We Are The Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast by Jonathan Safran Foer. 

3/5 rating. 

Book #5 of 2020. Read January 10, 2020.

This book had an incredibly important message for how to save the world: eating vegan before dinner. If everyone implemented this, we could move to vastly less environmental impacts, while still allowing people to not have to completely convert to a vegan lifestyle.

While this was the overall message, it almost barely talked about that. It definitely was one of the strangest books I’ve read in the sense that it meandered all over the place connecting disparate strands or ideas together. I think his ideas to eat vegan before dinner could change the world if people decided to do it. 

Think about even the question of What is the least you could do to save this world?

Some of the most important quotes from this book:

“Our land, water and soil support a remarkable range of human activities, but they can only take so much and we must remember to treat them not as a given but as a gift.”

“Is there anything more narcissistic than believing the choices you make affect everyone?

Only one thing: believing the choices you make affect no one.” 

“The best way to excuse oneself from a challenging idea is to pretend there are only two options.” 

“The only dichotomy that matters is between those who act and those who don’t.” 

Quotes:

“The government enacted – and Americans accepted – price controls on nylon, bicycles, shoes, firewood, silk, and coal. Gasoline was severely regulated, and a speed limit of thirty-five miles per hour was imposed nationally to reduce gas and rubber consumption. U.S. government posters advocating carpooling declared, ‘When you ride ALONE you ride with Hitler!’”

“In 1942, the government launched a ‘Share the Meat’ campaign, urging each American adult to limit their weekly meat intake to two and a half pounds. In the U.K., people were eating about half that. (This collective act of belt-tightening led to a general uptick in health.)”

“This will require, of course, the abandonment not only of luxuries, but of many other creature comforts. Every loyal American is aware of his individual responsibility…As I told the Congress yesterday, ‘sacrifice’ is not exactly the proper word with which to describe this program of self-denial. When, at the end of this great struggle, we shall have saved our free way of life, we shall have made no ‘sacrifice.’” – FDR

“Ninety-six percent of American families gather for a Thanksgiving meal. That is higher than the percentage of Americans who brush their teeth every day, have read a book in the last year, or have ever left the state in which they were born.”

“After the grocery store Pay and Save put green arrows on the floor leading to fruit and vegetable aisles, 90 percent of shoppers followed the path, and sales of fresh produce skyrocketed.”

“As early as 1949, 60 percent of Americans said that cigarette smoking was harmful to health.”

“We cannot keep the kinds of meals we have known and also keep the planet we have known. We must either let some eating habits go or let the planet go. It is that straightforward, that fraught.”

“Since the advent of agriculture, approximately twelve thousand years ago, humans have destroyed 83 percent of all wild mammals and half of all plants.”

“There are approximately thirty farmed animals for every human on the planet.”

“In 2018, more than 99 percent of the animals eaten in America were raised on factory farms.”

“On average, Americans consume twice the recommended intake of protein.”

“People who eat diets high in animal protein are four times as likely to die of cancer as those who eat diets low in animal protein are.

Smokers are three times as likely to die of cancer as nonsmokers are.”

“In America, one out of every five meals is eaten in a car.”

“According to models of cyclical climate change, Earth should be experiencing a period of slight cooling right now.”

“During the Great Dying, a series of Siberian volcanoes produced enough lava to cover the United States up to three Eiffel Towers deep.

Humans are now adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere ten times faster than the volcanoes did during the Great Dying.”

“For the eight hundred thousand years before the Industrial Revolution, concentrations of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere remained stable. Since the Industrial Revolution, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has increased by about 40 percent.”

“About 80 percent of deforestation occurs to clear land for crops for livestock and grazing.”

“The four highest-impact things an individual can do to tackle climate change are eat a plant-based diet, avoid air travel, live car-free, and have fewer children.”

“Pounds of CO2e associated with a serving of each food: 

Beef: 6.61

Cheese: 2.45

Pork: 1.72

Poultry: 1.26

Eggs: 0.89

Milk: 0.72

Rice: 0.16

Legumes: 0.11

Carrots: 0.07

Potatoes: 0.03

Not eating animal products for breakfast and lunch has a smaller CO2e footprint than the average full-time vegetarian diet.”

“While citizens of different countries have dramatically different CO2e footprints – the average American’s is 19.8 metric tons per year, the average Frenchman’s is 6.6 metric tons per year, and the average Bangladeshi’s is 0.29 metric tons per year – the average global citizen had a CO2e footprint of approximately 4.5 metric tons per year.”

“Our land, water and soil support a remarkable range of human activities, but they can only take so much and we must remember to treat them not as a given but as a gift. These issues know no ideology, no political boundaries. It’s not a liberal or conservative thing we’re talking about.” – George H.W. Bush

“This defining of ‘having enough’ as ‘having more’ is the mentality that created both America and global warming.”

“But with respect to greenhouse gas emissions, the notion of mortgaging doesn’t make sense: no one – no institution, no god – would give us a loan so wildly out of proportion with our means. And while humankind might feel too big to fail, no one will bail us out.”

“We don’t need to reinvent food but to uninvent it. The future of farming and eating needs to resemble the past.”

“Making [climate change] about individuals is naive of what needs to be done, while letting politicians and businesses off the hook.

But companies produce what we buy; farmers grow what we eat. They commit crimes on our behalf.”

“Only 14 percent of Americans deny climate change, which is a significantly lower percentage than who deny evolution, or that the earth orbits the sun.”

“The richest 10 percent of the global population is responsible for half the carbon emissions; the poorest half is responsible for 10 percent.”

“In other words, it is about $200 cheaper per year to eat a healthy vegetarian diet than an unhealthy traditional diet. Not to mention the money saved by preventing diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, and cancer – all associated with the consumption of animal products. So, no, it is not elitist to suggest that a cheaper, healthier, more environmentally sustainable diet is better. But what does strike me as elitist? When someone uses the existence of people without access to healthy food as an excuse not to change, rather than as a motivation to help those people.”

“There are fewer American farmers today than there were during the Civil War, despite America’s population being nearly eleven times greater. And if the ultimate dream of the animal-agriculture industrial complex is realized, there will be soon be no farmers at all, because ‘farms’ will be fully automated.”

“It is entirely possible to raise a relatively small number of animals in environmentally sensitive ways. That’s what farming used to be until the advent of factory farms.”

“According to the UN, animal agriculture is ‘one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global…It should be a major policy focus when dealing with problems of land degradation, climate change and air pollution, water shortage and water pollution and loss of biodiversity.’”

“Sadness and joy aren’t opposites of each other. They are each the opposite of indifference.”

“These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, know that there is no hope for their recovery. But they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice. These two men are laying down their lives in mankind’s most noble goal: the search for truth and understanding.” – Nixon’s speech written “In Event of Moon Disaster”

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