There is a conversation, repeated several times, during the powerful novella Of Cattle and Men by Paula Maia, translated by Zoë Perry: “Like they say in these parts: as long as there’s a cow in this world, there will be a man keen to kill it.”“And another keen to eat it,” concludes Edgar Wilson. Edgar …
At the opening of the essay collection Maverick, Laura Jean Schneider writes: I’m in the third generation of butchers in my family. As a family, we slaughtered and butchered most of the meat we eat ourselves. While this was not without conflict it seemed that once animals flesh was cooked, we were absolved of the …
We want to believe that cows live happy lives. From our childhoods of Old MacDonald and his farm, field trips and cartoons and stuffed animals, we are raised to believe they are happy. The dairy industry tells us they are happy. The advertisements we see on TV reinforce the illusion. But it is only an …
The Jungle by Upton Sinclair I recently revisited Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle—the original edition published by a socialist newspaper in 1905, not the shorter version published by Doubleday, Page (after Macmillan ultimately rejected it) in 1906. It wasn’t surprising to see what had been left out of the original book (though the censored version was …
