The Omnivore's Deception -- Praise

Praise for The Omnivore's Deception . . .

"Everyone who believes in justice for all should read this brilliant book. Offers the most compelling arguments yet for abolishing capitalist animal agriculture, urging us to question whether consuming animal products is an ethical way of inhabiting our worlds."

-- Angela Davis, The Meaning of Freedom and Women, Race, and Class

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"Stunning and brilliantly written. For half a century I’ve strived to awaken the world to the irrationality and needless destruction built into meat-centered diets. Now, Sanbonmatsu has awakened me. He digs to new layers of the crisis and also enables us to see the wider positives that arise as we embrace a plant-and-planet-centered diet."

-- Frances Moore Lappé, democracy and food policy expert and author of Diet for a Small Planet

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"This a book is a must-read for anyone prepared to honestly confront the moral obscenity, and the fatefulness for all life on Earth, of the world-wide killing field so often sanitized with the label 'animal agriculture.' The Omnivore’s Deception recounts with relentless clarity how the ecocidal magnitude of the crime of human-animal relations is repeatedly concealed with comforting myths about ‘humane slaughter’, ‘happy meat’, and ‘enlightened omnivorism’. It is a lesson, as invaluable as it is terrible, that we must imbibe if we are to move toward a more just and livable future."

-- Alice Crary, author of Inside Ethics: On the Demands of Moral Thought

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"By turns outraged and elegiac...a new masterpiece in the venerable tradition of animal ethics. This book should be read by everyone---vegans and omnivores, scholars and subway readers---for it will fruitfully challenge how they think about human-animal relations, spurring them to imagine a new society predicated on compassion and reason. I cannot recommend this book highly enough because I have long awaited the skewering of the impossible pieties of 'humane meat' and 'locavorism' . The infantilization of the American mind by foodie pseudo-intellectuals has gone on long enough---now they have met their match in Sanbonmatsu."

― Troy Vettese, co-author of Half-Earth Socialism: A Plan to Save the Future from Extinction, Climate Change, and Pandemics

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"This is an absolutely fantastic, brilliant, deeply insightful book. I had the opportunity to read it last year, and learned a ton. Highly recommended."
-- Émile P. Torres, Dystopia Now Podcast

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"A must-read for your ecologically conscious hamburger eater. A stocking stuffer for your "pasture-raised" enthusiast. A necessary riposte to your "cage-free" colleagues. For all who like hormone-free milk or would sooner shoot themselves in the foot than eat foie gras."
-- Leigh Claire La Berge, Marx for Cats

"This is perhaps the single best book ever written about animal suffering and why the world needs to go vegan. Few philosophers have spoken to us with such power and conviction on a matter of life and death--a matter as consequential for our own future as for the other animals. The reach of the author's scholarship in laying out the myriad implications of the animal system is astonishing. Yet rarely does reading a book of this depth give such pleasure. There is hardly a sentence that is not deep, surprising, important, and with the capacity to change our lives. The great poet Rainer Maria Rilke famously ended his poem ‘Archaic Torso of Apollo’ with the words: 'You must change your life.' The Omnivore's Deception will do that for you. You cannot read this book without changing your life. It is a work not only of immense moral significance, but a masterpiece."

~Jeffrey Moussaief Masson, author of When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals

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"This riveting and thought-provoking book traces the recent history of the belief that animals can be raised and killed 'humanely.' Then it systematically demolishes that belief. In John Sanbonmatsu’s account, we learn how writers like Michael Pollan, Temple Grandin, and Barbara Kingsolver created bedtime stories for adults so that they could have their meat and eat it too; eat it, that is, without ethical qualms. But as Sanbonmatsu shows, the 'new' meat economy is as unethical and ecologically damaging as the old. By turns harrowing and deeply moving, The Omnivore's Deception is the rare work that engages our sympathies and our intellect in equal measure. A dazzling achievement."

-- Carol Adams, author of The Sexual Politics of Meat

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"Sanbonmatsu's masterpiece is a must read for the unconverted and the converted. It is that compelling.
All too often books about the cognitive and emotional lives of animals that focus on our meal plans extol how smart and deeply sentient so-called ‘food animals’ are, tell us how they suffer immensely during their horrific lives on factory farms, in transport trucks, and finally on their way to bloody killing floors, and then offer all sorts of lame anthropocentric apologies and contradictory messages for why it's okay for us to eat them after all. In The Omnivore's Deception, Sanbonmatsu does nothing of the sort. He forcefully argues that exploiting and killing other animals for human desires along with the ecological damage for which industrial factory farming is responsible is morally indefensible and that widespread self-deception needs to come to an end. When we switch from saying ‘What's for dinner?’ to ‘Who's for dinner?’ Sanbonmatsu's urgent discussion will make much more sense to the countless people who say something like, ‘Well, I know they suffer, but I love my burger or tuna.’"

― Marc Bekoff, author of The Emotional Lives of Animals: A Leading Scientist Explores Animal Joy, Sorrow, and Empathy―and Why They Matter

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“As a historian of Chinese and Tibetan history who has spent much of my career combating the myths that nations tell about their own histories, I appreciated The Omnivore’s Deception’s similar attempt to expose the lies we tell ourselves about eating meat. Though it was tough to read about the brutality, callousness and deception underlying the animal system, the final section of the book turns despair into a celebration of animals, their consciousness and amazing abilities. Unlike so many other books that have turned to utilitarian or health concerns to recommend a vegan way of life, Sanbonmatsu takes personhood as the key, urging us to see each animal as a vulnerable self. In the end, he shows us a better way of being, an interspecies community grounded in love.”

-- Gray Tuttle, Leila Hadley Luce Professor of Modern Tibetan Studies, Columbia University, author of Tibetan Buddhists in the Making of Modern China