More on Why We "Eat Pigs"

The Random Animal has not fallen off the ends of the earth, just off the ends of the world-wide web for a while.

I'm still reading Melanie Joy's Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows: An Introduction to Carnism. "Carnism" is "the belief system that enables us to eat animals." Joy has introduced the term "carnism" to provide ways to analyze meat production. The structure of the book is explanatory and interpretive rather than narrative. It seems to be designed as a very approachable textbook, with abstractions like "schemas," "psychic numbing" and "ideology" explained. Side-bars further explain some concepts or highlight quotations that subvert status quo assumptions: "The invisible and the nonexistent look very much alike" from Delos. B. McKown.
Some sections are painful reading as they describe the abuses of factory farming. Like Michael Pollan and Jonathan Safran Foer, Joy finds ample evidence of food animals mistreated during their brief lives. It is cheaper, she argues, to raise large numbers, with die-offs of many expected, than to give each animal adequate care. "A typical hog breeding plant," she explains, "employs fifteen people to manage 3,000 sows" (44). According to the USDA, there were 64.3 million hogs in the agricultural system in December 2010 (and that's a drop of 2% from September. In Joy's reckoning, many of these will live surrounded by excrement, noxious gases, and their own dead. A number will NOT be adequately stunned before being killed; a number will not be dead before the butchering begins.
Joy assumes that 98 to 99% of Americans will never encounter hogs, or other farm animals, except as slabs in supermarket packages. This makes denial and avoidance of the slaughter issue easy; these defenses and desired ignorance keep in place a "violent ideology" that supports factory farming. The system keeps the sight of these animals from us: "Most of us, even those who are not 'animal lovers' per se, don't want to cause anyone--human or animal--to suffer, especially if that suffering is intensive and unnecessary. It is for this reason that violent ideologies have a special set of defenses that enable humane people to support inhumane practices and to not even realize what they're doing" (33).

So far I find Joy most convincing on linking "carnism" to factory farming. If, as a culture, we saw the living death of these animals, we would stop. I have been and now live, however, among the 1 to 2% of Americans who do encounter animals--these are also areas where deer and bird hunting are common. True, many do not like to kill or "clean" animals themselves; but especially on the few small farms that exist, they can "see" the animal and accept its death. (I'm not far from the glass abattoir Michael Pollan describes in The Omnivore's Dilemma.) And so far, Joy does not account for the origins of meat-eating or the practices of less industrialized cultures. I have a relative who's witnessed the slaughter of goats for a Namibian feast and the slaughter of about 40 free-range Iowan chickens.

The factory farm system needs exposing, but human willingness to eat flesh did nor arise from a hidden system. Meanwhile, I'll continue reading about the impact of meat culture on Homo sapiens.