On Friday, I attended a talk by Jonathan Safran Foer who came to speak about his latest book "Eating Animals". During the past few years, it seems like vegetarianism has become more main stream. In high school, Nari and her family were the only vegetarians I knew. Once I arrived at Yale, I met a few more vegetarians, including my suite mate Emily, who is just vegetarian by a matter of food preferences and allergies. One vegetarian soon became many vegetarians, and this summer, my Yalie group in Istanbul was half vegetarian (3 out of 6). And when Erika came to visit me in Istanbul, I learned that some times during high school, she too had also become vegetarian. After attending Foer's talk, I have consciously avoided meat for the past three days to see how vegetarianism can fit into my life. Perhaps I won't become a "vegetarian" in the absolute sense, but I think I will definitely become more limiting of my meat-intake. As Foer pointed out, by knowing what we know about the meat industry, the health hazards, and the abuse of animals for the sake of profit, a decision to not react at all is an action in of itself.
The Yale Daily News is running some kind of article on it tomorrow, and I volunteered to do the illustration. I finally get why Julia was so obsessed with pigs--they are so cute! Also, I'm 2 illustrations away from making staff on the oldest college daily newspaper in the US! Pretty cool, eh?
Awesome joy! I read part of that book one time at Borders, it looked pretty interesting. What was he like in person? Good speaker? What did he talk about? Did he read from his book?
ReplyDeleteHis book "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" is one of my favorite books EVER. If you haven't read it, you should. Gina really likes it too. :)