Interview with Rob Percival, author of The Meat Paradox: Eating, Empathy, and the Future of Meat
Rob Percival, author of The Meat Paradox: Eating, Empathy, and the Future of Meat recommends a fascinating group of books! Before jumping into the interview, please check out Rob's book:
Review from Book Depository:
Our future diet will be shaped by diverse forces. It will be shaped by novel technologies and the logic of globalisation, by geopolitical tensions and the evolution of cultural preferences, by shocks to the status quo - pandemics and economic strife, the escalation of the climate and ecological crises - and by how we choose to respond. It will also be shaped by our emotions. It will be shaped by the meat paradox.
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The Meat Paradox: Eating, Empathy, and the Future of Meat
'Should we eat animals?' was, until recently, a question reserved for moral philosophers and an ethically minded minority, but it is now posed on restaurant menus and supermarket shelves, on social media and morning television. The recent surge in popularity for veganism in the UK, Europe and North America has created a rupture in the rites and rituals of meat, challenging the cultural narratives that sustain our omnivory.
In The Meat Paradox, Rob Percival, an expert in the politics of meat, searches for the evolutionary origins of the meat paradox, asking when our relationship with meat first became emotionally and ethically complicated. Every society must eat, and meat provides an important source of nutrients. But every society is moved by its empathy. We must all find a way of balancing competing and contradictory imperatives. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the origins of our empathy, the psychology of our dietary choices, and anyone who has wondered whether they should or shouldn't eat meat.
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Easons €26.59
Book Depository €16.08
Waterstones £18.99
Wordery $19.40
Q. Do you have a favourite smart thinking book (and why that book)?
I’d have to say Wild by Jay Griffiths. It’s unlike anything else I’ve read, feral and intensely articulate, blending travelogue, memoir, anthropology, and nature writing. (It’s uncategorisable, but ‘smart thinking’ will do.) This book is the reason I set out to become a writer.
Review From Book Depository
'I took seven years over this work, spent all I had, my time, money and energy. Part of the journey was a green riot and part a deathly bleakness. I got ill, I got well. I went to the freedom fighters of West Papua and sang my head off in their highlands. I met cannibals infinitely kinder and more trustworthy than the murderous missionaries who evangelize them. I found a paradox of wildness in the glinting softness of its charisma, for what is savage is in the deepest sense gentle and what is wild is kind. In the end - a strangely sweet result - I came back to a wild home.'
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Wild: An Elemental Journey
Wild describes an extraordinary odyssey, courageous and sometimes dangerous. It is by turns funny, touching and harrowing, and offers a poetic consideration of the tender connection between human society and wildlands.
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Easons €10.99
Book Depository €11.82
Waterstones £90.99
Wordery $12.87
Q. What's the most recent smart thinking book you've read (and how would you rate it)?
Being Human by Charles Foster. The author sets out to inhabit the senses and emotions of a Palaeolithic hunter. It’s inspired, humorous and wise (and, again, uncategorisable).
Review from Book Depository:
What kind of creature is a human? If we don't know what we are, how can we know how to act? In Being a Human Charles Foster sets out to understand what a human is, inhabiting the sensory worlds of humans at three pivotal moments in our history.
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Being a Human: Adventures in 40,000 Years of Consciousness
Foster begins his quest in a wood in Derbyshire with his son, shivering, starving and hunting, trying to find a way of experiencing the world that recognises the deep expanse of time when we understood ourselves as hunter-gatherers, indivisible from the non-human world, and when modern consciousness was first ignited. From there he travels to the Neolithic, when we tamed animals, plants and ourselves, to a way of being defined by walls, fences, farms, sky gods and slaughterhouses, and finally to the rarefied world of the Enlightenment, when we decided that the universe was a machine and we were soulless cogs within it.
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Easons €23.79
Book Depository €14.44
Waterstones £16.99
Wordery $15.80
Q. Do you have a favourite childhood book?
I read David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten when I was 15, and it’s still my favourite novel. Not quite a childhood book, but the book I carried from late childhood into adulthood. I re-read it most years.
Review From Book Depository
A magnificent achievement and an engrossing experience, David Mitchell's first novel announced the arrival of one of the most exciting writers of the twenty-first century.
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Ghostwritten
An apocalyptic cult member carries out a gas attack on a rush-hour metro, but what links him to a jazz buff in downtown Tokyo? Or to a Mongolian gangster, a woman on a holy mountain who talks to a tree, and a late night New York DJ?
Set at the fugitive edges of Asia and Europe, Ghostwritten weaves together a host of characters, their interconnected destinies determined by the inescapable forces of cause and effect.
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Easons €10.07
Book Depository €9.33
Waterstones £9.99
Wordery $12.26
Q. Do you prefer reading on paper, Kindle or listening to an audiobook?
Paper.
Q. Do you have a favourite bookshop (and why that shop)?
My local, Dulwich Books.
Many thanks to Rob for recommending a fascinating group of books! Please don't forget to check out Rob's book The Meat Paradox: Eating, Empathy, and the Future of Meat.
Daryl
Image Copyrights: Little, Brown Book Group (The Meat Paradox), Penguin Books Ltd (Wild), Profile Books Ltd (Being A Human), Hodder & Stoughton (Ghostwritten).
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