I want to be vegan but I was raised in the 1950s on bacon sandwiches and roast beef for Sunday dinner. This is deeply entrenched into my brain and it is very hard to shake off. I feel guilty in having some ham slices in my fridge right now. I think they will be the last ham slices that I buy and I’m not going to buy a bacon sandwich again for the remainder of my life. I will have to force myself to change. Although, to be fair to myself, I eat very little meat these days. I am more or less a vegetarian but I do still eat meat to my shame.
The picture above got me thinking again. Pigs are intelligent. They are sentient beings. We don’t need to kill them to eat. We can live perfectly healthy lives eating plant-based foods. Many experts say that you will be healthier if you eat a plant-based food.
And yet, the world is dramatically divided between meat eaters and vegetarians (and vegans). The people who disagree with vegans think that vegans are mad. The comments on this image highlight this massive divide between the two parties.
On the one hand you have people saying that it breaks their heart to look at the sort of image and I must say it touched my heart too. And yet on the other hand you have a guy saying: “It’s food! You don’t wanna eat it alive, do you?”
The guy who wrote that does not see any issue at all with slaughtering pigs for food. He doesn’t see them as sentient beings but as products, perhaps inanimate objects, and he doesn’t see any issue with how they are raised and slaughtered.
My mind goes to Paul McCartney who famously said that if abattoirs had glass walls, we would all be vegans. And you wonder whether the meat-eaters of this world who so vociferously criticise vegans and vegetarians actually think about abattoirs and the whole process of ‘meat’ production.
I think it is probably fair to argue that humans do feel guilty about it and I mean all humans. This is because we have created a language to hide the shame that we feel about how we raise and kill livestock. The classic is converting “flesh” i.e. the muscle and fat of the pig and other animals, to the euphemism “meat”.
When you think about meat you think about fillet steak and chips or roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. When you think about flesh you visualise dead animals and blood.
It is also interesting that when humans think about a butcher’s shop with carcasses hanging in the window you either see flesh or meat. I see flesh. And the word “butcher” is ominous and sinister to me. It conjures up an image of butchering i.e. killing animals in a violent way. But many people think of the word “butcher” as something good and a place to visit to buy the Sunday lunch. They block out the reality of it.
Humankind has got themselves into a state of illusion regarding their relationship with farm animals, the production of flesh to eat and indeed the damage that it does to the environment as well. It isn’t just the cruelty of the whole process – and many animals are treated very cruelly throughout their lives before they are slaughtered – it is the negative impact that it has on the environment and I’m thinking here about the production of “beef”. Cows produce methane and methane is 10 times more toxic to the environment in terms of global warming and carbon dioxide.
And finally, the word “beef” that I mention is another euphemism to mean the flesh of a cow, bull or ox used as food. Everything to do with the production of flesh to eat is covered up by euphemisms because we are as guilty as hell for our cruelty to animals.
Below are some more articles on farming.
