The disconnect

1202: 

Because the law allows us to exploit animals, it never becomes a crime, whether it’s zoo-caging of exotics, vivisecting mice or factory farming pigs.

There’s a ‘disconnect’ between our own inner beauty and our baser food cravings.  Animal food is endemic to a lifestyle to which most people are addicted.  The popular animal-based foods are as attractive to the educated rich as they are to the uneducated poor.  As a result of our upbringing, most people have been seduced by their foods’ blood-salt-sugar-texture content.

Our number one impulse is to enjoy our food.  We want it to be both nutritious and enjoyable.  But we can do without the guilt. We need to justify eating ‘that type of food’, but there’s really no need to,  since any ‘normal food’ is, by definition, always going to be  socially acceptable; if we can afford to buy it, we can eat what we like and never have to justify ANY of it to anybody.  It seems that, for almost all people, the (ethical) provenance of our food is not a problem.  It needn’t bother us.

But it does bother some children.  When kids first find out about bacon being from a pig or tender mutton being from a lamb, it can be deeply disturbing. I doubt if most sensitive kids ever get their head around that one because they see a mighty contradiction. The contrast between displays of adult-love and adult-cruelty, in regard to food-animals, must be very confusing.  To children farm animals are no different to their own pets at home.  As kids grow older and these conflicts become clearer they are torn between their salivating tastebuds, at smelling breakfast bacon cooking, and concern for ‘what is happening to the pig’ when their fried bacon is part of a pig.

As usual, reality wins out in the end; kids realise that they mustn’t complain.  If they don’t do what they’re told, they starve ... or, more realistically, they’re denied lots of yummy things that kids like.  Children are bribed with food.  They’re indoctrinated, from birth, to conform to a ‘meat-and-two-veg’ diet.  They must conform, otherwise their carers are put to all sorts of inconvenience.

Ethics.  Isn’t it better to ignore ethics and simply enjoy the food we’re given?