2 Book Reports from Penn's private blog

Hunger by Knut Hamsun, Sverre Lyngstad – 210215 – I read this book because Elliot suggested it. I know it’s a classic and wanted to hit it. Just to make the timing right, I started reading it and ended reading it during a fast and then I fell down twice while reading it. So, I was living it. When I know a book is really heavy and smart and respected, I have trouble loosening up and laughing and that hurt my enjoyment. By the end I’d gotten the groove, but it took a while and it’s a short book. It’s clearly the granddaddy of “The Mezzanine” and I should have had that groove, but I couldn’t quite get it. I enjoyed it, but it’s a lot better than the amount I enjoyed it. That’s what I think. But fasting and reading it is funny.  Kind of performance art.

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Autumn had arrived, that lovely, cool time of year when everything turns color and dies.

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it had been a long time since I’d had such an ample meal, and I gradually felt that same sense of satiated repose you experience after a good cry.

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Had he heard about the electric hymn book that Happolati had invented? “What, an elec—?” With electric letters that shone in the dark?

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The consciousness of being honest went to my head, filling me with the glorious sensation that I was a man of character, a white beacon in the midst of a turbid human sea with floating wreckage everywhere.Why Vegan?: Eating Ethically by Peter Singer – 210215 – I read these books and that about what argument could have made a dent in me before I changed my diet for health reasons. It’s so clear now.  But when I was eating animals, I knew it was wrong, but I had built up so many defenses, I read this stuff now and it’s all stuff I knew, I just couldn’t act on it with all that advertising and shit in my system. So weird to try to talk back through time. How could I know that suffering and want eggs and cheese. It’s sickening to me now.  And environmentally . . . jesus, lay off the cars and get to the real issue.

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I am not, strictly speaking, an animal rights advocate, because my views are not based on attributing rights to animals. Instead, I argue that we should not support practices that cause avoidable suffering, as eating animals does.

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If we have learned anything from the liberation movements we should have learned how difficult it is to be aware of latent prejudices in our attitudes to particular groups until these prejudices are forcefully pointed out to us.

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The question is not, Can they reason? nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer

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People who eat pieces of slaughtered nonhumans every day find it hard to believe that they are doing wrong; and they also find it hard to imagine what else they could eat.

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Among the proposals, which the government refused to implement on the grounds that they were too idealistic, were: ‘Any animal should at least have room to turn around freely.’

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A RECIPE This recipe is vegan, very simple, nutritious, and tasty. It’s also eaten by hundreds of millions of people every day. DAL •2 tablespoons oil •1 onion, chopped •2 cloves garlic, crushed •1 cup dry red lentils •3 cups water •bay leaf •1 cinnamon stick •1 teaspoon medium curry powder or to taste •1 14-ounce can of chopped tomatoes or equivalent chopped fresh tomatoes •2 ounces creamed coconut or half cup coconut milk (optional) •Juice of lemon (optional) •Salt to taste In a deep frying pan, heat the oil and fry the onion and garlic translucent. Add the lentils and fry them for a minute or two, then add the water, bay leaf, cinnamon stick, and curry powder. Stir, bring to a boil, then let simmer for twenty minutes, adding a little more water from time to time if it gets dry. Add the tomatoes and simmer another ten minutes. By now the lentils should be very soft. Add the creamed coconut or coconut milk and lemon juice, if using, and salt to taste. Remove cinnamon stick and bay leaf before serving. The final product should flow freely – add more water if it is too thick. It is usually served over rice, with some lime pickle and mango chutney. Sliced banana is another good accompaniment, and so too are pappadams.

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Not for fish. There is no humane slaughter requirement for wild fish caught and killed at sea, nor, in most places, for farmed fish.

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To put this in perspective, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that 60 billion animals are killed each year for human consumption – the equivalent of about nine animals for each human being on the planet. If we take Mood’s lower estimate of one trillion, the comparable figure for fish is 150. This does not include billions of fish caught illegally nor unwanted fish accidentally caught and discarded, nor does it count fish impaled on hooks as bait.

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In the United States alone, the number of animals raised and killed for food every year is now nearly ten billion.

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Laying hens are crammed into wire cages so small that even if there were just one per cage, she would be unable to stretch her wings. But there are usually at least four hens per cage, and often more.

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The livestock industry now accounts for about 15% of global greenhouse gas emissions, roughly the same as the emissions from the tailpipes of all the world’s vehicles.