The Secret Reason We Eat Meat
By: Natalia
Lima
- January 9, 2016
- Follow Natalia at @TheNatiLima
Ask
any meat eater why
people eat meat and
they’ll tell you it’s delicious, that eating meat is not only
natural but also normal and necessary. Ask Dr.
Melanie Joy the
same question and you’ll get a much darker—and
interesting—answer: a violent ideology has convinced them they must
do it.
That
ideology is carnism, the opposite of veganism. Never heard of it?
That’s exactly her point.
“Carnism
is a dominant ideology, which means it’s embedded deeply in society
to the point that it’s considered ‘just the way things are,’”
Joy explains. “But just because something isn’t recognized or is
viewed as ‘how things are’ doesn’t mean they don’t exist.
Racism wasn’t recognized as a problem or ideology at a point in
history but that doesn’t mean it didn’t exist. It’s just been
around for so long that it’s taken for granted.”
Joy, a Harvard-educated psychologist, first explained her theory in a TEDX talk in early 2015. A former “meat lovers pizza girl” who would make sure her pizza had all types of meat in it, she turned vegan after being hospitalized for eating bacteria infested meat. The reason behind her deciding to ditch animal products wasn’t initially the animals themselves, but soon after, she began seeing them as sentient beings, not products. That’s when she began her research on what drove people like her former self to eat them.
“When
we’re born into a world with a dominant ideology, we can’t help
but see the world through that lens,” she says of how kids whose
parents eat chicken wings, for example, will start seeing chicken as
a natural food option. “There are people in this world who
absolutely need to eat meat because geographically or socially,
that’s where they are. Most people, though, have a choice when it
comes to eating animals, they’re just not aware if it because
they’re blinded by the ideology.”
Those
blinders come from both inside and outside ourselves, she says. From
the outside we have agro-businesses taking
strong measures to
make sure people don’t know how
violent and cruel the process of making meat actually is,
calling a cow a hamburger, a hen chicken wings and a pig hot dogs.
From the inside, we convince ourselves eating meat is normal,
necessary and natural by reminding ourselves people have done it for
years.
The
only way to break the cycle is then to make the ideology visible, she
argues. Look at undercover footage of factory farming, see how those
animals are treated, learn about how an animal becomes a hamburger, a
chicken wing or a hot dog.
The
first step in that chain of events is for people to first acknowledge
that there is an ideology, however. That was her goal with the TEDX
Talk and now an
animated video she recently released —
and it’s working.
Her
presentation, ‘Beyond Carnism and Toward Rational, Authentic Food
Choices,’ has become one
of the top one percent most viewed TEDX
talks of all time and she has presented it in five different
continents.
“It’s
really exciting the shift of consciousness that’s happening around
the world,” she says. “A lot of people are asking how they can
make more ethical choices.”
But
is it enough to trump an
industry that kills 77 billion animals for
flesh and body parts to be sold for food? Joy thinks so.
“I
have no doubt veganism will replace carnism one day,” she
proclaims. “Look at the other -isms who have fallen before like
sexism and racism. Carnism is so contrary to humans and their values.
Most people genuinely believe in values like compassion and not
causing harm unnecessarily. Carnism goes directly against all of
those values. When people become aware and freely choose how they
participate in these systems, they start saying ‘no.’”
Voor meer berichten n.a.v. het voorgaande, klik op één van de labels, die u onder dit bericht aantreft. Dat geldt niet voor de labels 'M. Joy' en 'carnisme'. Voorts heb ik andere ter zake doende labels toegevoegd, zoals luchtvervuiling en klimaatverandering, die worden aangejaagd door carnisme en de intensieve martelveehouderij in het bijzonder.....
