I first became a vegetarian when I was nine, in response to an argument made by a radical babysitter. My great change - which lasted a couple of weeks - was based on the very simple instinct that it's wrong to kill animals for food.

Your dad didn't die, so I won't be able to explain it to you.

I went to the guest room and pretended to write. I hit the space bar again and again and again. My life story was spaces.

Factory farming, of course, does not cause all the world's problems, but is is remarkable just how many of them intersect there.

Isn't it so weird how the number of dead people is increasing even though the Earth stays the same size, so that one day there isn't going to be room to bury anyone anymore?

This isn't animal experimentation, where you an imagine some proportionate good at the other end of the suffering. This is what we feel like eating. Tell me something: Why is taste, the crudest of our sense, exempted from the ethical rules that govern our other sense? If you stop and think about it, it's crazy. Why doesn't a horny person has as strong a claim to raping an animal as a hungry one does to killing and eating it?

[...]It is as if after surviving so much, there was no longer reason to survive.