Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

The Face on Your Plate

The Truth About Food

The best-selling author of When Elephants Weep explores our relationship with the animals we call food.

In this revelatory work, Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson shows how food affects our moral selves, our health, and the environment. It raises questions to make us conscious of the decisions behind every bite we take: What effect does eating animals have on our land, waters, even global warming? What are the results of farming practices—debeaking chickens and separating calves from their mothers—on animals and humans? How does the health of animals affect the health of our planet and our bodies? And uniquely, as a psychoanalyst, Masson investigates how denial keeps us from recognizing the animal at the end of our fork—think pig, not bacon—and each culture's distinctions among animals considered food and those that are forbidden. The Face on Your Plate brings together Masson's intellectual, psychological, and emotional expertise over the last twenty years into the pivotal book of the food revolution.

"Ah-may-zing." - Emily Woesthoff, Babycakes NYC [Read full review]


Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson is the author of the best-selling When Elephants Weep and Dogs Never Lie About Love, as well as The Pig Who Sang to the Moon and The Assault on Truth. An American, he lives in New Zealand.

The Face on Your Plate book jacket

March 2009 / hardcover / ISBN 978-0-393-06595-4
5 1/2" x 8 1/4" / 256 pages / Food Writing
Norton Home
Trade Home
Online Ordering
View Your Shopping Cart