We burned with love for ourselves, all of us, starters of the fire we suffered- our love was the affliction for which only our love was the cure.
Isn't it strange how upset people get about a few dozen baseball players taking growth hormones, when we're doing what we're doing to our food animals and feeding them to our children?
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote critiques societal outrage over minor issues while ignoring larger ethical concerns regarding food production.
Jonathan Safran Foer highlights the hypocrisy in society's reaction to athletes using performance-enhancing drugs compared to the widespread use of growth hormones in livestock. This statement encourages a deeper contemplation of our food systems and the moral implications of how we treat animals for human consumption, suggesting that we may be more concerned with the superficial issues than with the significant ethical questions regarding our food sources.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about food ethics, I would use this quote to spark conversation about what we prioritize in public health discussions.
More from Jonathan Safran Foer
All quotes →Memory was supposed to fill the time, but it made time a hole to be filled. Each second was two hundred yards, to be walked, crawled. You couldn't see the next hour, it was so far in the distance. Tomorrow was over the horizon, and would take an entire day to reach.
She was not crying Which surprised me very much But I understand now That she had found places For her melancholy That were behind more masks Than only her eyes
What do babies dream of? She must be dreaming of the before-life, just as I dream of the afterlife.
A few weeks after the worst day, I started writing lots of letters. I don't know why, but it was one of the only things that made my boots lighter.
What is being awake if not interpreting our dreams, or dreaming if not interpreting our wake?
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I have to live for others and not for myself: that's middle-class morality.
Finally, I began to write about becoming an older woman and the trepidation it stirred. The small, telling "betrayals" of my body. The stalled, eerie stillness in my writing, accompanied by an ache for some unlived destiny. I wrote about the raw, unsettled feelings coursing through me, the need to divest and relocate, the urge to radically simplify and distill life into a new, unknown meaning.