Way back in the 1970s, I was eating a steak, and I looked down, and for the first time it suddenly looked like flesh to me - like a dead creature. In a flash, I realized that every time I ate any kind of meat, something had been killed for me, and I stopped eating all animals, not just cows and pigs but chickens and fish.
Interpretation
The quote reflects a profound realization about the moral implications of eating meat.
Joanna Lumley's quote expresses a pivotal moment of consciousness where she recognizes the life and death associated with consuming meat. This realization led her to adopt a vegetarian lifestyle, illustrating a transformation in her perspective on animals and the ethics of eating. It underscores the concept that our food choices are intertwined with the lives of other beings, prompting a deeper awareness of the consequences of our consumption habits.
In practice
During a speech on animal rights, I mentioned Lumley's transformative experience as a reason to reconsider meat consumption.
My mother early on taught us to respect all animals, and I mean all animals - not just cats and dogs but rats and snakes and spiders and fish and wildlife, so I really grew up believing they are just like us and just as deserving of consideration.
I've never been interested enough to have a career trajectory. I've never had any ambition or thought of what I should be doing or had any idea of what I'd like to do. Never. And still don't. And if something comes along, I say 'Fine.'
Our life is half natural and half technological. Half-and-half is good. You cannot deny that high-tech is progress. We need it for jobs. Yet if you make only high-tech, you make war. So we must have a strong human element to keep modesty and natural life.
We were put here as witnesses to the miracle of life. We see the stars, and we want them. We are beholden to give back to the universe. If we make landfall on another star system, we become immortal.
This wasn't the sea of the inexorable horizon and smashing waves, not the sea of distance and violence, but the sea of the etenally leveling patience and wetness of water. Whether it comes to you in a storm or in a cup, it owns you--we are more water than dust. It is our origin and our destination.
There's a point of poverty at which the spirit isn't with the body all the time. It finds the body really too unbearable. So it's almost as if you were talking to the soul itself. And a soul's not properly responsible.
Faith does not, in the realist, spring from the miracle but the miracle from faith. If the realist once believes, then he is bound by his very realism to admit the miraculous also.
There must be some kind of way out of here,' said the joker to the thief.
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