Comfortably Unaware
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $5.99
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
In Comfortably Unaware, Dr. Richard Oppenlander tackles the crucial issue of global depletion as it relates to food choice. We should all be committed, he tells us, to understanding the reality and consequences of our diet, the footprint it makes on our environment, and seek food products that are in the best interest of all living things. His forthright information and stark mental images are often disturbing-and that's how it should be. As the guardians of Planet Earth, we need to be shaken out of our complacency, to stop being comfortably unaware, and to understand the measures we must take to ensure the health and well-being of our planet-and of ourselves. Oppenlander
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Oppenlander's powerful message that "our current food choices detrimentally affect climate change and global warming more so than do all the cars, planes, trucks, buses and trains used worldwide," and therefore veganism is the key to our survival isn't well served by his presentation. While he appears to have shocking facts on his side ("80 percent of the world's starving children live in countries where food surpluses are fed to animals that are then killed and eaten by more well-off individuals in developed countries"), he makes gratuitous arguments that undermine his own credibility. Rather than simply applaud Al Gore's work on the risk that energy consumption poses for Earth's future, the author accuses him of avoiding truths inconvenient to him, because of "ties to the current livestock industry" an allegation that Oppenlander admits is only speculative. More serious is Oppenlander's glossing over the pragmatics of how any politician could make headway on the issue in a post Citizens United political landscape. The billions of dollars the meat industry would pour into opposing any effort to ban meat consumption goes unaddressed, as does the challenge of changing the thinking of people whose ancestors have been carnivores for hundreds of thousands of years.
