Blog Post 3

The “Desperation” section stood out the most to me from this chapter in Eating Animals. Some of the things that he chooses to write about don’t make sense to me contextually. It seems as though he sprinkles his own personal experience as a sort of break among the sea of very-obviously-biased phrasing of facts that he presents as content. I believe that these breaks could intended to be read as ‘take a step back, and look, I’m still a person who had an upbringing before I decided to become vegetarian.’ They do completely break flow at times, though. In most all the other sections there seems to be the overlying point that the food industry is being deceptive and that farm conditions are deplorable, etc. In this section he talks about how his grandmother had a mountain of flour, a lot of soda, Uncle Ben’s rice, and all other sorts of not-immediately-perishable food. None of the food that he mentions in this section is meat, however, even though he previously stated his grandmother’s main dish is chicken. He goes into some misadventures, or grocery shopping, that his grandmother had taken him on. His grandmother clearly has had influence on him and his eating habits, considering how much he brought her up in these sections. I believe that his point in mentioning her is, straightforward, to evaluate that her eating habits had been shaped on survival, to contrast that his had been shaped by a more modern society where they’d always had enough to eat (as he mentions earlier). He even says in the end of the section that “She could live to be 120, and there’s no way she’ll use up half of the flour. And she must know that.” In this definition of “desperation” he’s saying that it is habit that drives her to do this. He wants us to see this as desperate and extreme. He wants this to be compared with how we are all driven by our habit.