Time & Perspective Quote by Michael Pollan

Pollan’s line works like a moral whiplash: it juxtaposes the soothing rhetoric of progress with the brutal math of modern production. The first clause nods to a familiar, self-congratulatory story many educated people like to tell about themselves - that we’re evolving, ethically, beyond human chauvinism. “Extend the circle” evokes the language of moral philosophy and social reform, borrowing the cadence of civil-rights expansion and applying it to animals. It’s aspirational, clean, and flattering.

Then he yanks the reader into the fluorescent-lit backroom. “Factory farms and laboratories” are not just locations; they’re symbols of industrial rationality, where suffering becomes a byproduct managed like waste. The subtext is that our compassion is increasingly performative: we celebrate pet rescues, buy “humane” labels, share documentaries, and adopt the vocabulary of care - while outsourcing cruelty to systems designed to hide it. Pollan isn’t accusing individuals of sadism so much as exposing how good intentions get neutralized by supply chains.

The kicker is historical scale: “more suffering on more animals than at any time in history.” It reframes animal ethics from a personal virtue to a civilizational indictment. This is the educator’s move: take a private moral stance and force it into the public ledger. The quote’s intent is to make “progress” feel less like a comforting narrative and more like a question of consequence: if our moral circle is expanding, why is the radius of harm expanding faster?