The Omnivore's Deception - by John Sanbonmatsu (Hardcover)

About the Book

"Shattering the conventional wisdom around animals, food, and the environmental crisis, The Omnivore's Deception: What We Get Wrong about Meat, Animals, and the Nature of Moral Life offers the most powerful case yet for ending our exploitation of animals for food, showing why "humane and sustainable meat" is a contradiction in terms"--

Book Synopsis

Offers the most powerful case yet for ending our exploitation of animals for food

Millions of Americans see themselves as "conflicted omnivores," worrying about the ethical and environmental implications of their choice to eat animals. Yet their attempts to justify their choices only obscure the truth of the matter: in John Sanbonmatsu's view, killing and eating animals is unethical, regardless of whether they are "free range" or factory farmed. Shattering the conventional wisdom around the meat economy, he reframes the question of animal agriculture from one of "sustainability" to one of existential and moral purpose, presenting a powerful case for the total abolition of the animal economy. In a rejoinder to Michael Pollan and other critics who have told us that we can have our meat and our consciences, too, he shows why "humane meat" is always a contradiction in terms.

The Omnivore's Deception provides a deeply observed philosophical meditation on the nature of our relationship with animals. Peeling back the myriad layers of myth, falsehoods, and bad faith that keep us eating meat, the book offers a novel perspective on our troubled relations with animals in the food economy. The problem with raising and killing animals for food isn't just that it's "bad for the environment," but the wrong way to live a human life.

A tour de force of moral philosophy and cultural critique, The Omnivore's Deception will change the way we think about meat, animals, and human purpose.

Review Quotes

"By turns outraged and elegiac, Sanbonmatsu has given us a new masterpiece in the venerable tradition of animal ethics. This book should be read by everyone---vegans and omnivores, scholars and subway readers---for it will fruitfully challenge how they think about human-animal relations, spurring them to imagine a new society predicated on compassion and reason. I cannot recommend this book highly enough because I have long awaited the skewering of the impossible pieties of 'humane meat' and 'locavorism' . The infantilization of the American mind by foodie pseudo-intellectuals has gone on long enough---now they have met their match in Sanbonmatsu."-- "Troy Vettese, co-author of Half-Earth Socialism: A Plan to Save the Future from Extinction, Climate Change, and Pandemics"

"All too often books about the cognitive and emotional lives of animals that focus on our meal plans extol how smart and deeply sentient so-called 'food animals' are, tell us how they suffer immensely during their horrific lives on factory farms, in transport trucks, and finally on their way to bloody killing floors, and then offer all sorts of lame anthropocentric apologies and contradictory messages for why it's okay for us to eat them after all. In The Omnivore's Deception, Sanbonmatsu does nothing of the sort. He forcefully argues that exploiting and killing other animals for human desires along with the ecological damage for which industrial factory farming is responsible is morally indefensible and that widespread self-deception needs to come to an end. When we switch from saying 'What's for dinner?' to 'Who's for dinner?' Sanbonmatsu's urgent discussion will make much more sense to the countless people who say something like, 'Well, I know they suffer, but I love my burger or tuna.' Sanbonmatsu's masterpiece is a must read for the unconverted and the converted. It is that compelling."-- "Marc Bekoff, author of The Emotional Lives of Animals: A Leading Scientist Explores Animal Joy, Sorrow, and Empathy―and Why They Matter"

"As a historian of Chinese and Tibetan history who has spent much of my career combating the myths that nations tell about their own histories, I appreciated The Omnivore's Deception's similar attempt to expose the lies we tell ourselves about eating meat. Though it was tough to read about the brutality, callousness and deception underlying the animal system, the final section of the book turns despair into a celebration of animals, their consciousness and amazing abilities. Unlike so many other books that have turned to utilitarian or health concerns to recommend a vegan way of life, Sanbonmatsu takes personhood as the key, urging us to see each animal as a vulnerable self. In the end, he shows us a better way of being, an interspecies community grounded in love."-- "Gray Tuttle, author of Tibetan Buddhists in the Making of Modern China"

"This riveting and thought-provoking book traces the recent history of the belief that animals can be raised and killed 'humanely.' Then it systematically demolishes that belief. In Sanbonmatsu's account, we learn how writers like Michael Pollan, Temple Grandin, and Barbara Kingsolver created bedtime stories for adults so that they could have their meat and eat it too; eat it, that is, without ethical qualms. But as Sanbonmatsu shows, the 'new' meat economy is as unethical and ecologically damaging as the old. By turns harrowing and deeply moving, The Omnivore's Deception is the rare work that engages our sympathies and our intellect in equal measure. A dazzling achievement."-- "Carol Adams, author of The Sexual Politics of Meat"

"The two largest dangers to our world today are capitalism and speciesism. In his courageous new book, Sanbonmatsu confronts them both, and offers a path forward for other animal, and human, continued survival. Debunking the myth of a right way to consume 'good meat' he lays open the stark choices we have to face. As Sanbonmatsu convincingly argues, it is long since passed time for all of us to end the Omnivore's 'Deception."-- "Vasile Stănescu, co-editor of The Ethics and Rhetoric of Invasion Ecology"

"Stunning and brilliantly written. For half a century I've strived to awaken the world to the irrationality and needless destruction built into meat-centered diets. Now, Sanbonmatsu has awakened me. He digs to new layers of the crisis and also enables us to see the wider positives that arise as we embrace a plant-and-planet-centered diet."-- "Frances Moore Lappé, founder of the Small Planet Institute and author of World Hunger: Ten Myths, Diet for a Small Planet"

"This book is a must-read for anyone prepared to honestly confront the moral obscenity, and the fatefulness for all life on Earth, of the world-wide killing field so often sanitized with the label 'animal agriculture.' The Omnivore's Deception recounts with relentless clarity how the ecocidal magnitude of the crime of human-animal relations is repeatedly concealed with comforting myths about 'humane slaughter', 'happy meat', and 'enlightened omnivorism'. It is a lesson, as invaluable as it is terrible, that we must imbibe if we are to move toward a more just and livable future."-- "Alice Crary, author of Inside Ethics: The Demands of Moral Thought"

"This is perhaps the single best book ever written about animal suffering and why the world needs to go vegan. Few philosophers have spoken to us with such power and conviction on a matter of life and death--a matter as consequential for our own future as for the other animals. The reach of the author's scholarship in laying out the myriad implications of the animal system is astonishing. Yet rarely does reading a book of this depth give such pleasure. There is hardly a sentence that is not deep, surprising, important, and with the capacity to change our lives. The great poet Rainer Maria Rilke famously ended his poem 'Archaic Torso of Apollo' with the words: 'You must change your life.' The Omnivore's Deception will do that for you. You cannot read this book without changing your life. It is a work not only of immense moral significance, but a masterpiece."-- "Jeffrey Moussaief Masson, author of When Elephants Weep"

About the Author

John Sanbonmatsu is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, MA. He is the editor of Critical Theory and Animal Liberation and author of The Postmodern Prince: Critical Theory, Left Strategy, and the Making of a New Political Subject.