Julia Moura
Prof. Jesse Miller
English 110-G
17 April 2019
Journal #18
In “Against Meat” by John Safran Foer, many ideas come to mind that I begin running around in my head. When reading the specific paragraph about his childhood memories, I found it easy to understand what was meant when giving up meat, and what was valued that he received by giving it up. First, in giving up meat he lost a pleasurable eating experience with many memories no longer being fulfilled. He also lost a cultural ideal and began to forget such memories. He had to work on forgetting the taste of many memories he enjoyed. His gain though was that he now had the ability to find certain tastes that could provide him with those same feelings as he had before.
I have a difficult time with this question. I personally will always be a meat eater and I truly believe I could never become a vegetarian. I have always loved meat and I grew up in a Portuguese home where you were almost frowned upon for eating anything but meat. Though, this question causes me to ponder my own ideals. Why are we okay with all of it truly? I guess, I could say that we are higher in society and have more control over the animals and since they cannot talk, we do what we need to do to fulfill our own needs. I mean you could argue that in eating all the plants and nuts we are taking the other animals food source, but are we really allowed to kill them in order to eat them. From a science perspective, yes we do have the power in order to do this because we are at the top of the food change and from a survival perspective we can. But, if we have a way not to do the killing will we be better off, I mean then we may come across issues with overpopulation.
