Melanie Joy ~ Guest Blog ~ Eating Consciously ~ 26 October 2009

[Carolyn Bailey]

Like most people, I grew up eating meat. I also grew up with a dog, who
was my best friend throughout my childhood. And like most people, I
didn’t think about how I could love my dog yet eat other animals daily
without thinking about what I was doing or why. Though there were times
when I’d question and rebel against eating animals – when, for
instance, I was faced with the resistant vein in the drumstick I was
biting into and I lost my appetite for the chicken, or when I witnessed
footage of the inhumane treatment of farmed animals – there were an
equal number of times I was coaxed back into my meat eating: I wasn’t
allowed to leave the dinner table until I’d cleaned my plate; my
pediatrician told my parents I needed meat to develop a strong, healthy
body; I was supposedly having “food issues” that were potentially
symptomatic of an eating disorder. So my discomfort at the idea of
eating meat would eventually “wear off” and the questions that had
hovered at the edge of my awareness were pushed back down out of
consciousness. I could maintain the gap in my consciousness that
enabled me to love some animals and eat others.

As a young adult, the internal conflict I’d felt about my relationship with
animals finally forced me to examine my assumptions and behaviors
toward eating meat and I became a vegetarian. I became deeply concerned
with the intense suffering caused by meat production, and with the fact
that I had been actively discouraged from learning the truth about meat
production and from reflecting on my food choices. In fact, I hadn’t
even realized that eating meat was a choice. It was presented by
society, my family, my friends, virtually everyone as simply a given,
as the way things are. Had I known that eating meat was a choice, I may
well have chosen otherwise. During this time I also became fascinated
with how my mentality, my paradigm, had fundamentally shifted. Food
that had once been delicious had become disgusting to me. What had
happened?

My concern with animal suffering, along with my desire to raise consciousness so that people like myself would be
encouraged to – rather than discouraged from – reflect on their
attitudes and behaviors toward animals, and my desire to understand the
psychology of eating (and not eating) meat led me to research what I
eventually came to call carnism. And there was another motivation for
my research: as I became more involved with organizations that
supported vegetarianism, I also became aware of the deep divide between
many vegetarians and carnists (meat eaters). I wanted to assuage
vegetarians’ frustration with and often judgment toward people who eat
meat. I wanted to explain the profound and complex psychological and
social mechanisms that enable “good” people to engage in behaviors that
don’t necessarily reflect their deeper value system, and encourage
vegetarians to feel more compassion and understanding for the meat
eaters in their lives. I also wanted to support vegetarians who often
encounter unprovoked defensiveness from carnists; I wanted to help
vegetarians understand why the mere mention of meat production could
cause a defensive, sometimes intense “anti-vegetarian” response from
carnists and therefore how to have a more productive dialogue around
the issue of meat.

As a doctoral student in psychology, I interviewed meat cutters, carnists, vegetarians, and vegans. I read
everything I could get my hands on about meat eating, cross-cultural
consumption patterns, vegetarianism, animal welfare, animal rights,
psychological “numbing,” cognitive moral dissonance, disgust, the
psycho-sociology of violence and nonviolence, and a host of other
issues that I thought might be related to my topic of interest. And I
continued this exploration into my post-doctoral career.

What I found was that, in general, people tend to “numb” themselves to some
degree in order to eat (or produce) meat. Most people feel a moral
discomfort with the idea of eating someone – rather than something –
and so they push this awareness aside in order to comfortably consume
animals. This mentality is enabled by a dominant social system, or
ideology, that I call carnism. Like other dominant systems that depend
on people to act against their deeper value system (most people’s value
system doesn’t condone extensive and unnecessary animal suffering),
carnism is structured in a way to block our awareness of the animals
and meat we eat. The system uses a set of defense mechanisms that
become ingrained in our psyche from the moment we’re old enough to eat
solid food. The primary defense of the system is invisibility – carnism
remains invisible by remaining unnamed, and the process by which
animals are turned into meat remains, to most people, hidden. (The
“psychic numbing” I write about applies to people in Western cultures
and who are not dependent on meat to survive. It would have been
impossible, and inappropriate, to discuss the myriad psychologies of
all societies. However, I do dedicate a section of the book to
discussing how psychic numbing may operate across cultures and eras –
how, for instance, it may apply to those who butcher and perhaps hunt
animals for food.)

In Why We Love Dogs…I deconstruct carnism. As the subtitle explains, the book is about the belief system that
enables us to eat some animals and not others. I have dedicated two out
of the seven chapters to exposing the truth about meat production so
that readers can understand the facts that the system works to hide.
Since invisibility is the primary defense of the system, it is
necessary to make the invisible visible. The other chapters explain the
specific ways in which carnism is woven into the fabric of society and
our psyches. To help readers understand these concepts, I use examples
from other ideologies that also relied on psychic numbing and that are
structurally similar to carnism; throughout history, humane people have
supported inhumane practices not because these people were “bad” or
“evil” but because they existed within a system that shaped their
perceptions, feelings, and behaviors. The last chapter also includes an
explanation of how to transform numbing into awareness – how to become
an active witness, to the system and oneself.

I wrote Why We Love Dogs…because, though much has been written about meat production,
and some books have explored the history of meat eating, no book had
been written about the psycho-sociology of meat consumption. The reason
we love some animals and eat others is not because some animals are
more loveable or because some animals are more edible; cross-cultural
analyses reveal that neither practicality nor rationality determine
which species become food and which become pets (I have dedicated a
section in the book to explaining this issue). In Why We Love Dogs…my
aim was not to discuss biology, but ideology. When meat eating isn’t a
necessity, it’s a choice, and choices always stem from beliefs –
beliefs, in turn, come from ideology. Just as discussing the biological
differences between so-called “races” has distracted from a discussion
about the ideology of racism, so, too, is a discussion of predation or
“omnivorousness” a distraction from the very real and pressing issue of
carnism.

Why We Love Dogs… is, in short, an exploration of the social and psychological forces that surround our experience of eating
meat. It is based on well-established sociological and psychological
principles, woven together with anthropological data to produce a broad
theoretical framework for understanding the underpinnings of
contemporary meat consumption. Though I have drawn on a number of
empirical studies, I do not intend the book as a rigid and conclusive
scientific treatise but rather as an exploration, and like any
exploratory work its principles may not apply to all people, all the
time. Why We Love Dogs…is not meant to be the “final word” on meat
consumption, but the beginning of an ongoing exploration in which ideas
are built upon, modified, and evolve over time. I wrote the book as an
invitation to open up dialogue, a dialogue that I believe is of
enormous importance to all of us: carnists, vegetarians, animals, and
our planet.

-Melanie Joy, Ph.D., Ed.M.
Author, "Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows: An Introduction to Carnism" and "Strategic Action for Animals"

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