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Personalities on the Plate: The Lives and Minds of Animals We Eat Hardcover – March 15, 2017
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Yet that realization hasn’t yet made its presence felt to any great degree in our most intimate relationship with animals: at the dinner table. Sure, there are vegetarians and vegans all over, but at the same time, meat consumption is up, and meat remains a central part of the culinary and dining experience for the majority of people in the developed world.
With Personalities on the Plate, Barbara King asks us to think hard about our meat eating--and how we might reduce it. But this isn’t a polemic intended to convert readers to veganism. What she is interested in is why we’ve not drawn food animals into our concern and just what we do know about the minds and lives of chickens, cows, octopuses, fish, and more. Rooted in the latest science, and built on a mix of firsthand experience (including entomophagy, which, yes, is what you think it is) and close engagement with the work of scientists, farmers, vets, and chefs, Personalities on the Plate is an unforgettable journey through the world of animals we eat. Knowing what we know--and what we may yet learn--what is the proper ethical stance toward eating meat? What are the consequences for the planet? How can we life an ethically and ecologically sound life through our food choices?
We could have no better guide to these fascinatingly thorny questions than King, whose deep empathy embraces human and animal alike. Readers will be moved, provoked, and changed by this powerful book.
- Print length224 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press
- Publication dateMarch 15, 2017
- Dimensions9.1 x 6 x 0.8 inches
- ISBN-109780226195186
- ISBN-13978-0226195186
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"Meat comes bundled in packages, and the fleshy lumps don't conjure up a creature that once possessed a mind, emotions and a personality. Did that make it easier for me to eat the chicken? Or would I have more enjoyed biting into a leg of a chicken I knew? Perhaps I couldn't have done it at all. King makes you think about such matters because the lives of animals matter to her. . . . King takes us chapter by chapter on a cook's tour of animals we humans eat, from insects to octopus to chickens, fish, goats, pigs, cows, chimpanzees and dogs, exploring the latest scientific discoveries about their intelligence and sentience--building a case for them as beings that deserve more out of life than a trip down our gullets. . . . King is not a scold, but she is good at stirring up. . . . She leavens this darkness with humor and tales of animals acting as individuals, expressing the full gamut of emotions we humans often wrongly claim solely for ourselves. Her method and passion are effective, and I ended the book agreeing that we can--and should--help these creatures and our environment by choosing to eat fewer of them or none at all." ― Washington Post
"King has a knack for walking right up to the dreaded anthropomorphization line without crossing it. . . . King has gathered the most recent scientific research into what it is like to be, say, a cricket or a blue-head wrasse or a Nigerian dwarf goat, and, taken all together, it is more than a little mind-blowing. . . . She is passionate but not prescriptive." ― Literary Review of Canada
"She is astute and interesting in reviewing the most recent scientific research into the inner lives of insects, octopuses, fish and vertebrates. . . . King is creditably keen that readers should come to their own conclusions on the basis of the evidence that she presents." ― Times Literary Supplement
"The most compelling sections of the book describe octopuses and their impressive intelligence. King is full of facts about them, from their three hearts and blue blood to their ability to solve puzzles and change colour depending on their environment and mood." ― The Times, UK
"King illuminates the animal lives and sensibilities that undergird the book's title. . . . King carefully engages recent scientific advances in ethology to document how animals learn, behave, and, to the extent that human systems of observation can hypothesize, feel. In doing so, she challenges the reader to consider that animals can be said to have personality; not to anthropomorphize animals per se, but to draw our attention to how individual animals feel and act so that we can 'train ourselves to see the complexity of animals' lives'. . . . Overall, Personalities in the Plate is a highly valuable, multidisciplinary contribution to the growing body of literature on how we as human beings come to be aware of the creatures we eat, and what kinds of embodied behavioral cues we can observe in animals in order to potentially make different decisions about our consumption." ― Gastronomica
"Whether we realize it or not, whether we want to or not, with every meal we eat, we choose who gets to live and who will die. We need to look this thrice-daily fact in the face and make decisions we can live with. Here to help us is the compassionate and lyrical voice of Barbara J. King. Never shrill, always revealing, often surprising and even funny, Personalities on the Plate is must reading for everyone who cares about animals, ethics and the earth."
-- Sy Montgomery, author of The Soul of an Octopus
"This thoughtful book is not about whether we 'should' or 'shouldn't' eat meat--but you'll probably have your own conclusion at the end. Barbara J. King looks at the range of values surrounding farming and feasting, and at who we are considering eating. But King also shows that different approaches to meat and to animal farming can be viewed through different lenses, giving us a richer understanding." -- Carl Safina, author of Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel
"Of all the animals that we eat, fish are the species for which we have least compassion. Recent scientific research shows, however, that fish are smart and have personalities just like you and I. They have feelings and suffer pain, anxiety and stress. There is no reason to treat them any different from terrestrial farm animals. So of all the animals on our plate, fish perhaps most of all require a second thought. King's thoughtful commentary on the intelligence and personality of the animals we eat will go some way to provoking these thoughts in her audience." -- Culum Brown, author of Fish Cognition and Behavior
"Barbara King has written a gem. With deft, lively writing, she guides us into the inner lives of the animals so often conveniently hidden from our view, and reveals why they deserve a place at the table, not on it. Personalities on the Plate should be read by everyone who eats, and especially the majority who eat others who had a life." -- Jonathan Balcombe, author of What a Fish Knows
"As factory farming and meat consumption increase globally, Barbara King's new book makes for crucial reading. Combining new scientific studies, personal experiences, and an honest, compassionate approach, King turns attention to the cognitive, social and emotional lives of species exploited for consumption. She puts firmly on the table the facts about animal sentience that omnivores would prefer not to think about. Brimming with ethological insights and boosted by anecdotes about individual animals (such as Ursula the pig, Mr Henry Joy the rooster, and Olive the octopus), there is no doubt that after reading Personalities on the Plate people will be compelled not just to rethink what to eat for dinner, but who they might be eating. A rigorously researched, eloquent, thoughtful and potentially life-changing book for all consumers of animals."
-- Annie Potts, University of Canterbury, New Zealand"In Personalities on the Plate, Barbara J. King uses the latest discoveries about mental capacities and social lives of creatures from insects and chickens to chimpanzees and dogs to make the moral case against meat. Combining first-rate science with personal experience, this book offers a fascinating window into the minds of animals that will make readers think deeply about what they are going to eat for dinner tonight." -- Hal Herzog, author of Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Personalities on the Plate
The Lives and Minds of Animals We Eat
By Barbara J. KingThe University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2017 Barbara J. KingAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-19518-6
Contents
Introduction,1. Insects and Arachnids,
2. Octopus,
3. Fish,
4. Chickens,
5. Goats,
6. Cows,
7. Pigs,
8. Chimpanzees,
Afterword,
Acknowledgments,
References,
Index,
CHAPTER 1
Insects and Arachnids
The bugs we eat
Fried wild-caught dragon flies and spider rolls featuring rose-haired tarantulas, katydid-and-grilled-cheese sandwiches and tacos stuffed with grasshoppers: The variety of foods laced with insects and spiders available in the United States and Europe today — when you go looking for them — is considerable. The venues in which they may be found are equally varied, ranging from upscale restaurants to street-side food carts and science-museum bug festivals. Entomophagy is on the rise and generating excitement.
I've not been adventuresome enough to try anything like tarantulas for lunch. One spring day in 2014, though, a package showed up for me with a return address in Austin, Texas, and I knew it was time to take an entomophage's baby step: I was about to eat crickets. Or at least, cookies with crickets baked into them.
At the time, I didn't yet know that crickets are "the latest nerd cuisine trend," as Xeni Jardin puts it. I had noticed in the media a small but dedicated band of entomophagy enthusiasts, including scientists, chefs, and writers who sing the praises of insect-eating. These enthusiasts aim not only at the exotic-food eaters among us — those who eagerly seek live octopus or pig uterus — but also adults with more conservative palates, and children who might think it's just that cool to swallow bugs. One insect-cuisine champion, Robert Nathan Allen of Little Herds, an Austin-based nonprofit organization that promotes insect farming, kindly sent me the cookies, which he had baked himself.
I knew that eating the crickets wouldn't count as my first episode of insect ingestion. It's just that all previous instances came about by accident, a by-product of the nature of our food supply. The statistics make insectivores of us all: the FDA deems it perfectly acceptable for peanut butter to host thirty insect fragments per hundred grams, and twice that amount is allowed in a comparable serving of chocolate. Considering how much of these two foods I've downed over the decades, it's clear that insects were no strangers to my digestive tract, even before the cookies' arrival.
Likewise, anyone who regularly eats fresh vegetables ingests an occasional mini-animal-protein-package along with their intended meal. Once, sharing dinner with my mother in a senior-living facility dining room here in Virginia, I moved a leaf of lettuce across my salad plate and was startled to spot a large beetle nestled calmly in the greens. Noting with some relief the intact nature of its body — no ingestion of any bit of this insect had occurred — I planned to quietly ask the serving staff for a replacement salad. This scheme was thwarted when my mother, a confirmed insectophobe of eighty years, caught sight of the beetle and — I'll fall back on the word "ruckus" to convey what happened next.
Deliberate ingestion of insects, however, felt to me wholly different. It's not that the cookies were repulsive in appearance or made me squeamish; they looked like, well, cookies. The crickets were baked into small, round, chocolate-chipped-studded shapes. The ingredients, save one, were entirely unsurprising: potato flour, brown rice flour, tapioca flour, coconut flour, sugar, brown sugar, butter, eggs, vanilla, baking soda, chocolate chips, and salt — plus cricket flour.
The cookies tasted good. I can't say they rivaled the best chocolate chip cookies ever made, because those are baked at Delicious Orchards in Colts Neck, New Jersey. But that's, in a way, exactly the point: Those New Jersey cookies are delicious to me in part because they come from my home state, indeed from Monmouth County where I grew up, and even more specifically, from a market, now on tourists' as well as locals' radar, that offers everything from fresh fruits and vegetables to breads, pies, and cookies. Those chocolate chip cookies were the ones my parents brought to me when I ventured twenty-eight miles northwest to attend Douglass College, and felt homesick for familiar things. Now, four decades later, when I travel from Virginia back home to New Jersey, a visit to Delicious Orchards is a high point for my own family; those still-perfect cookies unlock treasured memories.
The foods each of us loves, and the foods we love to hate, are about so much more than flavor — a theme central to this book. Many of us eat pigs and cows without a second thought but blanch at the idea of consuming chimpanzees — or insects.
For Little Herds to offer insects in familiar cookie shapes, mixed with chocolate chips (which might contain their own insect fragments!), makes good marketing sense. That's the logic as well at a cricket farm in Youngstown, Ohio, established in 2014 as the first in the United States to raise crickets specifically for human consumption. For entomophagy novices, cricket cookies — or, in the case of the Youngstown operation, cricket chips — may be far more palatable than food items that feature recognizable insect parts. It worked for me, anyway. To the extent that I can disentangle all the cultural overlays from the actual taste of the cookies, I would evaluate them as appealing, with a specific flavor I find hard to describe: slightly nutty, maybe, with a granular texture that I am guessing comes from the cricket flour.
Still, I'm sympathetic to the shivery reactions some people may voice to the practice of insect-eating, or even to day-to-day encounters with insects. As disappointing as I find this in myself, I'm less than calm around some of the bigger flying insects or spiders with large leg spans. It's not so much that I fear stings or bites as that I experience a visceral response deep in my nervous system that compels me to put distance between myself and the small animal in question. The scientific notion of "here's a creature interesting to observe and learn about" comes to me eventually, but on a sort of cognitive delay: the shiver comes first. (I still manage to rescue even the most formidable spiders trapped in our house and deposit them outdoors, but it requires some deep breathing on my part.)
This response makes evolutionary sense — our ancestors who were cautious around stinging, biting creatures may have survived longer and (most importantly) enjoyed greater reproductive success, and today we are dealing with a carryover effect. In another way, though, it is very strange. Insects, mostly harmless to us, are everywhere, even in our modern sheltered-from-nature lives. When fifty homeowners in or near Raleigh, North Carolina, volunteered their houses for an entomology study in 2012, the results were striking: over ten thousand specimens were collected in total — some living, some deceased. More than a hundred species of insects, spiders, centipedes and millipedes, and crustaceans like pill bugs were often found in a single home. Flies and beetles, ants, book lice, moths, silverfish, stinkbugs, cockroaches, cobweb spiders, and of course dust mites were among the common inhabitants. Crickets were less common, and bedbugs were absent entirely. The researchers who carried out the work, led by Michelle Trautwein from the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences and Rob Dunn and Matthew Bertone from North Carolina State University, concluded that many of us live inside a veritable, insect-favoring natural history museum. Shouldn't we habituate after a while?
Millions of people around the world do seek out insects and regularly, intentionally consume them. They do not pluck bugs from under the bed or the dusty attic, of course, but forage for sources of fresh protein and other nutrients in the wild or purchase prepared insects or insect flour at traditional markets. With a little help from anthropology, we may identify a global panoply of flavors that insects can provide to our palates.
Entomophagy around the world
Humans eat over sixteen hundred species of insects. "The Western abhorrence of eating insects is unusual on a global scale," note naturalist David Raubenheimer and anthropologist Jessica M. Rothman. Westerners may clamor for honey without fully recognizing that when ingesting it they are consuming regurgitated bee products, but people in many countries consciously embrace a wide variety of bugs as food. Raubenheimer and Rothman's cross-cultural report on entomophagy is stuffed full of intriguing data and forms the basis for my discussion of insect-eating patterns in this section.
The percentage of dietary protein people acquire from insects varies widely from population to population: up to 26 percent seasonally in parts of the Amazon region and perhaps as high as 64 percent in parts of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Yet it would be a mistake to connect entomophagy only with people who live in so-called undeveloped societies. The traditional diet in Japan and Thailand, for example, still includes insects. Thailand is a fascinating place for entomophiles. Regional preferences exist for different insects, but the giant water bug is eaten across the nation. Crickets are popular too and may be offered for commercial sale in abundant numbers. "400 families in two villages," Raubenheimer and Rothman report, "produce 10 metric tons of crickets in the peak production period, both for the domestic market and export."
Crickets are one thing. The idea of eating a giant water bug seems far more formidable to me, though I recognize this judgment is again a culturally grounded one. The Entomophagy Wiki project offers a video of a person called Bug Nomster who consumes on-camera a "massive" water bug, boiled and dehydrated and sold commercially in a silver pouch. Bug Nomster first bites into the posterior end of the intact bug, then decides to remove the legs and wings in order to get at the interior meat. He tastes "a hint of apple" but decides overall that the bug, in this desiccated form, offers too little meat in too much shell, and concludes that fresh-fried water bugs would be preferable. Beyond the lukewarm review, the video prompted me to wonder if consuming a water bug at home differs so very much from cracking into a lobster at a fine restaurant? Many people might covet the lobster as a delicacy but reject the water bug as a disgusting snack. Yet both these animals (and crab and shrimp, and insects too) are arthropods — animals with a shell, a segmented body, and jointed limbs. (Full disclosure: I don't eat lobster, thus this bit of comparative reasoning implies no necessity of my consuming water bugs for consistency's sake!) Bug Nomster's comment about the giant water bug's shell illustrates a key point. Amid a great deal of cross-cultural variability — including whether insects are eaten as staples, as fallback foods in hard times, or as delicacies — one general rule is that people prefer insects at the peak size of their life cycle and those with the lowest proportion of exoskeleton. (The water bug, in its prepackaged form, succeeds on the first point but loses points on the second.) These preferences make good sense, as larger-package protein makes the energy expended in acquiring and processing insects more worthwhile, and the exoskeleton or shell must be distressingly crunchy for some tastes — a factor I didn't have to contend with when eating cookies made with cricket flour. The exoskeletons were in the flour, to be sure, but so finely ground that the crunch factor was entirely absent.
When I lived in a national park in Kenya in order to carry out my research, I observed the behavior not only of baboons but of tourists, most of whom quested to see the "Big Five" — lion, leopard, elephant, Cape buffalo, and rhinoceros. I was thus amused to learn that there is also a "Big Five" of the entomophagy world. Of all insects, species in five orders — Coleoptera (beetles), Hymenoptera (ants, wasps and bees), Isoptera (termites), Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths), and Orthoptera (grasshoppers, crickets, locusts, and katydids) — show up most regularly in human diets. These insects tend to occur in abundance, often (except for Coleoptera) in large clusters, and are rich sources of protein, fat, and micronutrients, although species variation in nutritional content is considerable.
Entomophagy, as it catches on outside traditional cultural practices, builds on some of these patterns, yet there's an edgy new element to some of the current fascination. After all, Bug Nomster isn't in Thailand partaking of the local cuisine: he's showcasing his experimental entomophagy for, presumably, a heavily Western viewing audience. His fans include serious food enthusiasts — chefs and their customers who crave new dining experiences and work hard to bring them about.
Dining on escamoles is a good example. Often referred to as giant ant eggs, they are more correctly understood as ant larvae (species Liometopum apiculatum). In Mexico, escamoles were popular in Aztec times and are still highly prized. Looking a bit like pine nuts, they are often described as slightly nutty in flavor. (Are most insects nut-flavored, like my cookie-embedded crickets?) These larvae can't be bought easily in the United States. When writer Dana Goodyear shadowed Laurent Quenioux, a French-born chef now cooking in California, the pair sought escamoles from Mexico. Quenioux "knew a guy," Goodyear writes, "who knew a guy who would bring them across the border from Tijuana; we simply had to drive down to a meeting place on the US side and escort them back." In other words, the delicacies were smuggled into the country. Once at the pickup site, Quenioux exchanged a $100 bill for a half kilo of frozen larvae. This shipment ended up as part of a tiny dish graced also by Japanese noodles; at other times, Quenioux may prepare a corn tortilla with escamoles among the ingredients. Part of the zest with which Quenioux cooks these dishes stems, Goodyear makes clear, from the illicit nature of the goods — and a profile of Quenioux in LA Weekly (as well as Goodyear's book) makes it plain that his smuggling has been a fairly routine practice.
A major report on future prospects for entomophagy, released in 2013 by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), notes that tamping down sensationalism when promoting insect-eating is a worthy goal. It's a fine line between sensationalism and pure excitement when it comes to any cuisine, I admit: does Bug Nomster cross the line into sensationalism by posting online a video of himself biting off the end of a massive water bug? Are the smuggled escamoles as much about the thrill of the illicit as they are about flavor? While it's hard to know, it is nice to visit restaurants that incorporate insects into their menus without hype and hoopla.
Oyamel Cocina Mexicana in the Penn Quarter neighborhood of Washington, DC, is just such a restaurant. Stepping inside on a cool June evening in 2014, my friend Stephen Wood and I were immersed in the colors and smells of Oaxaca, Mexico. Oyamel is the name of the fir tree native to central Mexico where monarch butterflies rest upon migrating from the United States and Canada, and the décor had a lepidopteran theme: the glass door at the entrance was studded with transparent red, yellow, and pink butterflies, and butterfly mobiles hung from the ceiling.
But it wasn't butterflies that Stephen and I had come to sample. Our quest focused on chapulines, soft tacos stuffed with grasshoppers. Taking our order, the waitress noted our luck: the grasshoppers sometimes get held up coming through customs from Mexico, but that night they were readily available. Stephen and I ordered a number of small, tapas-like dishes, and when the chapulines arrived, I saw insect body parts right away. A delicate grasshopper leg tumbled onto the table when I raised the taco to my mouth.
So long to the land of cricket cookies. Here was the crunch factor at last! To our mild frustration, neither Stephen nor I could summon the adequate vocabulary to convey the grasshoppers' taste. What stayed with me was the sound (the crunch), the texture (many insects to chew), a smoky taste, and a spicy heat, which stemmed not from the insects but from the guacamole. Hot foods don't agree well with me, so I contented myself with eating only part of the grasshopper taco, then moving on to entirely delicious Mexican potatoes.
As I dined at Oyamel, I pondered some questions not often addressed by fans of entomophagy, whether they write popular books or government reports, or make edible art in the kitchen. What happens when we view insects through the lens of "animals we eat," as we do for chickens or pigs? What do we know about insect intelligence, personality, and sentience?
The ants, grasshoppers, spiders, and crickets that appear in prepared edibles are not much like the other animals we will consider in this book. They don't utilize underwater tools like octopuses or exhibit easily recognizable (to us) emotions like joy or grief as do farm animals. To include insects in a book that also embraces our supersmart, emotional, highly individual closest living relatives the chimpanzees takes us from one end of the thinking-and-feeling animal continuum way over to the other.
(Continues...)Excerpted from Personalities on the Plate by Barbara J. King. Copyright © 2017 Barbara J. King. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Product details
- ASIN : 022619518X
- Publisher : University of Chicago Press (March 15, 2017)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 224 pages
- ISBN-10 : 9780226195186
- ISBN-13 : 978-0226195186
- Item Weight : 1.04 pounds
- Dimensions : 9.1 x 6 x 0.8 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #2,250,120 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #873 in Animal Rights (Books)
- #5,873 in Environmentalism
- #9,866 in Cultural Anthropology (Books)
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About the author
I'm a wife, mom, animal lover, cat rescuer, ape-watcher, anthropologist, avid reader of novels and non-fiction, and of course writer! I love my work and how close it brings me to other species, ranging from gorillas and baboons to cats and turtles.
In recent years I've brought together my love of animals and my love of anthropology in writing books about what it means to be human. My recent book BEING WITH ANIMALS tells stories of emotions and behaviors expressed by apes, monkeys, elephants, whales, cats, and dogs to explore why we humans so readily care so deeply for other creatures. It spans the art caves of ancient France, the past-and-present reindeer cultures of Siberia, and our own present-day love of pets.
At home, my husband Charlie, daughter Sarah (see photo where she is pictured with me!) and I care for a large number of homeless/abandoned cats: 7 in the house, 11 in a spacious pen in our yard, 2 strays that hang around with us, and 7 at a nearby colony. The joy we get from interacting with animals at home, in national parks throughout the US, and indeed anywhere we travel is a huge part of our lives.
Please visit my website http://www.barbarajking.com to listen to some of my radio interviews or to read back entries in my FRIDAY ANIMAL BLOG (new ones will be available each week at the blog link here on Amazon). I'd also love to hear your own animal stories through the contact page there.
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Customers find the book informative and thought-provoking. They say it provides a balanced perspective and is worth reading for anyone considering being a vegetarian.
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Customers find the book thought-provoking and informative. They say it's painful to read but provides a balanced perspective.
"Animal welfare is my field, and this provided a balanced perspective." Read more
"Interesting and thought provoking." Read more
"Painful to read, but so informative and heartbreaking." Read more
"could be condensed to 25 pages or less and pack more punch and info" Read more
Customers find the book readable and worthwhile for those considering vegetarianism.
"...So I'd recommend reading it, it was definitely worth the time! Joe McDonald" Read more
"...And the really good thing about this book? It's an enjoyable read...." Read more
"A good read for anyone considering being a vegetarian to honor our wonderful animal world. It was one of the deciding reasons for me...." Read more
"Great book, can be a little difficult because of the content (emotional or disturbing) but the author's prejudices are laid out for you very clearly..." Read more
Top reviews from the United States
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- Reviewed in the United States on December 8, 2017I’m in a business where “full disclosure” is important. In her book, “Personalities on a Plate: The Lives and Minds of the Animals We Eat”, Barbara King gives full disclosure to the consumers on what’s on their plate. Did you know about the emotional sensitivity of an Octopus?, or the Grouper’s “team” effort in searching for food for themselves and others in the food chain? or the intelligence factor in a Chicken? Is human intelligence the “gold standard”?
As a meat eater, I tend to be skeptical of “education” of comparing and contrasting human vs animal intelligence because it often ends in the “meat is murder” punch line. However, in this case, King takes great care to step back from the emotion of meat consumption and focuses on laying out a framework of the characteristics of animals for the purpose of painting a picture for the reader at points, several steps before we see the final meat/fish product on our plate.
The bottom-line is that “Personalities on a Plate” may not inspire you to become a vegetarian but you will be fascinated by the research King provides and you’ll be aware, in a “full disclosure” way, as to what you’re eating and perhaps, that Vegan Burger option on the menu will be more than a “healthy choice”.
- Reviewed in the United States on January 11, 2018I was intrigued by the Kindle sample and bought the book, which I did enjoy, although perhaps not as much as I thought I would from the sample. That said, however, I find myself referring to the book in conversations, and it has me thinking about this entire issue in ways I did not do so before. So I'd recommend reading it, it was definitely worth the time! Joe McDonald
- Reviewed in the United States on April 21, 2017How many times can you say that a book has made your life better? I can say that about this one. Learning about the personalities of the "meat" I've been eating has convinced me to try vegetarian -- or at least cut waaaaaaaaaaaaay back on meat. And the really good thing about this book? It's an enjoyable read. I don't feel lectured at, or scolded -- I feel like I'm hearing from a friend, who is sharing some really neat stuff.
- Reviewed in the United States on August 1, 2017A good read for anyone considering being a vegetarian to honor our wonderful animal world. It was one of the deciding reasons for me. Even if you have no plans to become vegetarian, it will help you look at animals with a new light.
- Reviewed in the United States on January 28, 2019Gave this as a gift, they loved it!
- Reviewed in the United States on June 5, 2017Great book, can be a little difficult because of the content (emotional or disturbing) but the author's prejudices are laid out for you very clearly and allow you to take or leave what you want to in this book.
- Reviewed in the United States on May 30, 2017Animal welfare is my field, and this provided a balanced perspective.
- Reviewed in the United States on May 12, 2017Thoughtful about the sensibilities of animals but not haranguing or vehement. This is a book to make you think deeply about our role and our relationships with animals. Highly recommended.
Top reviews from other countries
- KateReviewed in Australia on December 11, 2023
5.0 out of 5 stars Interesting read
Very informative.