Jeffrey Masson on the Face on Your Plate

by Stephanie Ernst · 2009-03-19 06:00:00 UTC
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A book has been sitting in various places in my house lately--coffee table, desk, nightstand--and driving me crazy. Why? Because the second it arrived from the publisher a couple weeks ago, I wanted to put everything else aside and read it start to finish. But although it's moved all over the house (and even out of the house) with me because I keep thinking I'll find time to read, so far, I've not had a chance to get past the first several pages--and though they were an excellent first several pages, that's not quite enough to offer you a real review, is it? Nevertheless, I'm going to comment briefly on it.

The book is The Face on Your Plate: The Truth About Food by Jeff Masson (who, as regular readers of this blog will recall, has contributed two excellent guest posts here: "Temple Grandin Brings Me to Tears (of Frustration)" and "Food, Change, and the V Word"). And though I've not read it yet, Masson's notable past books (e.g., The Pig Who Sang to the Moon: The Emotional World of Farm Animals and When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals, among others), along with my having corresponded with the author and scanned through the book already, tell me we have an important, thoughtful, compelling work here.

-Continue reading after the jump-

So until I can offer my own reactions, I recommend you read the recent LA Times review ("It's a challenge to create transformative moments with books, but he does it") and get yourself a copy of the book. If you'd like to attend a reading, check out Jeff's calendar and see if your city is to be one of his stops in the next few weeks.

And if you happen to see the review from Publishers Weekly that appears on various booksellers' sites, please do your best to ignore this bizarre line: "If the advocacy of a completely vegan diet (neither milk nor eggs, in addition to giving up meat and fish) is not particularly new—even Masson acknowledges that he is following the path laid out by authors like Temple Grandin and Michael Pollan—the passion with which the argument is made is immediately apparent." I don't know what this writer was smoking, but "advocacy of a completely vegan diet"? No, that does not apply to the work and positions of either Grandin or Pollan, and the notion that not only have these two advocated vegan diets but that, additionally, Masson is building on or owes a debt to those fabled positions is so strange that I have to wonder if the writer of the review has actually read anything by Pollan or Grandin.

Finally, while we're talking about Jeff Masson's books and reviews, head on over to easyVegan.info too, where Kelly has just posted a review of the 2003 book The Pig Who Sang to the Moon, which I have read (twice) and which is remarkable.

Stephanie Ernst wrote the original Animal Rights blog at Change.org until December 2009. She can now be found at Animal Rights & AntiOppression.
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