem), the more talking she did about feeling at peace and calm in her body on this new diet, the more I started to question how much of this she could back up with any kind of research and how much of this was just new age enlightened spirit talk.

She then moves on to outlining the downfalls and hidden cruelty of the meat, fish and dairy industry. For those of us who know something about this already, Alicia wont give you any new information. In fact, she will give you skimpier versions of what you already know. For example she sites an Australian behavioral ecologist's experiments that prove that fish "have longer memories than we assumed, the capacity to learn, and they transmit knowledge to other members of the school." Cool. This is good to know - but why not tell us more specifics on the experiment? I can guarantee you that if I tell my dad that Dr. so and so did "experiments" to prove that fish have the capacity to learn things and remember the things they learn for longer than we thought, he wont get much out of that. Now if I can explain to him the actual experiments "hey Dad, this Dr. did a test where he passed a net through a tank with a small hole in it. After 5 times through the fish had figured out where the hole was and could successfully find the hole each time the net passed through. Then 11 months later the same test was done with the same fish, who hadn't seen the net in those 11 months, and they could still find the hole every time. Crazy right? That information, by the way, came from Thanking the Monkey. Both Dawn and Silverstone's message was the same: fish are in fact intelligent, but Dawn's was not only more convincing to me, but it also armed me with concrete material to share with others rather than just, "well i read in Alicia Silverstone's book that fish are actually able to learn and remember things."

But perhaps I am being too harsh on Alicia Silverstone. In reading her book you can definitely tell that her focus is more about the relationship between the body and the food, not the animal and the food. It's a diet book. Oh...and its also a diet book that seems to be specifically branded for young, twenty something, hip girls. Let's discuss the language Silverstone uses in the book. In the beginning of the book when she is welcoming us to her creation she ends her little preface by signing it: Peace out, Alicia. Ok, I think to myself, she's a fun loving, hippy. Not a big deal. But then she starts talking about food, and words like "naughty, magical, nasty, and sexy," start popping up left and right. In fact, based on the amount of times each of these words shows up, I'm lead to believe these are her absolute favorite words and are the sole words which comprise the scale of descriptions of quality. The words naughty and sexy especially irked me. She uses these words when talking about resisting temptation to eat animal products, and while I commend her for being honest about "nick[ing] a piece of sushi off a friend's plate right at the end of the meal," because this clearly reminds us that she is in fact human and prone to weakness and error, her vocabulary makes me simultaneously believe that she's a eccentric fairy princess writing to us from some utopian far off land. Its ironic because this type of vocabulary, while I'm sure it was meant to be fresh and youthful, was actually kinda alienating and almost a little insulting - and Im only 23 years old.

Never-the-less I read through the rest of the book, looking forward to the recipes at the end. The next few chapters did hold some interesting information. While I felt her chapter on animal cruelty was a bit lackluster, she presents a pretty good chunk of writing dedicated to explaining food. Well...most of it. While she does go into some explanations of tempeh and seitan, which are very useful to people who don't know much about them, she pretty much leaves out information about other ingredients that many of us have no exposure to. For example she has mirin in several of her recipes - but never bothers to tell us what mirin is. Turns out (I googled it) its a rice wine similar to saki thats used for cooking. I work in a Japanese restaurant. I didn't know what this was. I also could have used some descriptions or pictures of hijiki, arame, wakame, and kombu. She also refers to shoyu several times in her book before she decides to define it. What is it...turns out she's talking about soy sauce. She tells us that in fact shoyu "is how most soy sauce is labeled in the health food worlds these days." The health food world or the LA world? I checked my health food store, and even the bottles we have in the restaurant and the bottles of private stuff the chef uses to cook his own meals. No mention of shoyu. Now I am all for recipes that make me try new things or have me exploring my local ethnic markets, but come on, it's not some random recipe I found online, you have a whole book to explain these ingredients! Not to mention - some of these things are expensive. I asked Kazu, the Japanese owner of the restaruant where I work if she could get me some black soybeans (part of a stew recipe in the Kind Diet) at the Asian market. First of all, Kazu didn't even know if they would have black soybeans because she had never used them before and wasn't even familiar with the idea of them, and secondly, when she did find them there, they came in a tiny, expensive package all in Japanese. Now how was I supposed to find that if even my Japanese boss had some trouble? This failure to fully explain the ingredients she was introducing (and she does acknowledge the fact that most of these things will be totally new for a lot of people) just added to the alienation I felt when reading this book.

Plus...doesn't she say we should be eating local foods? Part of the macrobiotic diet is to avoid foods that don't come from your area. For example eating a pineapple in the middie of winter makes no sense for me, according to this diet, because that food is designed to hydrate my body and cool it down, when thats not really what i need. Plus its shipped from far away which means lots and lots of energy and fossil fuels go into that pineapple getting to me. But skim through one of her recipe and you will see all kinds of Japanese ingredients that really don't qualify as local. Perhaps they feel more local to those living in LA who share an ocean with Japan - but even that is quite a stretch.

She says in the beginning of this book that this diet is for everyone. Not just celebrities. I don't feel like she does a great job of convincing the reader of this. From her obvious target audience (throughout the book she cites ways in which this diet will help with your menstrual cramps or ward off breast cancer, she even has a page of "cute vegan boys") to her expensive and complicated ingredients list, Im not completely sure this is a diet for everyone. But she does convince me of several things. I need more grains and veggies in my diet. I could do with less processed vegan substitutes. And, I could certainly switch to sweeteners that don't spike my blood sugar to such a crazy extent.

She also does something I totally love her for. She hired Victoria Pearson to photograph her food. The food looks amazing and delcious and healthy and Alicia and her husband look vibrant and young and happy. Im absolutely a sucker for beautiful photography and this book certainly packs some in.

And while I was a little peeved about Alicia not explaining all the food she suggests we adopt into our lifestyles, I am going to seek out some of them and try the recipes. In fact, I look a break from writing this and made her Fried Udon noodles with cabbage and onions and it was pretty darn good. In closing - Im willing to give these recipes a fair shot. Im even a little excited to find out what this "magical" umboshi vinegar tastes like. Would I recommend this book to others. Hmmm...it would have to be the right situation. If it was a guy - no. If it was my grandma - no. If it was my hippy minded peace loving friend - maybe. If it was someone I knew who already knew lots about animal cruelty and just wanted some recipes to try being healthier and vegan - yes.

All that being said I think her blog is actually a good resource and worth checking out! Also, I would like to add, that in giving this book a somewhat unfavorable review, I don't at all mean that to detract from Alicia Silverstone as a vegan or animal lover. I think its great that she felt so moved to write this book and that her celebrity status will perhaps get it into the hands of more readers. I do think more thought could have gone into certain aspects of the book, as I've already covered. In watching her youtube videos where she is running around NYC (with wild crazy untamed hair - which she comments on in the video) I DO realize that the way she talks in the book is pretty much the way she talks in real life. She does in fact say groovy. She's cute, she's vivacious, and she's thrilled to death by food. I still don't lover her book, but I actually do think I would like her as a person if we were to meet.

Thanking the Monkey: A book review

I read a lot of books. But sadly I have a very poor memory for details. Ask me the names of the characters from a book I read a few months ago, heck even last month, its likely I can't tell you. But I love to read. So I do it almost compulsively. I power through books in days but always manage to have a healthy stack of "in the future" books waiting for me. I tend to get stuck on certain topics or specific writers and amass a collection of work to tackle as soon as the current book is finished. My current stack is on the topic of animal rights combined with vegan lifestyle and diet. I've got books from the library waiting, books I bought at the bookstore, and books I ordered from Amazon. I'm set for the next few weeks.

I picked up this book, Thanking the Monday, the other day at the library because one of Ryan's friends at work is interested in learning about vegetarianism and animal cruelty and as Ryan put it "I figured you would have some books to recommend since you know more about this stuff than I even do at this point. I've created a monster." While he may be right that he's created a "monster" as I get more and more into the cruelty free lifestyle and my list of "to read asap" books gets higher and higher - I realized I had no books to recommend that I personally had read other than Skinny Bitch (which was interesting and while it was recommended to me by a dude, I couldn't really see one of Ryan's dude friends going out and buying it).

So I went to the library and searched the animal rights section and came upon Thanking the Monkey: Rethinking The Way We Treat Animals. I came home and immediately started reading the book and now 3 days later I am pretty much ready to hand this book out to anyone and everyone for Christmas. Realistically I can't afford that, and also I don't want to push the issue on people who just aren't ready - but what I will do, and am currently doing, is give this book as much endorsement as possible.

Here is why I thought this book was great: To many people veganism is scary, extreme, and somewhat elitist. Karen Dawn presents a different perspective. A more realistic perspective. Instead of bashing us over the head with her intended purpose from the word go (which is absolutely to convince readers that a vegan lifestyle is not only the morally correct choice but also the healthiest diet option) she begins her book by tackling the broadest topic involved: animal rights. Animal whats? Rights....oh right...they don't have any. At least not the animals who contribute to what you eat, wear, or put on your skin or use in your household. Dawn starts her look at the world of animal cruelty by addressing the questions vegetarians and vegans face on a regular basis from others. Questions like: why do you work so hard for animal rights when there is so much human suffering in the world? Shouldn't that come first? Or: Don't animal rights activists prefer animals to people? She addresses these common questions and tries to put the misconceptions to rest by fully explaining what we mean by the term animal rights and why its so important to be the voice of beings that can't contribute their own voice.

Next she moves to a topic we can all show some interest in: pets. She addresses topics in this chapter such as: what exactly is in your pets food, the practices of animal shelters, keeping wild animals as pets, debunking the myth that fish are unintelligent (really interesting studies she quotes), animals as part of a family unit (and how the government doesn't consider them so, leaving them open to abandonment when disasters like Katrina happen and survivors are forbidden to bring animals to shelters) breeding and the ethical questions that come along with that like tail docking, selective breeding that is detrimental to the breed (think the smashed faces of pugs, adorable, but absolutely detrimental to the species) and puppy mills.

From here she moves into animals in the entertainment industry. From circuses (the elephant stories are heartbreaking and amazing) to zoos to the animals that perform and die making the movies we pay so much (too much man, theaters are so expensive these days. When I was young.....ok I'll stop) to see. This section get me thinking about animal rights and animal cruelty in a way I had never even considered. So wait... the animals that play in the movies sometimes die making it? And if they don't die they can be sold to laboratories or slaughterhouses? What kinda thanks is that for a part well learned?

The rest of the book gets into the things you pretty much expect. The issues with fur, leather, wool, and silk. The absolutely inhumane way we raise and slaughter animals. And the pointless tests we run on animals to proves things like: consuming alcohol and smoking cigarettes while pregnant can damage fetuses.....did you really need to test thousands of animals to prove something we already have lots and lots and lots of concrete human evidence on? These three sections of the book: fashion, diet, and testing presented me with a lot of squirmy information. I remember shirking away from PETA volunteers and their gruesome brochures or looking the other way when those terrible commercials about abused animals would come on the tv. These sections, while reaffirming my choice to go cruelty free, brought back those familiar queasy emotions I always tried so hard to avoid. It was a tough read. Ryan would come home from work the last few days, take one look at my face, and say "you making yourself sad again?" But some of it was completely new information for me. Completely heartbreaking but necessary for me to ingest, process, and hopefully one day share with others who are curious about how we treat animals.

This book is gruesome. Really gruesome. She spares no details. But she also acknowledges the fact that we don't want to sit through a book that makes us feel terrible the entire time. She tries to lighten the mood (while still being absolutely serious mind you) by using ironic titles for sections like: Confining Nemo, Going Clubbing, Finger Lickin Bad For You, The Right to Arm Bears? and All the Worlds a Cage. She also includes loads of cartoons pulled from newspapers, quotes and photos from vegan and vegetarian celebrities, and artwork on pretty much every page. Another thing that hooked me with this book is that she pulls her information from real, recognizable stories. This isn't a book full of finger wagging and "lets just do the right thing because its what I believe is the right thing" kinda talk. Every topic she puts forward in the book is supported by studies, news reports, newspaper articles or interviews. She cites newspapers like the New York Times, Reader's Digest, the Los Angeles Times, and surprisingly several publications geared towards farmers and hunters. In her last chapter she also explains how having a real relationship with our media can have a surprising impact. Letters to the editor, calls to radio stations, and praise for stories well reported and represented can mean future stories and follow-up stories that might otherwise be canceled due to networks fear that the information is too sensitive or gruesome for the American public.

At the end of the book you will leave with your head swimming full of information. Both heartening and disheartening. You will be itching to tell people things you learned, like: Did you know that bees have the second most complex language of any species (ours is most complex of course). Or: Did you know that male chicks born on hatching farms are considered practically worthless and most of them are ground into pet food? Im probably driving Ryan crazy doing all this "fun fact" sharing.

For those of you who are already vegetarians or vegans, go ahead and pat yourself on the back or give yourself a gold star and just feel warm and fuzzy after reading this, knowing that although millions of animals are out there suffer, YOU aren't contributing and hopefully you are even working against it. You'll come away from this book with a bit more knowledge and a few more facts to share with curious non-veg friends and family, while simultaneously reaffirming your life choice.

For those of you who are still eating the carnivorous Western diet most of us were raised on: After you've spent a good half an hour rocking yourself back and forth, tightly rolled into a ball, in the corner of your house that gets you furthest away from the bacon staring you down from the fridge, while clutching your fuzzy little cat or your yappy little dog to your chest, promising that HE wont ever be abandoned or abused or sold to a lab for testing or fed ground up baby male chicks....well, once you've recovered from that. Let me welcome you to the club. If you really read this book all the way through you should be fully on your way towards an animal friendly lifestyle. You wont regret your choice.

Dawn chooses to close out the book by letting her readers in on a little secret. She's a vegan - but she sometimes bends the rules when she feels its acceptable. She gives the example of going out to dinner with non-vegan friends and ordering the veggie burger, even if it may contain traces of eggs or dairy, to show her friends that making kinder choices isn't as impossible as it seems, and to show the restaurant that there are in fact customers who will choose the veggie burger over the beef burger. She reminds her readers that lifestyle is a personal choice. If what you feel you can contribute is not wearing leather, not visiting zoos and cutting out eggs from your diet, well great. You ARE making a difference. If you want to cut all animal products from your life and adopt a dog. Awesome! The point is: being animal friendly doesn't need to be scary or extreme or elitist. Anyone can do it and we are all free to choose at what level we commit ourselves to the cause.

In closing: I heartily recommend this book.