The Face on Your Plate Quotes

“We are not encouraged, on a daily basis, to pay careful attention to the animals we eat. On the contrary, the meat, dairy, and egg industries all actively encourage us to give thought to our own immediate interest (taste, for example, or cheap food) but not to the real suffering involved. They do so by deliberately withholding information and by cynically presenting us with idealized images of happy animals in beautiful landscapes, scenes of bucolic happiness that do not correspond to anything in the real world. The animals involved suffer agony because of our ignorance. The least we owe them is to lessen that ignorance.”
― Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, The Face on Your Plate: The Truth About Food

“What struck me whenever I visited a farm was how much more sophisticated was the life the animals were capable of living than was assumed by those exploiting them. The more we are willing to see about their lives, the more we will see. Humans seem to take perverse pleasure in attributing stupidity to animals when it is almost always entirely a question of human ignorance.”
― Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, The Face on Your Plate: The Truth About Food

“Strange as it seems, we appear to be the only species who do not have an instinctive ability to know what food we should eat to stay healthy. All other animals do. We consider ourselves a superior species, yet we are destroying the only planet we have, endangering our very existence.”
― Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, The Face on Your Plate

“Isn’t man an amazing animal? He kills wildlife—birds, kangaroos, deer, and all kinds of cats, coyotes, beavers, groundhogs, mice, foxes and dingoes—by the million in order to protect his domestic animals and their feed. Then he kills domestic animals by the billion and eats them. This in turn kills man by the million, because eating all those animals leads to degenerative—and fatal—health conditions like heart disease, kidney disease, and cancer. So then man tortures and kills millions more animals to look for cures for these diseases. Elsewhere, millions of other human beings are being killed by hunger and malnutrition because food they could eat is being used to fatten domestic animals.20”
― Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, The Face on Your Plate