An overdue existential crisis, or moment of clarity, caused by a lifetime of routine alienation between the consumer, the product, the store, the factory pen and butchery.
Mom should read Marx, and The Jungle.
Maybe pick up hunting, if she wants to see what it takes from her own pov.
I was pressured into going hunting a few times with my dad growing up, and I ended up killing a few deer. It’s something I’m not proud of, one among many things I came to regret later in life.
I used to think “If you can’t or won’t kill it personally, then you shouldn’t eat it” was an argument in support of hunting. Now I think of it as an argument in support of vegetarianism. Funny how perspective changes everything…
What’s also funny is how as a society we say things like “kids who kill bugs grow up to be psychopaths,” yet we totally normalize hunting as a sport. Why is that? For that matter, why don’t we say “anyone who eats animal flesh is a psychopath?”
As if being five steps removed from the suffering and death somehow abstracts the cruelty so that one can indulge in the pleasure of what is produced by it without bearing any moral culpability in the processes by which that meat arrived on one’s plate?
Why is it only the forms of cruelty that society doesn’t accept as cultural pastimes that are considered taboo? I should rephrase. Why does society accept some forms of cruelty and not others?
This is why I prefer chicken, I know I can take one on 1v1.
You’d be surprised, those descendants of T-rex can be fierce!
Kidding, but I fully agree with your comments. I write a lot about the public perceptions on nature in my work. The stories we tell ourselves sometimes, I swear.
As if being five steps removed from the suffering and death somehow abstracts the cruelty so that one can indulge in the pleasure of what is produced by it without bearing any moral culpability in the processes by which that meat arrived on one’s plate?
This, and as a vegan it infuriates/despairs me when people whom I otherwise like and respect just never turn a thought towards this dissonance in their lives. They may care deeply about social injustices and oppression, but see no problem with continuing to participate in the mass torture and murder of non-human sentient creatures. So by now when someone says they “love animals”, my first (internal) reaction is a bitter snort, because it’s extremely rare that such people are even vegetarian, let alone vegan.
The principal difference ia that you see the death of a non-sapient animal as murder and I ascribe it the same ethical weight whether a person or a lion does it. It’s not “dissonance” it’s a foundational disagreement on inherent morality, our place in nature, and the “value of life”.
There’s lots to complain about regarding the factory farming industry (environmental impact foremost in my mind, and the needlessly inhumane conditions they’re raised in) but eating meat is not imo itself a cruel act.
Or she is on a few different neurospectra, and gets species dysphoria as a regular thing and finds it funny as well.
But yeah after stopping being a vegetarian I went and killed a lot of animals for other people to balance the scales. Now I prefer if my terrestrial meat had a name, not number.
Maybe watch Dominion
my last straw was Meet Your Meat
For busy moms who don’t have time for a full documentary, try 3minutes.wtf.
+1 to the existential exploration.
A little more lot and she’ll eventually stumble in to “Where did this existence come from? Why is there matter to have a universe, why is there any existence at all? If God exists, how was he created?”
I’m just more jealous than I should be that other people can still afford to go to the store and buy steak.
Mom tried the edibles.
omnivore realises the cognitive dissonance required to consume meat :P
I don’t think anything should suffer unnecessarily (so most of the meat industry is of course terrible), but anything without sapience, and doesn’t have a sense of self or concept of time isn’t much different to plants to my mind. I don’t think there’s any cognitive dissonance inherent in eating meat in general.
You probably also wouldn’t appreciate my stance on how little I care about a human infant’s life.
I personally draw the line at ability to be in pain/suffering, rather than self-awareness. And so trying to minimise the suffering I cause to other beings, within practical limits - living in a capitalist society, everything I buy or use was at least partially made available by human exploitation.
But back to animals, I do agree that, say, a prawn is most likely capable of less suffering, than say, a cow or chicken, since their nervous system and “psychology” (if a prawn even has such) is much simpler. So if someone was truly forced to eat animal protein for health reasons (with the assumption that human health is of elevated priority over animal suffering), then I do think that eating animals of lower ability for suffering is more ethical than those with higher. Both prawns and cows can feel bodily pain, but animals with higher cognitive abilities are probably also harmed by all the ways in which factory farming stops them from being able to express their natural behaviours.
I am of mixed attitudes towards treating animals and humans on the same priority scale. My emotional affection to people I know and my awareness of societal norms tend to make me shy away from saying that a fetus/newborn or a person with profound intellectual disability are potentially less capable of non-pain suffering than a cow or a dog, but intellectually it would only be consistent reasoning. (Same with drawing parallels between human slavery and animal captivity and exploitation.)
Every mammal possesses sapience and a robust concept of time and self.
You are a bad person for eating meat just as I am. For the selfish desire of our own pleasure and simplicity of nutrition, we cause immense suffering and death at a scale and acuity worse than the holocaust. There is no way to rationalize eating meat as anything but catastrophically unethical.
Don’t rationalize your way out of it, accept that it makes us bad people and try to do something about it.
Counterpoint: shut up.
*Gulps and almost chokes on triple-bacon-beefy-saiyan-deluxe*
“Finally!”
You guys keep saying the word “sapience.” But do you mean SENTIENCE? Because “sapience” is a derivative of homo sapiens which means human. But if you are talking about animals, they are not humans, therefore not homo sapiens, therefore no “sapience.” I think you are contemplating animals’ SENTIENCE. 🤔
Holy moral absolutism batman, this barely reaches Sunday School levels of ethical thought. I’m a strong proponent of abandoning animal product dependence but poor-puppy-dog arguments drive me nuts.
For starters, every living being has a prerogative to survive and propagate its genetic pattern; pleasure and pain are base mechanisms for that. I personally refuse to believe that there is anything inherently bad about the existence of pain any more than the existence of pleasure is inherently good. Our human aversion to inflicting undue pain is natural as prosocial animals but that doesn’t make it morally just or our tolerances for violence absolute.
Our reactions to violence aren’t universal because every plant and animal has a set of characteristics which overlap with human characteristics to varying degrees. Those overlap very little with plants, more with mammals, even more with domesticated animals (selected for prosocial traits) and most with primates.
Moreover, our sensitivity to those traits is highly personal, depending on the context of our exposure to them. If your only exposure to non-human mammals is pet dogs then you’ll obviously draw parallels when you see cattle with eyelashes and fur and tails. If you have to deal with dangerous feral dogs and nuisance vermin then you won’t have the same sensitivity to those traits.
Our society exists at the expense of other forms of life, either directly (animal husbandry) or indirectly (habitats disrupted by our infrastructure). So saying nobody should eat meat because it causes suffering doesn’t say anything about universal ethics, it’s an unexamined exclamation that tells more about your existential dissonance than mine.
Before you dive into an argument about minimizing suffering, let’s look closer at this part:
There is no way to rationalize eating meat in modern society as anything but catastrophically unethical
Humans have already destroyed many food chains, usually by eliminating apex predators. If there’s nothing to hold the deer population in check, native plants will be decimated and the ecosystem will collapse. Humans are left in the position of culling them as the apex predator, the violence must happen either way.
How could eating the meat be “catastrophically unethical” in that situation? That’s the expected flow of the food chain. Is it better to self-flagellate by disposing of ready calories; wasting water + topsoil + time to turn it into a vegan food?
Putting aside “humans greedy and meat bad”, let’s examine a fun part of your argument:
we cause immense suffering and death at a scale and acuity worse than the holocaust
We have 8 billion megafauna primates on our pale blue dot. Any pain we inflict is necessarily going to be at an immense scale. The scale has no ethical bearing unless you’re arguing against utility derived, in which case a genocide is infinitely worse because we derive no utility from it.
Checkmate badgers.
We should normalize poetry.
Don’t you go aristotling on me
Food is fucking weird
Mom is stoned.
“What kind of mushrooms did you put in the mushroom sauce?”
Trip ≠ High
Cold?
Mom needs to learn to cook
“cold raw flesh”
Mom needs to learn to cook
Or maybe you just need to learn to read? This is clearly before cooking
Mom needs to
learn tostart the cook (I’m hungry)
Apparently the term “long pig” for human flesh originated because we taste like pork. I wonder if butchered cuts of human look like pork too.
I know Mythbusters used pig carcasses a ton because it was so similar to humans so I assume so.
I read a short story once where in the future they could synthesize foods (like Star Trek), and part of the challenge was to find the best flavors. At some point there is a combination formula going around that everyone agrees is the best tasting food ever. The end of the story is the person narrating who had figured out what the formula is simulating, and it’s people.
Also, Soylent Green is mentioned in the movie to be a very popular and preferred flavor, more than the past Soylent products.
Did it smell like pork?
Deep Thoughts by Werner Herzog.
Pre-vegan thoughts.
Or pre-hunter.
I feel for mom. I want to be vegan but I hate legumes. So instead of becoming protein deficient because I refuse to eat beans, I’ll just wait for lab-grown meat to finally get USDA (FDA?) approval.
There are many more vegetal protein sources though, and if you really can’t bear those either just eat eggs
Then they would be vegetarian, not vegan
Tofu, seitan, synthesized pea or soy protein… where I live, you can get vegan nonfat skyr that tastes every bit as funky as real skyr, and although it does have a hollow, oaty aftertaste, you can counter it pretty easily by adding a fat (I tend to carefully temper melted vegan butter and just add that) or using it with something (like jam, oats, and wheat germ/flaxseed) or as a thickener/creamy/cultured element in a recipe
I avoid soy protein because I heard it can promote estrogen production. Correct me if I’m wrong.
Plus I just like steak and octopus too much. I’ll wait for lab-grown meat.
Even chickpeas, lentils, or peanuts? I dislike western beans but I’m fine with these others which are (IMO) quite superior.
Especially chickpeas, lentils, and peanuts. Peanut butter is alright, though.
Valid!
I mean, has she tried her leg?
That’s because it is poetry. Mom might need a psych eval, but it’s still poetry (and I love it).
// I cooked a steak tonight // and was feeling alien // // How weird this gross piece // of cold raw flesh // on a cold plate is // // and I was thinking // I am just an animal // with the luxury of packaged flesh // and is it human flesh? // Like // I wouldn't know // We just believe it's a cow but // // we don't // // have fucking proof // // of anything // // // The knife went through the same // // as if it was my own leg // // -MomTrying desperately to recall AP English classes to remember which poet was particularly renowned for doing unusual spacing and alignment in poems like this. Hemmingway?
ee cummings?
THAT’S THE GUY
Thank you!
Interesting, I didn’t know there was actually a guy kind of famous for that. These days, it always feels like a bit of a meme, like,
oh i wrote my text in a way that made you read it different now its pohetrykbyethx
Behutiful
The various spacings make this read to me like a William Shatner impression
that lady is dissociating. get her some therapy.
Fuck that, get her elected
