James McWilliams
James McWilliams is a historian and writer based in Austin, Texas. He is the author of several books, including The Modern Savage: Our Unthinking Decision to Eat Animals; Just Food: Where Locavores Get It Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly, and A Revolution in Eating: How the Quest for Food Shaped America.
His writing has also appeared in The Paris Review daily, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Harper’s, The Washington Post, Slate, The American Scholar, Texas Monthly, The Atlantic, and The Texas Observer. He writes “The Things We Eat” column at Pacific Standard, and his literary non-fiction has appeared in The Millions, Quarterly Conversation, The New York Times Book Review, and The Hedgehog Review.
I reached out to James for an interview after reading his cover article "Loving Animals to Death" in The American Scholar, and he kindly offered to share an afternoon conversation in his work studio in Austin, Texas.
“Questions of sentience, questions of suffering, questions of how this might look from the animal’s perspective, simply don’t register. I mean the disconnect between production and consumption when it comes to animals is enormous. And because we enjoy those products very much, there is very little motivation to discover what you we don’t want to discover.”
The Interview
Getting Interested
The Central Contradiction
Costs
Resource Allocation
What Animals Tell Us
Agriculture
An Analogy
Consumers Helping Farmers
A Steep Climb
Logic and Speciesism
Public Perception
Decisions
Farmers and Jobs
Stepping Through the Door
Idea of Humane Animal Agriculture
Pasture Raised
Justifications