Awareness is bad for the meat business. Conscience is bad for the meat business. Sensitivity to life is bad for the meat business. DENIAL, however, the meat business finds indispensable.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the conflict between ethical awareness and the meat industry, suggesting that a lack of consciousness is necessary for its survival.
John Robbins's quote critiques the meat industry by underscoring how awareness and conscience regarding the treatment of animals and the implications of consuming meat negatively impact business practices. It implies that to thrive in the meat business, owners must cultivate a state of denial to ignore the ethical dilemmas and suffering involved, pointing to a broader commentary on the necessity of moral awareness in societal practices.
In practice
In a discussion on animal rights, you might use this quote to illustrate the moral conflicts in industries that rely on animal suffering.
Our food chain is in crisis. Big agribusiness has made profits more important than your health—more important than the environment—more important than your right to know how your food is produced. But beneath the surface, a revolution is growing.
I believe that eating simple food in a healthy body with a clean conscience is more pleasurable, and infinitely more satisfying, then eating decadent food that makes you and your world ill.
The joy is that we can take back our bodies, reclaim our health, and restore ourselves to balance. We can take power over what and how we eat. We can rejuvenate and recharge ourselves, bringing healing to the wounds we carry inside us, and bringing to fuller life the wonderful person that each of us can be.
The level of consumption that we identify with success is utterly unsustainable. We're gobbling up the world.
Every time you make a choice that expresses respect for life, you bring a little more love in your body, into your family, into our society, and into a world that is calling out for this blessing.
A reduction in meat consumption is the most powerful single act that you can take to halt the destruction of our environment and preserve our natural resources.
Beauty is indeed a good gift of God; but that the good may not think it a great good, God dispenses it even to the wicked.
Money for me has only one sound: liberty.
The word religion comes from an origin which means "coming together." But priesthood has been doing just the opposite, it has created splits in man, not oneness. Religion means creating in man an organic unity; it has nothing to do with God, it has something to do with you. It has nothing to do with worship, it has something to do with a transformation of your own consciousness.
I was born an American; I will live an American; I shall die an American.
I believe it was God's will that we should come back, so that men might know the things that are in the world, since, as we have said in the first chapter of this book, no other man, Christian or Saracen, Mongol or pagan, has explored so much of the world as Messer Marco, son of Messer Niccolo Polo, great and noble citizen of the city of Venice.
The United States is just now the oldest country in the world, there always is an oldest country and she is it, it is she who is the mother of the twentieth century civilization. She began to feel herself as it just after the Civil War. And so it is a country the right age to have been born in and the wrong age to live in.
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