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tv   Book TV  CSPAN  January 9, 2010 12:00pm-1:15pm EST

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>> thank you all for coming. it's nice to see a packed house but i had to turn family away. i want to start thanking my guess, who don't need more
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press, but came to do this and i'm excited about it that i do want to start with a clarification, because there's been a little bit of media hype about the jonathan foer versus frank bruni face off on me. i hope they disagree on some things here but i really invited him here for hopefully a more wide range talk on food and its primacy. and i think all of our lives. so we will touch on food as we read through the books and our lives and the world right now. and again, because i'm jewish i don't want anyone to support a. so until you right now there might not be blood on the floor. let's start with the fact that i'm going to make a broad generalization, frank, your book may be what you eat, and jonathan, your book maybe want to start. and that's an over civilization. frank, you have done some battles with food.
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if someone's going to say to you, where do you think someone is left in terms of the take away on food and life, i know it's a big question, but what do you think the take away is for each of you? frank, why don't you start? >> i was hoping you'd ask him. >> jonathan, why did you start? food, if you walk away from your book, what do you think someone ends up feeling about food, or wrestling with in terms of food? >> i imagine most people will in the book, i hope saying i didn't know that. and i wish i had known that sooner. i don't expect that people will reach the same conclusions. i certainly don't expect that most people would close my book and stopped eating meat. i hope that a lot of people will close my book and stop eating factory farmed meat. but maybe the realistic hope is that people would just pause.
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that's what everybody wants a book to do, every writer of every kind of book ever written once the reader to pause after having read it and, you know, think about the next moment a little bit differently. so in the case of this book, the next vote takes place in a supermarket, a restaurant, or in front of your own refrigerator. and just maybe it takes a second longer before you reach for the thing and say, hey, you know, i've read that book and it gave me reason to think. >> and for those of you who haven't read yet, i hope all you do read both of these books, because you will be sad when they're over, how would you kind of layout just in a few sentences what they are discovering in "eating animals"? >> i should say i wrote the book when my wife, are i conceived of the book when my wife became pregnant with her first child and i faced the prospect of having to beat somebody else. i have given a lot of thought about me throughout my life that
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i became a vegetarian when i was nine, only for a couple weeks and then i started eating meat again. just a swinging pendulum through all of my life. until quite recently. when my wife became pregnant, and i thought i'm going to have to -- this is my kid going to enter a swinging pendulum or can my soapbox and figure out what it is i believe, which would require going out in a world and seeing where meat comes from, and also investigate my own instincts. and i made a choice. the thrust of the book is not -- it doesn't deal with the question, is meat right or wrong? it's not something i get into. i don't think it's a very important question. it does aim at the question is the way we eat meat right or wrong? and i'm not appealing to french values. i'm a very conservative american values. 96 percent of americans think that animals deserve legal protection.
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everyone at this point, certainly everyone in this room thinks that the quality of the air we breathe matters, the health of the oceans about her. the water we drink matters. our continued reliance on antibiotics matters. and lo and behold there's an industry which is responsible for about 99 percent of the meat that's produced in this country that is demonstrably bad in the ways that i just described. appealing to the values that we really all share. there's a very broad consensus in this country that is wrong to make animals suffer. it is wrong to callously destroy the environment, when there are alternatives. this is the single worst thing we can do to animals or the single worst thing we can do to the environment. so what i wanted in my book was to find a way, unfortunately, when we put these universal concerns in a package of the people get very uncomfortable and testy, and a few accused and offensive, and sometimes
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aggressive. i think it's a necessary. i think it's just been framed in the wrong way. it's been framed as kind of a wagging finger on it as an absolutist position. you're a vegetarian or not. that's not the choice. the choices to be someone who cares about the things i describe are not. if you care, there's a whole spectrum of ways to care. so i wanted to present readers with the spectrum and to say, you know, of course is acceptable to make different choices, but it's not acceptable to willfully ignore these problems, not any longer. >> frank? >> it actually didn't occur to me until i was listening to jonathan talk him although i read most of the book, and it's a great book. were both running in some ways about the same thing. were writing about eating in an affluent country in a land of plenty. he's writing about the ethical choices that many people but i think it's important is the most people, not most people, can make an affluent country when it
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makes to the sourcing of their meat when it comes to everything about where their food is coming from and how the choices they make about that, they can support certain things and turned back on on other things. i'm riding -- i wrote about a different kind of dilemma one faces in a land of plenty. and a culture confluence which is how i was raised. which is when you have solved the problem as many people in our country and you are faced with a multitude of options, how if you have a certain kind of relationship with food, if you have a certain neurochemistry, how do you cast food in the right kind of role in your life and put it in the right place, and not let it get the better of you. in my case that was not letting it get the better of me, was about a century overcoming what would be called eating disorders over the course of my life. getting back to jonathan. were both talking about problems that are unique to culture, to a
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culture of plenty and a land of affluent. >> i think what you both have in common, which kind of goes to the and goes to the resistance you're describing is that people are very invested in their connections to food. you both write about food as memory. it's really powerful in both your books. you talk about passover, thanksgiving, yours is just down, there's too many examples of your mom, your grandma, those incredible excursions to remington's? >> ramekins, a restaurant. >> and the thanksgiving, which were kind of bottomless. it's hard for people to let go over the things that are very powerful in their lives, that are connected to food. please start with that, frank. >> i think there's a long-standing phrase we hear a million times in a life which is you are what you eat. and the phrases typically been
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made to me like what you ingest more will reflect your state of health, will reflect a lot of that. i think we've evolved to a point where you are what you eat. it's almost like what we eat is what we program our dvi to record. we express, and jonathan is all about this. we express our identities in large measure based on what we eat. in some circles it's about what is this about your discernment, in other circles it's about what it says about your values. but we've become an increasingly food fixated as society. i think it's about the stage of wealth were in because we are europe a little later on. and i think people now see every dean decision they make as a very profound matter of identi identity. >> for yourself tuesday pursley for a minute, because so much of the book is personal, in what way is your childhood and her growing up, struggles you had with food also related to the bounty of it, the warmth of it,
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the love of it? >> in my case it relates to my fathers parents who were really sort of the great influence, culturally in my life because my mother, she was more of a wasp but she was absorbed into the sprawling boisterous anti-american family. and my fathers parents were poor immigrants from italy, and to them food, having enough of it, having more than enough of it, putting out more than anyone could be, that was so connected to feeling like they had made in this country. it was the primary currency with which they showed, not only their own kind of stand, their own relative wealth compared to what they had come from, but it was the demonstration of generosity. you know, my grandmother used to always tell us when you went -- for her, trying to get people, feeding people, giving them food was all about kind of issue of progress in the new world and all that. so she would offer that even if
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she didn't have enough to give. were always crazy to go to someone's house, and they say would you like a dish of lasagna? you say no. then if they say, really, would you like a dish of lasagna? you say no again. and you wait for a third of fourth time, because that's the only sure sign they have it again. [laughter] >> she thought this was such a universal thing that i often grew up coming home hungry from friends houses that i had gone to for the express purpose of dinner because the third offer had never come. [laughter] >> but in terms of what i read about in my book, that for me was sort of a perfect storm circumstance, because i grew up with a ravenous appetite from the time i was in a hatchet that it is clearly hired wired into me. i had way, way too much to wonder what the appetite across the gas to escape with his italian-american family. >> you know, food as with frank,
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growing up it was not about getting full, although that was often a pleasant or unpleasant side effect. but about a conveyance of love and a conveyance of values. and he conveyed of story. particularly in my relationship with my grandmother, food was what she did. we would go there to eat. that's what it was. we didn't read books with her. we didn't watch movies with her. we didn't play chess with her. we ate. that's what we did. we rarely saw her when we went there because she was always in the kitchen and were always at the table. [laughter] >> so when i faced this question when i was writing the book, of will i continue to eat her signature dishes, and will i effectively allow my son too, there's a lot of heft and those questions. it's not as simple as having a stance towards the environment, or toward animal welfare or
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these various other things that we could talk about. it's also what is my relationship going to be with this person, and if food is for primary stratcom is there a way to change the story or do we tell it. the wonderful thing that i have found is that since making this shift, since in fact saying no, or even more strong as a rejecting, her signature dishes of which there are not that many, food has become a much more powerful vehicle. and many, many more values are transmitted and the source are much richer. because there is no effort involved whereas before there was something she would make and we would go and eat it and that was the shtick every civil time. and now, she is the grandmother figure out a way to make vegetarian matzo balsam. that's great because we wanted. she wants to make what we want to eat. she found a way to make it that's every bit as delicious.
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my children eat it and love it and know her as the woman to make this matzoh ball soup. it's fantastic. i think there's an anxiety about removing certain symbols from our diets, like the thanksgiving turkey. good thanksgiving possibly be thanksgiving if we remove the turkey? and yet, what does the turkey actually do? it's not something we talk about that it transmits zero values. nobody knows its connection anymore. in fact, there is no connection in american history. it's entirely unlikely that the pilgrims ever ate turkey. who cared if they did anyway. i have found that removing the symbol involves a conversation, whereas the presence of the symbol never involve the conversation. the conversation is rich and provide more than this particular food ever did, regardless of how delicious it might be. >> frank, you didn't have just one turkey.
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>> i was laughing. jonathan is younger that i, so my grandmother is long gone to producing removing something involves a conversation that if i told my grandmother i wanted her to make me a vegetarian meal, the conversation would have been what's the matter for you? and would have really had a bocce ball thrown at my head. because the one time she did speak to me for days if i told her i was on a no carbohydrate diet and couldn't eat or pasta. >> you know, it's funny. i went to my grandmother's house shortly after the book came out. and had our first real conversation about this issue. and i said what i thought was such -- it was a very difficult question to ask for some reason. i said do you think animals suffer? it's horrible asking someone who has suffered on the scale that she has come if animal suffered. just a trivial in the wake. >> can use when has she? >> she's a survivor and she lost every single member of her family, and woodward that we can possibly imagine.
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but i did after this question. she asked me if i were some kind of an idiot. and she sent of course. does anybody think they don't? and truly, does anybody think they don't? and i said, you know, does that mean anything? should it have any influence on how each? she said it's wrong what we do to them. this is my grandmother. this is not somebody who has toured factory farms around the country. this is someone who holds a very tradition image of farming. infinitely better than what we are doing now. she's not going to change. i'm never asked anybody in my family to change that i'm the only person among my brothers, parents and grandparents who is a vegetarian. i'm not actually interested in trying to persuade them to change, but the conversation itself was so valuable that i had with her, and he confirmed to me again that we have different abilities and different desires to change our diets, but making our conversation reflective of our
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shared values is so important. not allowing others to tell the stories to us. not allowing concern for animals or concern for the environment to be divisive. it's not democrat or republican, or early our world, or east coast or middle america. this is something that everyone believes in and we have to make a descent of our conversations in the same way that meet has often been at the center of our plates. >> i think part of the resistance is a tradition and family is very powerful there. frank, you wrote not lurching for and mooning over whatever fried, baked, boiled or brome offering grandma put before he was a violation of the unspoken covenant between her and anybody she cared about. that's not an easy thing to let go of and suddenly make the matzoh ball soup with that chicken. >> no, i think you're right and i think it's a boardroom members that being isn't just a matter of politics. and a sense of whether it is factory farming or whatever.
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eating is an expression of culture. is sometimes a culture doesn't cut a certain way. it's a tradition. i think that i talked about affluence before, and i think it's really important when we have a debate about how we should eat and where are animal should come from and how we should treat those animals. that we recognize that some of us have the control over our lives and circumstances and economic muscle. to make a certain set of ethical decisions, which would be great if we made. and that other people don't. i think about if someone had asked my grandmother, came here with nothing, and with struggling hard and had a gazillion things to worry about beyond what the life of the cow that brought her her milk or, you know, where her became from. i don't know that it would have been right in the scheme of things to ask someone in that circumstance. and i think it's important we keep it all in perspective.
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those of us who had the ability to make certain choices i think it is incumbent upon us to consider the choices we're making and maybe make one kind of better set of them. but i don't think we should be so absolute about it that we ignore the fact that it's a privilege to be able to even have that concern. >> can you address that because i think that's a lot of people's reaction to this is is an expensive lifestyle. and the sense you are proposing are these which were sort of left with at the end of your book. how to do this? how do you buy me that hasn't suffered? how do you just come if you want to be a vegetarian, vegetables are more expensive than fast food, then many things. was having to survive on fast food burgers and they just can't afford a cucumber. >> is a lot of conversations going on at once and it's a temptation to cross them. its dangers of the restaurants he reviewed and the people who read your reviews, these are people who are able to make better choices. so as one in this room is able
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to make better choices. it may very well be true and in fact it is true that there are people that can't, but it doesn't excuse us from making better choices. we cannot dispose of her consciousness onto their inability. the other thing that i would say is, don't eat meat. i mean, it is true that more humanely raised meat costs more. of course it costs more than the 49-cent burger. all the costs are externalized. it's the number one cause of global warming. is responsible for 51 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions, more than everything else put together. this is animal at a culture. the un says it's one of the top two or three causes of every single significant environmental problem in the world, locally and globally. air pollution, water pollution, deforestation, these are big, big things. one could need as a vegetarian on a budget. of the problem is not the cost of eating at the vegetarian.
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for most people, again, there are people for whom this isn't true but those are the exception. those are not the rules. the problem is we have n it mad, there was more wisdom in raising that kind of animals that nature produces piggyback on it makes more sense to create animals that literally cannot live out of their adolescence, 38 days, 41 days, that's about how long chickens live long. it's an animal that lives 10 years in nature that they don't kill them at 38 days because
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their bones start to break, the attendants start to slip. the turkeys we need on thanksgiving are incapable of reproducing sexually. this is crazy stuff that "the new york times" editorialized two weeks ago that tunas to be reclassified as an inpatient species. i think we're past the point of saying isn't more especially as it less expensive. and where to the point of saying this is lunacy. if i can't afford the more expensive alternative that i'm just going to withdraw completely. i'm just not going to eat the meat that's provided in supermarkets. i know that there are a lot of people who can't find a way to that conclusion. but i don't believe they can't find their way to that conclusion once a week or twice a week. if americans remove one serving of meat a week, it would be the equivalent of taking 5 million cars off the road. its profound. the resonances are huge and they are spawned by individual choices. and we cannot, again, we cannot, you know, make poor people or
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the third world depository of our conscious. we have to say this is me. i'm at the supermarket. i am at the restaurant. i have choices. maybe it's awkward. but we know. is hitting us over the head. the u.k. climate chiefs said in an interview to his ago, this is not a peace activist, said the only way to save the planet is a global movement towards vegetarianism. al gore now talks about it openly. it's always been the elephant in the room. >> for it, do you want response to? i don't think we're making the poor people of the world depository or whatever of our consciousness. i'm not saying that you should not care at all. because poor people need cheaper. i'm saying that when we had this conversation, when we say factory farming is flatly evil, i do know if this is what jonathan is saying, and should be abolished in all shapes and forms. i'm just asking that we ponds
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and think about what we are saying it who's affected by because the affected is beyond us. it may not absolved you or me or you, from being encouraged to and trying to make a better and more ethical choice about our own dinner there but when we are setting public policy and calling for things to change in a very fundamental way across a broad swath, i think we have to pause first and ask about those affected by that be on animals. this is a conversation about animals that it's a conversation about humans also. >> when you hear the question he asked his grandma, do animals suffer, or the id he talks out in his book about thinking about that, really thinking about that, there are people in my life who would say a lot of people suffer, and i'm weighing all those -- >> of course animals suffer, and animal suffered when we look at the around the word natural. or they suffer when there are
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still native people in alaska who are allowed by law to hunt in danger species because it's a long part of their culture and tradition. those animals are dwindling that those animals suffer. of course that's the case. and we now have progressed to a point in terms of our civilization, technology, where we can take steps or have a conversation about how to minimize that suffering. but if the type of animal suffering compels vegetarianism, then we are kind of reacting in a very unnatural way against centuries and centuries of the way, of humanity and tradition. >> i guess i'm asking you personally, since we all have trusted your taste for a while. how do you wrestle with it when you go to the supermarket, or order something in a restaurant? >> i've only recently begun going to the supermarket. [laughter] >> and when i order in a
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restaurant, honestly and this is not meant as a copout. you ask a great question about what my life will be like going forward and it's a question i actually have been asking myself. and asked myself a little bit more having read jonathan's book over recent days. but my job and going into those restaurants, i was evaluating a pleasure delivery system. and i would occasionally get e-mails from readers saying he wrote about the seafood restaurant. utility which are thought of their fish. you didn't tell me which of it was sustainably, sustainable and which was a. i did not purpose because we don't read movie reviews that tell us whether the action is used in tanzania, you know, had a crappy service card. that may be a really great issue for someone to write about and i would like them to. i think it's great when the dining section rights was about all these issues. but the job i was asked to do within those 950 words, was talk about how much pleasure a restaurant delivered. if i hit pause menu item by menu
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item to it i would with the ethics of it i wouldn't have been doing the job i was supposed to do. >> would someone who was a vegetarian or a deacon be able to do that job? >> i don't think so because sadly i'm a big advocate for ever i. there aren't enough -- there aren't enough of those restaurant in the city and i don't think the majority of people in the city are vegetarian pics i don't think you have a restaurant critic who was immediately kind of deleting records of the restaurants are not intense of the restauranrestaurant and recorders of every menu. i think that's what i think i occasionally mention this not mr. nx explicit way but in an implicit way. i do think it is a good idea that had menus of a certain length to try to accommodate a spectrum of eating styles. but that's good business as well spector you want to respond to that because i'm asking a question that seems obvious that you can be the restaurant critic for "the new york times" and not
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eat meat, but it is conferring a certain legitimacy to eating meat without knowing necessary if it's made safely comic manely on a family farm or from the factory. you can't really do that job and separate that out. in a way, it is sort of one of the top positions that we all look to to tell us how to eat in the city. >> i don't disagree with what he said that he has a certain function in the culture. people look to him for certain kind of advise and a look to maybe the science section for a different kind of advise. and often the science section is the forefront in talking about these kinds of issues that we're not talking about. i certainly wouldn't expect him -- i think he does a nice job and often bringing some of these issues to the floor when he didn't have to. i would take your things in response. to point you may. of course animals suffer in nature. but we are putting the full force of human knowledge, really, to making them suffer
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more. we now factory farm 50 billion animals a year. we are raising them in cages that are stacked sometimes 18 tears i. these are animals that we have designed so that they can't let out of their adolescence. design so they can't reproduce naturally. design so they have to be fed a steady diet of animatics their entire lives. so i agree, life and nature isn't pretty but we don't replicate the violence. we don't spend our money trying to make more and more of it, pushing it across the world or the other thing i would say it is true that humans have done this almost always, almost everywhere. i don't find that very persuasive as a guide for what i should do tell. humans have kept other humans as slaves, almost all the time, almost everywhere. human have treated women as second class citizens almost everywhere almost all the time. animals are not humans. animals are not -- women, i don't mean to make and a
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knowledge in that sense. when we look assistance we don't have to look at what came before us for our league. so much of what we're most proud of is how we have transcended our history. do i think that people are going to stop eating meat one day? i think it's possible. i think much more likely is we will take a really close look at the system has only been around for 50 years. this is really radically new and radically different than what came before it, and say this just isn't what we want. we had a factory farm set up on the stage right now, there's nobody, i don't think there's anybody come in this audience who would be indifferent to it. i don't think there's anybody who said i would like to pay money to have that once you kill that, and serve it up. i think more likely people would call 311 or 911. i think of a lot of people walking out, some people crying. the problem is a clear line of sight. that's the problem.
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much more than our culture or history. if your grandmother, i imagine without ever having met her on the seat state seat, went to a factory farm, i'd have to imagine she would say this is not right that these are like fundamental -- >> she was ruthless. she would've been fine fine with it. [laughter] >> most people, anyway. this was a woman who we used to go with the dragnet and she would take the fish from an bite the heads off and idem. [laughter] >> she was hard core. >> she would have club a baby seal, my grandma. spent what i felt reading your book and even here now is how can you see all this, feel the way you do, and not become a proselytizer in some way? how can you sit back and say i'm not trying to change anybody in my fama, the restaurant critic can do what they want. you know, it's like watching something in standing by and letting people suffer. doesn't suddenly make it in comment upon you to do more than
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your own choices, but to affect other people's? >> i am sitting on a stage, right, talking to an audience. i spent three years writing a book when i much would have preferred writing a novel. is ineffective at it just doesn't work. people have been trying for a long time. it just doesn't work to get in someone's face and say you have to change. the people who change me the most are the people have done just by their example. by sharing the reasoning when i asked them, but i don't know that anyone has actually presented me with an argument that has -- i've been persuaded by many, many arguments in my life, but persuaded to stay change, i'm not so sure. the other thing i would say is, i went to some very good farmers while i was writing this book. that surprise me. the goodness of those farms and surprise me as much as the badness of the background that i want to. i went too far for animals are treated without exaggeration,
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better than a dream i dogeared they are given all the space they could possibly want. they are allowed to engage in all the species specific instincts that they would want. they do not anticipate their slaughter and they do not experience their slaughter. most of the time. this is like dan, we're talking about him backstage. really conscientious farmers and conscientious chess. i would not eat what they produce. i think it's a bad system to endorse, meet. anytime you have a system where there is such a differential with those with power and those at the mercy of those in power. and unnecessary system by the way. and when there are such strong incentives to abuse, the power, it doesn't work. there situations in which we can imagine getting a five year old a job and that would be good for the five year. that doesn't mean we would engage in child labor. we don't run around looking for the exceptions. there are good farms and are there a lot of good farms?
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no. almost 2 feet staten island. at the rate we check in. could ever be enough of the songs to be the world? no, there could. there is not enough earth, on earth. so i don't get that excited about it, but neither do i feel like arguing with someone who feels like arguing about a. i'm not confident -- i guess i was it appeals to something very deep in me and i don't want -- i don't want to argue with something that is something very deep and some elton. >> frank, you wrote a review about candle 79. it's a vegan restaurant. and you said i'm convinced that many vegan are antsy about what they're missing. and that you pointed out there are almost always some dishes defined in terms of meet. can an experienced this meet as really be this famous? >> i was having fun. that was more of a kind of
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literary think that i was having fun with the fact that one of the things that struck me when i'm eating at candle 79, which i went to because i wanted -- it's not easy in the city to find vegan restaurant that someone who doesn't eat that way normally can enjoy as much as another restaurant. and i wanted absolutely to spotlight at which i had good music i was just kind of noting more any fun of literary fame and is really ironic way, given that people who don't eat meat are i think justifiably proud of it. it's a fine choice. i don't be right at all. i thought it was funny they often characterize those dishes in terms of meet as it reassures. don't worry, you're not missing anything. i call them cutlets and stuff like that. i just thought and intellectual playful puzzle since that was the. i wasn't saying it shows they're missing their meet. >> it gets at something in a way which is just how central meet really is. >> i think it betrays -- i think
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it demonstrates that if you make the decision, just what you said, meet is so central that if you make the decision to not eat meat you are conscious of the. and maybe a little bit defensive isn't the right word about it, but looking to push back and say i'm not missing anything. i love to get off the subject of meat per se because i'd like to talk about food as pleasure. it's one of the things i think it's lost in his. i wanted to read these two things. and just to be provocative and just because they are sort of saucy. this is from gordon ran to. my biggest nightmare would be if the kids ever came up -- i think i missed transcribed is that this is one of his kids. my biggest nightmare would be if the kids ever came up to me and said dad, i'm a vegetarian. then i would set them on the fence and electrocute them. [laughter] >> this is by the way footnote in my book. i didn't get to the book because i liked it so much i didn't want to skim so i was going -- tony
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boarding. vegetarians and their hezbollah like splinter faction, the vegan, whether one is offended or not it's verbally deft. are persistent irritant in a chef for the damper to me, life without veal stock, sausage, organ meat, demi-glace or even stinky cheese is not a life worth living. vegetarians are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit. and an affront to all i stand for, that pure enjoyment of the. i think those are both extreme and when i was reading i was asking, why go to that extreme? i think it's because one thing we haven't talked much about tonight, it is absolutely okay as human beings to talk about is the value of pleasure and the pleasure of eating certain kinds of foods. it doesn't silence of -- it does absolutely kind of bovine the importance of talking about more responsible farming, more humane
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slaughter. of the fact that the very broadness of food is a source of pleasure and pleasure is not such a horrible thing. >> i think there is an analogous conversation we could have that would eliminate this one. about the pleasure of sex. there is a character in my book, a woman,. >> you are against factory sex? >> i'm married. [laughter] >> who says why doesn't a morning person have as good a claim to raping a confined animal as a hungry person does the slaughtering and eating it? she says, this might sound like a totally preposterous question. but why is it at all preposterous. why his case become exempt from all of the ethical rules we apply to all of our other senses, it would not be right to slaughter an animal because you like the way it looked. it wouldn't be right to confine
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and slaughter an animal because you liked the way it sounded. and of course, we would think someone who had sex with animals, and i was a sex is a much more profound crating and essentially craving for food. >> you didn't grow up in my family. [laughter] >> why, what was the sex like in your family? [laughter] >> sex is a very strong crating, right? it certainly enriches life and yet we seem all to be perfectly satisfied to demand independence on certain rules. it is just wrong. it is not correct to have sex with whoever you want to have sex with whatever you want to. it is not correct to have sex with animals. not only because it is taboo, but because it is wrong. >> someone is going to kind of balk at that compares in. >> go ahead. >> i don't have one problem with the comparison but it's a big one. you know, i find, and mind you again, i want to reiterate. i think it would be value if it would read your book, that i
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think they are just countless great questions asked and sees plan for things we all need to think about. but when we had discussions about eating meat, all too often the line between human and animal gets blurred. jonathan has used the word rape in relation to what happens to a. and he has used both metaphors to this discussion. that personal line between -- i don't buy that we owe him is the exact level of respect that we are humans. >> rape is not exact level of respect. i don't think that i don't love animals but some people find that odd when i say the. i don't love animals but i have no desire to go pet animals. i don't want to do with -- i don't want to make it that i don't want to actively taken. of course humans deserve things that animals don't deserve. of course there's a hierarchy of our concern. humans are up here and perhaps animals are down here. that doesn't mean we can do
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whatever we won't. >> of course it doesn't but i think it's dangerous to use analogies and metaphors like rape and slavery because were talking about human victims in this case that and i don't want to be quick human victims of exploitation and bedridden. >> i thought he made it clear. i think it can be useful to equate systems. again, what i'm talking about is very baseline decency. i don't think that animals need to have duvets. you know, i don't think that they need to have hot water. just saying that we shouldn't put pregnant animals as we do as a rule in cages so small they can't turn around. that has nothing to do with an equation with humans. no one would ever consider doing such a thing to human. >> when you say we don't have to hate animals, i don't think people who allow animals to be killed the way they are necessarily hate them.
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i don't think we even have that kind of emotional guard. maybe we should. but even you're still casting an emotional terms. >> if someone said what my be an emotional relationship, how would you describe the emotional relationship that involves these things? how would you describe -- let's take upward emotional. we can try to remove liquid altogether and just put someone as i said, the best way to have this conversation is not with words or taking someone to a farm. unfortunately it's totally impossible. i mean, you are the most important food critic in the country, and you would never have been able to get into the kind of form that produced the meat that you ate in restaurants, etc. places like blue hill. they just wouldn't let. they wouldn't want to there. >> is because a clear line of sight makes language irrelevant. it makes argument irrelevant. it makes philosophy, science irrelevant because we had the
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instinct and we shouldn't that it's not right that it's just not right. >> i just want to get at because of the quote you brought, if you're going to be honest about it there is an emmy esther tacticals with a vegetarian or a vegan, or at least i see it myself. >> are you a vegetarian? >> i am not. that they are humorless, that they are holier than thou, they're kind of a downer. >> looking in a mirror. why don't we just give them birkenstocks. >> but i want you both to address them because i don't think there are stereotypes for no reason. there's a little bit, you talk about a fire to a dinner party -- >> do you think other saint ives ostracized for no reasons because i think the stereotypes have a colonel of truth in them, i do. >> about ethnic minority or about a colonel of truth in them? >> you know, i heard a rabbi say that if you made a joke about
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jews never wanting an education from it wouldn't be funny. right? things are funny about jews if they are a jewish joke because we know there's some truth in a. there are certain things that don't work into it because it's not recognizable. so what i'm saying is i think we all know what the clichés are. and i want you to address them, both of you, because i think what those get out, i would admit to in my own home, since reading a book i become a little bit of a pill. i'm saying to my husband i'm not sure we should get that, where did you buy that? maybe we should -- suddenly, what have you done to our home? i've sort of a pain. and i'm thinking what if i get invited somewhere, am i really going to say i would rather it not be factory farming, can you assure me of that if you're going to serve the state? is not without awkwardness, as you said. if you could just address the humorlessness that i think we all recognize.
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>> traditionally i think vegetarians have made a big mistake in the way that they institutionally presented vegetarianism as a dichotomy, as an absolute position. unfortunately, it often has been presented as -- serta come off as a holier than thou position. and that's a shame. because it is not -- there's not a speck amid which meat eaters and vegetarians are at an opposite in. i know many meat eaters who care. there are different ways of carrying. some of them by the more expensive kinds of meat in supermarkets. some of them won't eat meat andn restaurants unless they really know the source in. >> you are saying someone who buys a tyson chicken doesn't care? >> i think someone who buys a chicken from tyson access if he or she doesn't care. a lot of people don't know so how could you say they don't care? and they don't know for good
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reasons. it's been concealed from them. theirs is the veil of secrecy. there is an animal terrorist act passed after september 11 that makes trespassing on a farm act of terrorism. unlike other kinds of trespass. so what's the most generous interpretation of that law is that they are afraid of i don't know, some foreign terrorists coming and poisoning our food supply, and perhaps wreaking havoc in our environment. so 76 million americans get food poisoning every year. which you are what you eat and are concerned that humans. i think one could not finish it about animals and care about diet. 76 million americans who poisoning every year and a center for disease control said the prime culprit is animal agriculture to the world health organization has been pleading for animal agriculture to stop using nontherapeutic and a bionics. we get eight times to healthy
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animals as reducing sick humans. and we know that it's making art and a bionics less useful. there's a very direct and lucidly. women who drink milk and discussion are three times as likely to have twins as women who don't. that corresponds almost directly to the incidence of twins among cows who are fed growth hormones than those who are not. women in england have twins about half as often as american women to. we made signs expense out of ourselves. swine flu which is now all over the country, originate on a fat farm in north carolina. it takes between six and 26-calorie of food to make 1 calorie of me to. anyone who's serious about world hunger has to recognize when we eat meat without effectively throwing away between six and 26 meals. >> i guess -- i'm hearing you and i don't want to minimize any other. it is the more important information. there is reality as to how we all move and talk and look at each other, and you've got to at least deal i think because it is
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a barrier, this idea of what it means to be a vegetarian. it's like what it means to do yoga. >> i would just move away from the word vegetarian. i don't think the word vegetarian is the goal. the goal is to reduce the consumption of factory farming and hopefully dismantle the system, if farming were as it were 80 years ago. i wouldn't have written my book. just wouldn't have compelled me. >> frank, do you want to respond? >> to what? >> first of all, what i'm talking about of the sort of personality that people associate. >> no, i don't want to because i don't really like stereotypes of any kind. if someone tells me they are vegetarian i don't immediately assume -- >> ten things about him. >> no. but i do think some vegetarians have made the mistake of saying but i think they hear jonathan saying the same thing, and a purely strategic thing is a blunder.
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i don't want anybody lecturing to me in a condescending or self-righteous way about any aspect of my life, including whether i'm being a steak or not. i'm more than open to someone to clean my brain with a whole bunch of why i'm reading jonathan's book word for word that i am happy to consider all that stuff and it is not a preachy book. i wouldn't stereotype they detained that i would say some of them had made the mistake of being very holier than thou. >> would you say that reading his book has gotten away a pleasure. you talked about the way of pleasure, in the wake of pleasure when it comes to me or that it might? >> i don't know. these are issues i'm thinking a lot about. i think a lot of us are thinking about these issues producers a. not for the first time but in the way we have as much before. we can afford to. we have more choices. we happen to live in a city with a kind of culinary and an
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incredible range of merchants and all that so we can make some very -- we can make some very particular and one might say at the goal decisions or its white at the beginning i pointed out there are people for whom that would be asking a whole lot more in terms of inconvenience, in terms of expenditure. that's why i think it's one thing to exhort people who have a lot of discretion to behave a certain way. it's quite another thing to say there should never be any of this kind of agriculture or whatever because we have to look at how it's affecting people who don't have our level of kind of discretion enjoyed. >> i would love to open it up for questions. and all that i ask is that because we are -- were on camera here, we're trying to get the microphone to you. so give some time for the microphone to get to you, and hopefully it will get you quickly. and the other thing i ask is that they really be questions, because i do in these smart new york audience is everybody here
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has an opinion. please make an inquiry. that is what we are asking for for either of the folks of your. >> did you say very quickly? my book is -- it really was, i was hoping this might come up naturally in conversation but it did but it was a great pleasure. i very strongly encourage everyone here to read a. it was just a wonderful book and it made me laugh and it was a moving at times also. i just really enjoy to. >> thank you. >> yes, in the back there. >> okay. i was just wondering what you think the impact, what kind of impact the food network has made on the way people eat? >> how has the food impact -- food network impacted on the way we eat? frank, do you want to start? >> i don't watch enough programs on the food network to do that i have two doubts i don't know the range of programming. i don't hear a lot of issues
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we're talking about tonight, up, but i think that the food network and a lot of other things like that, even going to stuff on bravo like top shelf, i think it has made everybody much more self-conscious in various ways. and i made -- in a sense if people are eating in a more conscious list heedless fashion it's probably going to end up or down due to the benefit of issues like less reliant on factory farming and more consumers voting with their palates, let's say, and creating a bigger market for alternatives to that. >> do you want to weigh in on that? >> i agree. it's also helping to regenerate this culture of cooking, which has been totally lost. the majority of meals are eaten in cars that. people eat with one hand. it helps to be shift our focus
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toward other ways that meals could be, namely deliberate. >> i saw on martha stewart during my research, and she was clearly so -- she was so fixated on the substance but she had to make whatever she did make in the time she had to make a. at a certain point he wasn't helping her. she was like, poor that. put that in there. [laughter] >> yes, frank that. >> i was just going to say that's a great point about cooking. the further we get away from it, we kind of confuse eating with under convenience, or at least we treat you with something which is a cop is with the grace continues. if we start looking more and we startpproaching meals as a more sacred moment, whether they include meat or not, i think will make more considered decisions about what we are putting on a plate and into our mouths. >> yes, sir. , in the back there.
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>> first of all i want to thank jonathan for helping me solve my chanukah gift list problem. i know of other people are going to be getting your book. since we're here, in the jewish committee center, i wanted to ask you what you think about the movement and what you think that it has the potential to make a observant more conscious of these kind of issues? my sense is that thus far, people who observe are those who -- they have been very defensive and try to apply that ethical issues are completely separate from the governing of a. i'm wondering if you see any potential of that have an impact on the way jews eat, observing jews? >> very quickly because it's not so hugely irrelevant to the
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conversation at large. it is early promising that it is interesting and a lot of people take pride in being kosher, and i think the origin of that pride is that it's a more humble way to eat, that it is a kind of compromise if we're going to eat animals we will do it with humility and with care and humanity. that was a long time when kosher slaughter really did provide the most humane and end-of-life. it's not true anymore. slaughter is the only thing that's improved in the last 50 years in farming that everything else has gotten worse. it really isn't the case anymore, that a knife across a knack -- it's not what you would use if you were, it's not what you would choose as yourself. as opposed to, like, things done, being made having a pneumatic steel cylinder shoved through your brain. you would actually prefer that.
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you would prefer neither. i would prefer neither. so slobber -- kosher slaughter has huge problems that it's been in the times, particular agro processes which was the biggest kosher slaughterhouse in a world that there's been numerous exposés of half slaughtered animals running around and it was ultimately shut down because of illegal immigrant issues. i pose the question in a book that i don't get into kosher slaughter but i do post the question, is a contradiction in terms in a world in which we presently live? where there are five and a half million or whatever you are, going on 9 million people, where china and india are trying to eat like us, we necessarily, if we're going to be even me, the volumes we desire it, we doesn't she have to raise an indoor and they have to be genetically modified and have to be medicated, is there anyway that
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could be kosher? and all i can say is people keep kosher for very different reasons. each person investigates his or her own reasons with some knowledge of what's actually going on in the world. >> robin, my sister. >> i just happen to be a real good fan of frank's book and it was a struggle about food and there were various chapters in your journey and being restaurant critic seemed to be a moment and having made peace with it. so now you are sort of a post-critic phase, how it's evolved from their? >> well, it's kind of too soon. it's it's funny you ask that i just got back from miami where i was doing a restaurant story. so it was once again to dinner tonight and that whole thing. i'm not really quite out of it, but i find it more -- from a kind of weight control healthy eating standpoint, not meters versus vegetarian, but just in
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terms of consumption that i found each of to be in that restaurant critic job than i do to be out of it. because that kind of true, although a broad parameters around a meal, at least it drew kind of made me was a finite universe and it wasn't -- there wasn't much improvisation and i didn't have to make as many choices on my own all day long about what i was going to be because i had a reservation at 7:30 p.m. >> and how many were you eating out a week roughly? >> like six or seven dinners and one or two lunches. >> i would imagine being compelled to eat with others had to keep you honest? >> that's sort of any woodway does connect us to tonight but it is a way to make a meal about something other than the mere consumption of food that if every meal you have is -- i can't find an adverb in the word
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i was using. if every meal is by design going to be with other people and you're going to be having conversation, you have something to think about to be diverted by something other than active shoving the food in your mouth. >> yes? >> i wonder if you can touch on some of the issues as they relate to sort of a cultural framework, not necessarily sort of a family history or tradition in this way, but more specifically travel and how to participate in other cultures in the way that they sort of treat food for culinary histories in that sense of? >> you know, when i travel i try to participate in coulters and i also resist participating in kosher when i find it uncomfortable. when
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