“Why would a farmer lock the doors of his turkey farm?”

Jonathan Safran Foer

Explore This Quote Further

Quote by Jonathan Safran Foer: “Why would a farmer lock the doors of his turkey … - Image 1

Similar quotes

“The factory farm has succeeded by divorcing people from their food, eliminating farmers, and ruling agriculture by corporate fiat.”


“You can call your turkey organic and torture it daily. ”


“Why is taste, the crudest of our senses, exempted from the ethical rules that govern our other senses? If you stop and think about it, it’s crazy. Why doesn’t a horny person have as strong a claim to raping an animal as a hungry one does to killing and eating it? It’s easy to dismiss that question but hard to respond to it. And how would you judge an artist who mutilated animals in a gallery because it was visually arresting? How riveting would the sound of a tortured animal need to be to make you want to hear it that badly? Try to imagine any end other than taste for which it would be justifiable to do what we do to farmed animals.”


“Choosing leaf or flesh, factory farm or family farm, does not in itself change the world, but teaching ourselves, our children, our local communities, and our nation to choose conscience over ease can.”


“The factory farm industry (in alliance with the pharmaceutical industry) currently has more power than public-health professionals... We give it to them. We have chosen, unwittingly, to fund this industry on a massive scale by eating factory-farmed animal products (and water sold as animal products) - and we do so daily.”


“However much we obfuscate or ignore it, we know that the factory farm is inhumane in the deepest sense of the word. And we know that there is something that matters in a deep way about the lives we create for the living beings most within our power. Our response to the factory farm is ultimately a test of how we respond to the powerless, to the most distant, to the voiceless--it is a test of how we act when no one is forcing us to act one way or another.”