Jeffrey Masson

Jeffrey Masson was a Sanskrit scholar who became a Freudian analyst and now devotes his time to vegan and animal welfare issues. He is a prolific author (see his titles that deal with animals and veganism in my list of "Books Read" in the left margin), his latest book (2009) being The Face on Your Plate. On March 30 of this year he did a book signing and hour-long discussion of the book and related issues at a bookstore. The hour-long presentation and discussion was recorded and made available to the public. You can watch it online here or below. (Happily, the embedded video below plays perfectly. Why can't all online videos be as large-formatted and stream as well as this one?)

I like these off-the-cuff presentations as much as authors' books. The live discussions reveal "who" the author is (personality, mannerisms, tone, etc.) which is often not revealed (as clearly) via the printed page. "Meeting" the author adds an extra dimension to reading his or her books. Plus, wittingly or unwittingly, these interviews always reveal insights about other "major players" with whom the author has interacted, conversations that rarely make it into a book. For example, I was intrigued by his remembrance of an interview with Alice Waters, the iconic doyen of whole/slow/organic food—the owner of the famous Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley, California. It revealed (at least from his perspective) that even the most esteemed leaders in a given field have not always thought about everything. His comments about, and stories of his conversation with, Michael Pollan, an even larger icon than Alice Waters, and Wendell Berry, were also illuminating. Masson, as an author and researcher, does prodigious research, interacting with the leading lights in the field.

I keep coming back and adding tidbits from this talk. He talks about how trends are changing in our culture by noting that when he was an undergrad at Harvard there were only two vegetarians (he and another), whereas the student body of Stanford University today is 25% vegetarian.