Jonathan Safran Foer's new book is We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast.From his Slate Q&A with Inkoo Kang:
[I]s there a way to promote greater plant-eating other than this call to abstemiousness? [Foer advocates “no animal products before dinner” because meat production is such a big driver of climate change.]--Marshal Zeringue
A hundred percent. I approached a couple of chefs when I was writing this book, and chefs are bizarrely, or not bizarrely, the most enthusiastic endorsers of this idea. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall in London, who literally wrote the book on meat, is a huge advocate of meat reduction. Yotam Ottolenghi just posted about my book, and it’s kind of worth seeing the little video that he made. [Editor’s note: In the video, Ottolenghi vows to “inject my vegetables with even more flavor.”]
Samin Nosrat, who does Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, the way she describes it is “vegan during daylight.” I know her a little bit. I don’t know anyone on Earth who likes food and celebrates food and loves the culture of food more than she does. I find it unbelievably inspiring and brave that she would even enter this conversation, much less go that far. She hasn’t talked about it that much, but what I’ve read that she said is like, “This is hard. Man, I don’t know if I’m going to be able to do it. And I doubt I’ll do it consistently and I don’t want to do it, but we have to do it or we have to acknowledge that we’re giving up.”
[Editor’s note: Nosrat said about her “daytime” veganism, “I really don’t want to, but I feel like it’s something I have to do, and I feel like it’s what I need to, not necessarily bully other people into doing, but at least model for people.”]
We have to eat less meat. There’s no two ways around that unless we just decide to give up on climate change...[read on]