Justice & Law Quote by Michael Pollan

Pollan’s line reads like a weather report with a warning siren tucked inside it: the pressure is rising, the front is moving fast, and respectable people are already packing sandbags. By stacking “philosophers, ethicists, law professors and activists,” he’s not just name-dropping; he’s laundering what could sound like fringe sentiment into institutional credibility. This isn’t “animal lovers” getting sentimental. It’s the academy, the courts, and the moral professions quietly aligning into a coalition with teeth.

The phrase “great moral struggle of our time” is an intentional provocation. Pollan borrows the cadence we associate with civil rights, feminism, anti-apartheid movements-the big chapters of modern moral self-congratulation-and aims it at a target many readers still treat as dinner. The subtext is accusatory without being explicit: if this really becomes the era’s defining ethical fight, then our everyday habits will look, in retrospect, less like personal preference and more like normalized harm.

Context matters. Pollan emerged as a leading voice in critiquing industrial food systems, where animal suffering is not incidental but optimized. So “rights of animals” here isn’t an abstract seminar topic; it’s a forecast about how supply chains, legal definitions of personhood, and consumer identity could collide. He’s also hedging with “are convinced,” a rhetorical move that keeps him from preaching while still validating the movement’s trajectory.

The sentence works because it reframes the debate from taste to history: not whether you eat meat, but which side of the moral record you’ll land on once the culture catches up.