Feast And Famine

I am eating lunch with my daughter at a fast-food restaurant, where I’m having a hamburger. She is here for the advertised toy they have set like bait in a circle of French fries, orange soda, and meat. As I read the newspaper, I see a picture of a starving child. I know, because I have made it my business to know, what is happening inside that child’s body: The sugar in her blood, the starches in her liver, the fat deposits in her tissue have been used up, leaving her skin loose and her eyes sunken. Her brain needs glucose, the only source of which is now her body’s protein. Already, the digestive enzymes in her stomach and pancreas have been sacrificed. Soon will follow the muscles in her arms, legs, and heart. She is consuming herself.

Correspondence

I was moved to tears by Sharman Apt Russell’s “Feast and Famine” [March 1996]. I was also disappointed by her reductionist dismissal of key aspects of the hunger problem; overpopulation and environmental degradation, she says, are “not the problem. . . . The problem is a lack of human will.”

It seems to me that, as we generate the requisite human will, we are forced to come to terms with these real aspects of the problem — as well as with the implications of our own dietary choices. The article begins with Russell eating a hamburger. Anyone familiar with John Robbins’s Diet for a New America can see the contradiction here.

To the extent that we stop consuming the products of animal agriculture, we not only make a dent in the problem of world hunger but also reduce our complicity in another form of massive suffering — the use and abuse of highly sentient animals in the production of meat, eggs, and dairy products. And we ourselves become healthier.

It’s nice to know that, at least in this case, what’s best for us is also best for all the animals and humans of the world.

Billy Ray Boyd San Francisco, California

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March 1996