David Foster Wallace’s penchant for footnoting makes him a little bit hard to excerpt, but I’m going to use an asterisk to represent what is a numbered footnote in the text:
Is it possible that future generations will regard our present agribusiness and eating practices in much the same way we now view Nero’s entertainments or Mengele’s experiments? My own initial reaction is that such a comparison is hysterical, extreme — and yet the reason it seems extreme to me appears to be that I believe animals are less morally important than human beings;* and when it comes to defending such a belief, even to myself, I have to acknowledge that (a) I have obvious selfish interest in this belief, since I like to eat certain kinds of animals and want to be able to keep doing it, and (b) I haven’t succeeded in working out any kind of personal ethical system in which the belief is truly defensible instead of just selfishly convenient.
* Meaning a lot less important, apparently, since the moral comparison here is not the value of one human’s life vs. the value of one animal’s life, but rather the value of one animal’s life vs. the value of one human’s taste for a particular kind of protein. Even the most diehard carniphile will acknowledge that it’s possible to live and eat well without consuming animals.
-David Foster Wallace, “Consider the Lobster.” Consider the Lobster. New York: Little, Brown, and Company, 2006. (253)
Yeah… pretty much. I am so far from a moral example on this one.
UPDATE: Bought myself some couscous. Felt no guilt when I ate it. (Couscous isn't made from animals, right?)
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