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Common Sense Solutions - Starting Now

Jonathan Safran Foer, Author of Eating Animals

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It's Not All Or Nothing

Jonathan Safran Foer is the author of Everything Is Illuminated (2002), Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005) and Eating Animals (2009) about factory farming and commercial fisheries.

"We've perverted the whole system to make it not only unsustainable, but aggressively unsustainable." he says.

In this clip the author makes some important points on the topic of meat consumption. What are we so inclined to polarize the discussion so intensely? He believes that the term "vegetarian" does a disservice to the conversation. "It implies you're either going to do everything or nothing. You're somebody who cares or you're somebody who doesn't care - when in fact most people can easily imagine themselves somewhere in between the extremes of nothing and always." he says.

That is a very important point. The less meat you eat from factory farms means the less dollars go toward factory farms. The big change will not happen on the already highly conscious fringe -- it will happen when the mainstream masses say they want less and less factory farmed meat. It is not by any means an "all or nothing" conversation. It's evaluating one meal at a time, and being part of shifting the Western food culture, wherever you are on the spectrum.

Most people are in the middle of the spectrum, and they do want more vegetarian options, because awareness IS being raised about the unsustainability and cruelty of factory farms.

"Caring is a muscle." he says. "The more we use it, the stronger it gets."

--Bibi Farber

This video was produced by Fora TV