User Reviews
Rating: really liked it
I’ve been vegan for over a decade, and I’ve read a lot of arguments for and against the lifestyle choice. There’s a lot of information (and misinformation) out there and it’s a very contentious and heated subject. Even now, as I write this, I expect to get trolled in the comments section or be hit with people trying to justify their consumption of animal products. I promise you, there is absolutely nothing I haven’t heard before. Or, at the very least, I know I will lose followers when I post this review. I always seem to when I post this kind of content.
Admittedly, I have found the Goodreads community to be much more welcoming to veganism than most. There seems to be quite a few vegans on here and those that are open-minded. So, I’m going to talk about this book quite freely and engage with the most important question it poses:
Why do we eat some animals but not others? This is an interesting question and Dr Melanie Joy’s purpose here it to make you think; it is to make you understand that there is a great deal of prejudice involved in our food choices and even more hypocrisy: it is to demonstrate the absurd nature of the entire food system. Essentially, at least in the west, we love dogs and cats but happily and unflinchingly eat cows and pigs and chickens. We see some animals as more worthy and deserving of respect. We call them pets and we could never imagine eating them. Why? Why do they deserve life when our “food” does not?
This is called carnism, a belief system that deems it okay to eat some animals and not others. This is often culturally determined and conditioned by society. We essentially exist in a system that has made this seem morally acceptable and normal when it is totally bizarre. The treatment of animals, at the root of things, is determined by their species. Dr Melanie Joy coined the term carnism, and she uses it to demonstrate this phenomenon with the hope that more people will give up eating and using animals entirely.
Today, she works toward promoting a vegan world with her influential organisation Beyond Carnism. What’s interesting here is her credentials as a clinical psychologist and the way in which she has written this book. She has strategically laid out her argument to make the reader think critically. She asks a lot of questions, and she builds slowly and carefully up to her point. And it’s a very effective device. I really do encourage everyone to engage with these ideas because they are quite revealing.
As a vegan academic, I find discussions like this fascinating. So this was a very interesting and rewarding book for me.
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Rating: really liked it
As I read this book, I vacillated between saying to myself “well, duh!” and then thinking it was an exceptional book, one where this subject has never been written about before in this exact way. It’s a slim book but it contains a lot of food for thought.
I felt as though I were back in a college psychology class because my mind was being stimulated in just the way it was during some of those classes. It’s written in a very reader friendly manner and even though there’s a lot of terminology that might not be familiar to all readers, it doesn’t use a lot of jargon, it’s written so that any unfamiliar words will have a clear meaning with the reading of them.
Melanie Joy has coined the word carnism and I really like that the word is now in the vernacular.
The book is definitely written for and directed at the carnists, the vast majority of the population who accepts the dominant paradigm; those living as omnivores. However, vegetarians and vegans can also learn a lot from this book.
Unless I’m reading for a class of some sort, I rarely take notes when I read books for pleasure or edification, but I took many notes here. I’m going to leave most of them out of this review. I don’t want to just regurgitate the book’s contents here. I want readers to read the book for themselves.
This is a psychology and philosophy book and the author’s musings and hypotheses were what interested me most. I cared less for the material about the atrocities committed against farmed animals. However, I because I do believe the author was writing for those who’d maybe never questioned they way things are, that information might be necessary to put what she is saying into context, and it actually makes up a rather small part of the book. I really do love her though!: She specifically says that once we know the full extent and all the details of the suffering of animals, we no longer need to continually expose ourselves to graphic imagery in order to work on their behalf. Thank goodness! I’ve been reading what’s what for over two decades and sometimes it’s just too painful for me to put my focus on the specifics of what goes on.
I love the one or two quotes that start off each chapter; they’re so apt. I liked them so much so that I put a few of them in my Goodreads quotes.
For Americans who truly cannot care about the 20 billion animals killed for food in the U.S. every year, or even care about the devastation caused to the environment, the 300 million (human) animals might get their attention. I love how the author refers to these 300 million as the collateral damage of carnism: the factory farm workers, those who live near factory farms, and those who eat animal flesh.
Most people like to believe that they make their own choices, and that they’re in control of how they act. I’d like to challenge them to read this book because the author talks about how the pervasive and violent ideology of carnism is the norm, how most believe without questioning, how the system is set up so that much of the truth is hidden from the population, and how this system is so entrenched that it’s just the way things are, and most aren’t even aware of their philosophy or aware they even have a philosophy. Vegetarianism has been named because those people are doing something different. Carnism was never named because those people are just doing what everybody does. It’s invisible, legitimized, and unnamed until now.
The author writes about how every aspect of society, not just those making money off the killing of animals, goes along with this ideology of carnism, including the legal system and the news media. The system depends on its invisibility, on myth, on conformity, on objectification, deindividulization, dichotomization of the animals, and on confirmation bias, where people get fed what they already believe.
She contends that most people feel better if they attain integration, a state where their values and practices are in alignment, that most people are actually disgusted by what they think of as moral offenses, that in order to do what they’re doing as carnists dissociation and denial are widespread, because while society believes eating meat is normal, natural, and necessary, those aren’t really facts.
Studies have shown (she uses Stanley Milgram’s experiments as an example) that people will sometimes not obey their own consciences but will cede to those in authority. Joy encourages her readers to question that external authority and question the status quo, and pay attention to their own internal authority.
The book ends on a very hopeful note. The author believes that not only can we change and that the time is right for change, but that the vast majority of people would be more comfortable with their values and actions matching. So she believes that people can change and will want to change when they learn the truth. She gives some of those truths in this book. The reader can decide for herself/himself what to make of the information.
At the end of the book there is a list of useful resources, notes, a bibliography, and an index.
The way I figure it, even those people who are certain that they will want to eat animals their whole lives will appreciate this book. The ideas she proposes here can be generalized to all sorts of subjects, at least some that every reader will find beneficial to contemplate.
Rating: really liked it
Melanie Joy is the leading researcher in the field of carnism, a field she invented. If that sounds a tad catty, sorry, but I'm laboring under the burden of having actually read her book.
Dr. Joy purports to give us a thoroughly researched discussion of the psychology of why we eat meat, and why we eat some animals and not other animals. This book has gotten a lot of praise, for it's fairness and respectful attitude towards people who eat meat. I'm honestly mystified by that praise. The assumption of the moral superiority of veganism is quite clear. It's true she does assume that us carnists are doing it because we're bad people. No, she assumes it's because we don't know any better, are ignorant, brainwashed, and perhaps not very bright. This book is poorly researched, poorly reasoned, and overall pretty silly.
One of the sillier and more annoying features of the book is her effort, repeated throughout the book, to suggest that eating meat is not natural--despite the fact that she concedes our ancestors have been doing it for two million years. Despite the fact that we've been eating meat since before we were fully human, we only eat meat because of an "ideology of carnism." Really? I want to read her explanation of how this "ideology of carnism" arose in Homo erectus, or among the tribes of chimpanzees who hunt, kill, and eat monkeys whenever they get the chance.
Saying that something our ancestors have been doing for two million years, since before we were fully human, is "not natural" is to strip the word "natural" of all meaning.
On the "lack of respect" point, I think it's rather hard to overlook the quotes used throughout the book, many about Nazis and how they treated the people they considered subhuman, some about slavery, some about misogyny. You're not being "respectful" when you imply that the people who disagree with you are like the Nazis. On the internet, that would be called a "Godwin violation" and the discussion would shut down. And I'll note an amusing little irony: Hitler was a vegetarian, and very concerned about humane treatment of animals. Does that make vegetarians bad? Does it make them like Nazis? Of course not! Nazis have nothing to do with this discussion, and it's a mistake for Dr. Joy to pretend that they do.
One of her basic points is that we perceive some animals as food, and some animals as family members, and still others as just icky. ("Icky" is my word, not hers.) In America, she says, we eat cows, and pigs, and chickens, because we perceive them differently than we perceive dogs. If only we were not so deluded and confused, we'd see that this difference in perception is silly, and that dogs, cows, pigs, and chickens are all really the same, sentient beings with feelings and identity. In Dr. Joy's view, it's all false perception on our part, and while she does not quite come out and use the phrase, "a rat is a dog is a boy," it's implied very strongly. There's no moral difference between eating a cow and eating a human being.
She also makes a big point of the fact that different cultures class different animals in the "animals we eat" and "animals we love" categories, implying that this proves the inherent invalidity of classing any animals as "okay to eat."
No, sorry, not true. We perceive dogs and cows and chickens differently because our relationships with them are different. Our relationships with them are very different because the animals themselves are very different. Dogs evolved out of wolves because early humans and early, proto-dog wolves had both similar social structures and complementary abilities and needs. Humans created middens of the bits of both plants and animals that were not edible to them but were edible to hungry wolves; the wolf proto-dogs who followed the human hunter-gatherer bands had better scent, hearing, and night vision, and raised the alarm when critters (human, wolf, or other) that weren't part of the established and recognized band. Everyone was better off, a little better fed and a little safer, and this evolved into a human-dog partnership--starting at least 14,000 years ago, and possibly, depending on which body of evidence and which reasoning about it you find most convincing, 250,000 years ago. If the extreme early date is at all accurate, proto-dog wolves starting partnering up with us when we were still making the transition from Homo erectus to Homo sapiens. If the latest, most recent date is correct, it was still while we were paleolithic hunter-gatherers with the beginnings of agriculture still thousands of years in our future.
Cows, on the other hand, evolved out of wild cattle that our ancestors hunted for food.
It's quite true that different cultures have different relationships with the same animals. Hindus don't eat cows; they revere them. Jews and Muslims don't eat pigs; they regard them as unclean. In China and Korea, and Dr. Joy somewhat gleefully tells us, people do eat dogs. She does note that in Korea, as more people keep dogs as pets, there's a growing movement to ban eating dogs.
What I think she's missing is that these differences are not random or accidental. Differences in food preferences and beliefs about food don't just happen. Judaism has some complex food rules that had the cultural benefit of differentiating them from their neighbors and keeping a small culture intact and cohesive, but the ban on pigs is different. There are real ecological reasons for pastoralist and subsistence agricultural cultures in the Middle East to avoid keeping pigs, no matter how tasty they are. That's why Muslims and Jews share that ban. (Note: I am talking about the practical origins, not the religious meaning it has to practicing believers.)
As for dogs and the eating and non-eating thereof: Even large dogs are much smaller than cows or pigs or horses, on the one hand, and not nearly as prolific and quickly-maturing as chickens. They're not an economic source of food, and they are eaten, where they are eaten, either as a delicacy or out of desperation.
Another area of silliness is her claim that we use different words for live animals (sheep, cows, pigs) and for the same animals when we eat them (mutton, beef, pork.) A minimal effort at research would have revealed to her--something she probably already knows, if she just stopped to think about it. This vocabulary difference comes from post-Norman Conquest England, where English peasants raised cows, pigs, and sheep, and talked about them in their own English language, while the meat was eaten by the Norman overlords--who spoke French. This vocabulary difference doesn't exist in, at least, most Western languages.
Meanwhile, Dr. Joy is overlooking two little details that undermine her point even without the linguistic history. First, when we eat chickens, we normally refer to the meat as "chicken." The same is true of turkeys and turkey. Rather an odd discrepancy, if the word differences have the "purpose" of making us forget that the meat on our plates used to be live animals. The other point is that, while the English eat mutton--the meat of adult sheep--Americans rarely do. When Americans eat the meat of sheep, we eat the meat of baby sheep--lambs. And we call that meat "lamb." Lamb chops. Leg of lamb. Rack of lamb.
It's hard to look at that fact and claim we're trying to hide the truth from ourselves because we couldn't bear to eat them otherwise.
Where her book is stronger is on the abuses of our meat production industry. Factory farming of cows, chickens, pigs, and sheep has produced terrible abuses, imperfectly and often ineffectively "regulated" by a USDA that is essentially a captive agency, charge with both regulating the industry and promoting its products. The conditions in factory farms are often appalling, and a typical slaughterhouse can be horrific. Our food animals generally don't live normal lives, and despite regulations intended to prevent it, often die in terror and pain. I try to make the best choices I can on the source of my food; I know people who are vegetarians, or effectively vegetarians, because they can't afford meat that meets their standards for humane production. This is a real issue. Our tax dollars are going to "farm" subsidies that in reality promote CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations) that are abnormal and unhealthy for the animals, compromise the safety of our food supply, and create environment-destroying pollution from runoff of animal waste and chemicals on a scale more traditional manufacturing factories are no longer permitted to do. There is absolutely nothing positive to be said about CAFOs; whether from animal welfare, human nutrition, or environmental safety, they're bad news.
Stop the subsidies, stop tilting the playing field in favor of these travesties, and our food would cost a bit more, but be dramatically healthier and more secure, while our environment would suffer much less damage.
But this brings us back to another silly claim: that locking up food production behind walls where most of us never see how our food animals are treated makes it easier for us to eat meat without picturing the live animals it came from and thereby being repelled by it. It seems a superficially reasonable argument, but it stumbles on reality. If this argument were correct, there should be more people eating meat, and eating more of it, than in past generations, most of human history, when people lived side by side with their food animals, their cattle, their sheep, their chickens, their pigs, when every animal was an individual, usually with a name. Or else deer and pheasants and rabbits were hunted, and had to be killed by the hunter and butchered by him or his wife so that they could eat. Vegetarianism should be on the decline, if Dr. Joy were correct about this.
But vegetarianism and veganism are on the rise, not on the decline. I think it's because people know, at a gut level, that there's something wrong with not knowing how your food animals are raised. We evolved as a species that knew, in the most visceral possible way, that the meat we ate came from living animals who valued their lives as much as we value our own. Most cultures have had rituals to respect the life of the animal killed, and the sacrifice being made when that life is taken to provide food for the humans. The reason we have more vegetarians and vegans, and many people who still eat meat eat less than they would have in the past, is because it's abnormal for meat to come in neatly wrapped packages bearing no resemblance to a living animal, and we know intuitively the dangers of not knowing how your food is raised. It's why urban farming is on the rise--the natural human drive to not be so disconnected from your food, and unaware of the lives of the animals you eat.
I cannot recommend this book, except for the advantages of knowing what otherwise-sensible people are saying and thinking.
I purchased this book.
Rating: really liked it
This book changed my life. Though I was familiar with many of the facts presented in the book (the perils of factory farming, etc.), I had no idea just how much cruelty and torture is endured by most of the animals who become our meat. Nor did I have any clue how intelligent and sensitive many "livestock" animals really are (
especially pigs). As an animal lover, and a meat lover, I felt very conflicted while reading. But the author effectively points out the absurdity of our cultural attitudes towards animals - we love our pets as much as family members, but we turn a blind eye to the cruelty suffered by other animals all in the name of our taste. In our modern society, we don't have to eat meat, we choose to eat meat, and there are consequences for those choices that we don't want to think about. I'm making a conscious effort to eat a meat-free diet as a result of reading this book.
Rating: really liked it
This book is kind of a mess. It's filled with baseless generalizations, poorly cited data, and spends most of its length talking not about what the title promises, but rather an attack on industrialized animal agriculture.
The book starts out with a "thought experiment" - you're at a dinner party, when the host suddenly reveals the delicious stew you're eating is made of dog. Clearly, you are horrified. If you're not, well, the author doesn't know what to do, so she offers this footnote, dismissing anyone on the other side of the issue whose views are different from how she imagines them: "Although some individuals may be intrigued rather than repulsed at the idea of eating dogs, in the United States these people represent a minority, and this book describes the experiences of Americans in general."[12] Ugh.
later, in a bizarrely formatted side bar, she quotes but doesn't contextualize or really investigate an article published by the
Telegraph , which discusses the dog meat trade in South Korea. In the same side bar, she presents the comments of "bloggers" - meaning people who commented on an article on the ASPCA's website. The inclusion of the comments is pretty odd, since they don't exactly add anything to the discussion, although the author claims "the bloggers give voice to what many people feel when they become aware of animal cruelty."[69] Apparently, these feelings include a bunch of racism:
"[I]'ve seen cruelty from all around the world, but the far east is truly shocking in its attitude towards animals...why is this? [M]y theory is cos [sic] they know the enlightened west generally gives dogs/cats the respect they deserve, and their backward societys[sic] are unwilling to catch up." [70]
The author never comments on this after quoting it, which is obviously a little problematic. Are we supposed to be like "woah, even racists care about dogs/cats," or is this being presented as a reasonable response to eating animals? Either way, ugh. Also, none of the authors/"bloggers" of these comments are actually listed in the notes at the end of the book, only the main article that it seems like they are commenting on; this is pretty lazy and potentially confusing for readers.
Also anyone who compares the [totally horrible] conditions of factory farms or the eating of meat to actual genocide is a dishonest asshole, so there's that.
If you're interested in meat eating/the meat industry, there are better books out there, many of which the author quotes liberally from. Check out
Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser or
The Omnivore's Dillema by Michael Pollan, and if you're in the mood for a radical take on the ethics of eating meat, check out
The Sexual Politics of Meat by Carol J. Adams. If you want to read the book that actually goes with the title of this one, though, I'm not sure what to suggest.
Rating: really liked it
I read this book during a timeframe when I used to travel extensively - still mindful of reading books (thankfully), but a tad mindless of food that I used to shovel into my mouth on the plane, at the airport or restaurants.
This book was quite impactful to such an extent that I changed my behaviour in terms of becoming more mindful of meat dishes that I choose to eat. For instance, I could no longer accept chicken wraps on the plane or foie gras at restaurants. I became more observant of where I consume food. I stopped eating at certain places that were not in consonance with laws and regulations of animal rights.
If you’re looking to get a deep insight into the meat industry, read this book. You may find some passages stressful and disturbing, but coping exactly with these emotions helped me become more mindful of my meat consumption.
A compelling book, triggering the urgency to intrinsically change something with the goal of transforming lives.
Rating: really liked it
I decided to become a vegetarian on a random Saturday afternoon. It wasn’t a calculated decision. I’d been incorporating more plant-based meals into my diet at that point, in a half-assed attempt at quieting down the voice in my head that told me I couldn’t be an “animal lover” and an animal eater at the same time. But on this particular Saturday afternoon, I had run out of plant-based options, and the only thing I could find in the fridge was malfouf, an Arabic dish made up of cabbage stuffed with ground beef. It happened to also be one of my favorite dishes, and I was hungry, so I decided to have some. While having my lunch, I looked down at a piece I had just bitten into and was stunned by my own reaction. I no longer saw ground beef; I saw ground bits of cow, and I was disgusted. The moral dissonance I’d been grappling with for months had finally caught up with me and I couldn’t look down at my plate again. I was too disgusted to take another bite of that meal, and that was when I decided I would never eat animals again.
I recount this story because this book gave me perspective on my own experience. Melanie Joy uses this book to prove that carnism – the belief system that conditions people to eat some animals and not others – remains unexamined by us because the industries in power have kept it out of our sight. We don’t witness the horrors of factory farming, because these farms are quite literally removed from our sight. They’re far away, windowless, and no one is allowed to enter them. We are never asked to explain why some animals are our food (cows, chickens) while some are our companions (dogs, hamsters). We have totally dissociated the act of eating meat from the process that sends it to our plates. Most of us can’t even watch videos showing factory farming conditions because of how difficult they are to endure. After all, we all love animals. None of us
wants to see them in pain. This is summed up pretty well by the following:
“The paradox is that the very reason we resist bearing witness to the truth of carnism is the same reason we desire to witness: because we care. This is the great truth that lies buried beneath the elaborate, labyrinth mechanisms of the system. Because we care, we want to turn away. And because we care, we feel compelled to bear witness. The way to overcome this paradox is to integrate our witnessing: we must witness the truth of carnism while witnessing ourselves.”
This is how it happened with me. It was all about witnessing. As soon as I had watched a few documentaries and read about the ethics of eating animals, I had some serious questions. All these things that the animal agricultural industries have worked tirelessly to hide from us had finally been brought to my attention and I had a choice: either I could ignore it, dissociate, and continue with my current lifestyle, or I could face it and examine whether I was being true to myself and to my ethics. I knew on that Saturday afternoon, looking down at that fork and seeing the ground bits of cow that hung from the end of it, that I wasn’t being true to myself.
This book is short. I read it in three sittings. It doesn’t purport to be the definitive resource on anything, and it doesn’t go in depth on any one topic. It’s written by a social psychologist who has conducted years of research on the psychology of eating animals, and had a few things to say. It’s not a masterpiece, and some of it could have been edited out, but it’s still a solid text that changed my perspective on our attitudes towards animals as food.
Rating: really liked it
This is an enlightening book for anyone interested in the psychological and social mechanisms that behind certain food choices. It's based on the author's doctoral research in psychology--but is highly readable and engaging.
Melanie Joy coined the term
carnism to describe the belief system that sees eating certain animals as ethical and appropriate. She describes the elaborate system that has evolved to keep consumers from actually examining their food choices. As long as we care about animal suffering and also continue to eat animals, she says, “our schema will distort our perceptions of animals and the meat we eat so that we can feel comfortable enough to consume them.”
So why has vegetarianism, widely accepted as a belief system, been named while carnism has not? One reason is that carnism is the norm in our society. It’s mainstream—which is simply a way of describing an ideology that is so widespread and entrenched that its practices are regarded as “common sense.” Ideologies that fall outside the mainstream—like vegetarianism—on the other hand, are easier to recognize.
Much more importantly, though, the way in which entrenched ideologies remain entrenched is by staying invisible. And the primary way in which they stay invisible is by staying unnamed. By choosing not to name the belief system, consumers are able to avoid the hard questions that it raises.
This symbolic invisibility is further supported by practical invisibility. The agricultural industry goes to great lengths to protect the secrets of how animals are raised for food on modern factory “farms.” The system is necessarily cruel because, from a business standpoint, animal welfare is a barrier to profit. Agriculturists don’t want consumers to see these cruelties, nor do consumers want to see them.
Still, there are discrepancies between consumers’ beliefs and behaviors, and one way to avoid the associated moral discomfort is to embrace what Joy calls the three Ns of justification: eating meat is
normal, natural, and
necessary. Anyone with any sense of history, especially as it pertains to social justice movements, knows that these are the exact justifications that have been used to support all exploitive systems, including African slavery and efforts to deny voting rights to women.
Joy identifies the cognitive defenses that carnists employ, and suggests that, because empathy appears to be hardwired in our brains, carnistic defenses may actually go against our nature. We cannot be wholly integrated if we care about animals but support widespread animal cruelty. There are ways to close the gap between values and behavior, which involve questioning the status quo and external authority. The author is honest about the difficulties of doing that, but encouraging about the benefits to the individual, and practical in her recommendations.
Here’s the sad—and frustrating—thing, though. The same elaborate system of cognitive defense that supports carnism will keep most carnists from ever picking up this book.
Rating: really liked it
When I read non-fiction, I read it very differently from reading fiction. And when I read a book like this about animal ethics, about vegetarianism and how to stop eating meat, I try to read it very carefully and I try keep my emotions out of it - which is very hard when reading about how we treat animals, even though this is a decent book without a lot of emotional blackmailing.
I'll just mention before anybody reads further, that there will be a few graphic details in the review below so be forewarned.
Melanie Joy's point with this book is to try and investigate and explain why we are comfortable eating some animals and not others. Why do most of us feel okay with eating a cow but not a dog. Why do we feel so bad when we hear about how they treat dogs in Asia before they eat them but don't care how pigs are treated before we eat them?
To explain this, Joy introduces the term 'carnism' as the opposite of vegetarianism, meaning people who have decided to eat meat:
"We eat animals without thinking about what we are doing and why because the belief system that underlies this behavior is invisible. This invisible belief system is what I call carnism. Carnism is the belief system in which eating certain animals is considered ethical and appropriate." (p. 29-30).
Our view on different animals is all about perception - how we perceive these animals determines how we treat them. We perceive dogs almost as persons so therefore we of course can't eat them. But pigs for instance, we perceive as being dirty stupid animals, so we don't care about eating them. This also means that when eating a pig, we don't imagine a cute little piggy playing with other small piglets but if we were told we were eating dog, we would immediately think of a cute dog running and playing on the grass. It's all about perception.
But if we suddenly imagined a cute calf when eating veal, would we be able to continue eating? Most people probably wouldn't - even though we divide animals into edible and inedible and cows are classified as edible. Joy's claim is that if we imagine the animals classified as edible as real living individual animals while eating them, then we will think differently about eating them because even though we are supposed to like eating cows for instance, the image of the actual animal might destroy this learned preference. That's also why we talk about eating beef and not eating cow, to hide what we're actually eating. We objectify animals, we de-individualize them and we dichotomize (classify them as edible and inedible) them - as well as think that it's normal, necessary and natural to eat animals.
Joy has a good point when she mentions that we only like to eat a very few types of animals and feel disgusted at eating the rest - and she thinks that our lack of disgust is at least somewhat learned. And with the lack of disgust disappears also our empathy - and even though we like animals and don't want them to suffer, we change our perception so we don't have to think about whether the animals we are eating, actually suffered.
Joy argues that the meat industry have taught us not to feel about the animals being slaughtered by disguising as much as possible what we're actually eating and what happens in the slaughterhouse. Therefore, her point with this book is to deconstruct the invisibility of the system and making us all bear witness to what's really going on. Because even though billions of animals are slaughtered and eaten each year, most of us don't see that many of them - and definitely don't see much of the process of meat production.
She deconstruct it by telling it like it is - how are cows, pigs and chickens actually treated in the meat industry. Now, if you've read books like this before, none of this is truly new or shocking but the good thing about this books is that she keeps her head most of the way and at least gives the impression of being straight about the real conditions - how the meat production goes so fast that some animals are not killed at the appropriate moment but sometimes dies bit by bit as they are chopped into pieces, boiled alive, skinned alive etc. - and at the very least, it's probably a safe bet to say that all animals die scared.
There were a few new things to me - for instance that it's illegal in some places to boil lobsters alive because they are able to feel it, that it's illegal in Monza, Italy, to keep goldfish confined in small bowls and that in 2005, Human Rights Watch issued a report criticizing the U.S. meat industry for working conditions so appalling that they violate basic human right (p. 80-81)!
I really liked how she argued that we are all the collateral damage of carnism because it's not necessarily the most healthy way to eat, it's damaging for the environment - and at least in the US the meat industry doesn't live up to certain health standards (although we in Denmark have several meat scandals recently where super markets sold bad meat). Of course, the workers in the industry also grow accustomed to violence and sometimes act out on their family or others - or on the animals.
Now, it is clear that the United States are far behind Europe when it comes to animal rights - in Europe things are still bad but they are not as bad as in the US - as Joy also points out at several points. This doesn't give Europeans a carte blanche to eat meat because if you accept that animals are individuals in their own right who are able to suffer (and several studies have shown them to not only be fully able to feel and suffer but also to have the emotional capacity of at least the same level as young children - something Joy doesn't really go into), then you probably should think about whether it's okay to eat them.
As I've already stated, Joy does a good job of not being too emotional, blackmailing us or using bad arguments but she does cross the line - for instance here:
"Under carnism, for instance, democracy has become defines as having the freedom tho choose among products that sicken our bodies and pollute our planet, rather than the freedom to eat our food and breathe our air without the risk of being poisoned." (p. 88). Most people making the decisions are also brought up in the system and she makes it sound like decisions makers are determined to keep us unhealthy - and at least some of the research showing the negative effect on the environment and that meat are not the healthiest choice to eat, are very recent and it takes time for all to change. (Although, of course, with the way American politics are being run with lobbyist able to buy politicians, there are some further issues in the States regarding this.)
One other thing I've always had a problem with is the comparison between the meat industry and the Nazis' slaughtering of Jews. Although I don't see human beings as in a class of our own compared to the rest of the animals, we do have a bit more mental power and I think there is at the very least a difference in degree between what we are doing to the animals - and what the Nazis did - although I do see the similarities. And maybe it's just because I'm part of this system, this cruelty, because I haven't chosen the right pill yet as Morpheus offered Neo in the Matrix (which Joy also references as a comparison).
What this all comes down to is, that as modern human beings we seem to have a choice - at least those of us securely living in the western parts of the world. We do not go hungry if we stop eating meat - and evidence is slowly tickling in suggesting that it is actually healthier for both ourselves and the environment to eat at the very least less meat, if not stop eating it altogether.
But why is it then so hard to do? This is because we are trained from a very small age to eat meat. Before we are able to speak for ourselves, we have our first bite of meat. I've read some studies where they suggested that children don't like meat - from my own personal study of one child, I can say that isn't true - although she prefer easily chewable stuff like sausages and ground beef.
So I'm not a vegetarian. I'm thinking about becoming it - not just because of this book but because of many books like this, because I don't like much meat and because I don't like the idea of animal suffering. I don't eat a lot of meat but I try to cut down on it all the time and - as Joy also mentions - to do that, you have to face up to the facts regularly to remember why you're doing it.
Books like this makes me cry. The descriptions of the brutality of some workers in the slaughterhouses are so incredible cruel that it's almost impossible to understand. I'm not sure if I buy her entire argument yet - but I'm not sure whether that's because I've always been brought up to live in the bubble where it's okay to eat meat or if it's because her arguments are not entirely valid all the way through - I'm still processing it all.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.Aldous Huxley.
Rating: really liked it
Dr. Melanie Joy is a psychologist and this book is about the psychology of using animals for food. Her main message is that using animals for food involves holding cultural beliefs that many people are not aware of.
The book is intelligent and respectful to all types of people. It illuminates why it is often hard for people to give up using animals for food despite the strongly negative ethical, health and environmental consequences involved. In this respect I think it is very useful for people who have been animal rights activists for a long time who feel flabbergasted at why people "just don't get it" and change their diets after being given a single leaflet.
In exploring the psychology of using animals for food Dr. Joy makes powerful arguments for not doing so. Joy does so in a sober, intelligent way that would appeal mostly to reflective people. I wish I could go vegan again and go vegan from having read this book in that regard.
What was disappointing about this book was that Dr. Joy didn't have much to say about using the knowledge of the psychology presented to be more effective in convincing people to stop using animals for food. Dr. Joy offers only two suggestions. Make the invisible beliefs visible by naming the beliefs ( "carnism" ) and bringing the facts of eating animals into plain view that are normally hidden.
Rating: really liked it
In
Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows: An Introduction to Carnism, vegetarian animal rights advocate Melanie Joy writes:[return][return] We have a schema for every subject, including animals. An animal can be classified, for instance, as prey, predator, pest, pet, or food. How we classify an animal, in turn, determines how we relate to it whether we hunt it, flee from it, exterminate it, love it, or eat it. Some overlap can occur between categories (an animal can be prey and food), but when it comes to meat, most animals are either food, or not food. In other words, we have a schema that classifies animals as edible or inedible. [return][return]While I wish Joy would have said prey, predator, pest, pet, or protein to complete the alliteration and perhaps even added person to include the fellow humans within the scope of analysis, the biggest issue I have with this book is that it never really explores the paradoxes of this paragraph, never really describes the biological, anthropological, and sociological roots of this near universal human cognitive adaptation to categorize animals into such groupings.[return] How have present and past human cultures categorized various animal species, especially in the course of the development of domestication? [return] How does this categorization relate to the representation of specific animal species in the symbolism of religion, mythology, and folklore? [return] How do other primates and other animals seem to categorize animals based upon field research and behavioral testing? [return] When humans de-humanize each other, what categories of animals are evoked? [return] What does archaeological evidence seem to indicate to be the order of development of these different categories in the history of human culture? [return] What does research indicate about our history as scavengers, as hunter-gatherers, and as agriculture and industrialization emerged? What were past human transitions of diet associated with and how has animal categorization changed over time? [return] What is similar and different between the intuitive categorizations of animals and groupings of edible and inedible plants? [return] How does this categorization relate to essentialism and other aspects of human intuitive biology? [return] How have these adaptations related to human survival and proliferation over the course of human history? [return]Perhaps good questions, but these are
not ones the author explorers in this book.[return][return]Joy does briefly discuss the eating of dogs in the Korean culture and other atypical categorizations, but for the most part, the biological questions raised by the title of this book go unanswered. In Hume s Is-Ought divide, Joy is solely on the ought side. While the title of the book seems to indicate relevance with scientific work on the is side and work on this topic in evolutionary psychology is long due, never does Joy explore the anthropologically and culturally deep human journey of the categorization and domestication of other animal species. She only, albeit without much dogmatic and high-minded ethical pronouncement, seems to indicate simplistically, in a philosophically blank slate kind of way, that we, now in the twenty-first century,
ought not be domesticating animals for consumption.[return][return]Domesticated bovines are treated horribly in our industrialized society. As are pigs. And poultry. And fish. And more. We ve known this since Upton Sinclair s
The Jungle. Yet we seem to continue to hide from ourselves its truths in our supermarketed modern lifestyles. The fact that we, as modern humans, systematically distance ourselves from awareness of the breeding, fattening, and slaughter of these animals seems to indicate an inconsistency in our belief system. Frankly, many, it seems, prefer a good, juicy cheeseburger and avoidance of a bit of distasteful cognitive dissonance over consilience in our understanding of how we (often cruelly) relate to other animal species.[return][return]We've long been omnivorous. Yet we have theory of mind and empathize with the sufferings of others. Now there's a dilemma.[return][return]Despite the title of this book, Joy doesn t explore. One would think there s some interesting anthropological research, some actual work, worth doing.[return][return]Why we love dogs, eat pigs, and wear cows?[return][return]Joy offers no hypothesis.[return][return]She simply presents the case that our beliefs are inconsistent. Well,
obviously they are. And they have long been. [return][return]But why?[return][return]Joy asks the question. But never answers it.[return][return](This book review was done in participation of the LibraryThing Early Reviewer program: http://www.librarything.com/er/list)
Rating: really liked it
This book portrays itself as a book on the psychology behind which animals we eat and which we don't. It did that for about two chapters. Then it launched into a liberal diatribe on the evils of the meat industry in the U.S. I felt tricked. And sickened. Supposedly, the book evolved from her Ph.D. dissertation in psychology. If a work like this can be accepted for a dissertation, I don't want to interact with any psychologists who graduated from the same school.
If the author wanted to write a political book about her views, she should be upfront about it. Not hide behind the guise of another subject.
Rating: really liked it
This is a simple, straightforward answer to the question implied by the title: why do we love dogs, eat pigs, and wear cows? It's about psychology, actually social psychology. Melanie Joy actually is a social psychologist, and has used her expertise to focus in non-technical language on a question that is not only baffling to a lot of people, but of great social relevance. This is an ideal use of her gifts.
It's obvious to vegetarians that society's attitudes towards animals are inconsistent, but why isn't it obvious to others? She explains this inconsistency in a way that will satisfy vegetarians and make sense to nonvegetarians thinking about this issue as well. In the process, she coins a new word to describe what was previously unnameable: "carnism," the overall belief system that makes meat-eating "normal."
I just love how she makes up these simple mnemonic devices and lists to convey her information and make it easy to remember. In order for something really stupid and violent to succeed, where it is something like meat-eating or even as big as the Nazis, it has to be seen as natural, normal, and necessary (the "three N's"). There are also three defenses against seeing this reality: objectification, deindividualization, and dichotomization. So this is an excellent book and a very quick and relatively easy read -- it left me wanting to delve into something more technical, if she could have given us that.
Rating: really liked it
“There's a final, perhaps more fundamental, reason we resist witnessing the truth of carnism: if we no longer feel entitled to kill and comsume animals, our identity as human beings comes into question. Witnessing compels us to view ourselves as strands in the web of life, rather than as standing at the apex of the so-called food chain. Witnessing challenges our sense of human superiority; it forces us to acknowledge our interconnectedness with the rest of the natural world, an interconnectedness our species has made every effort to deny (...). And yet witnessing is ultimately liberating. When we realize that we aren't isolated fragments in a disconnected world, but rather are a part of a vast, living collective, we connect with a power much greater than our individual selves. (...) Bearing witness takes the courage to refuse to follow the path of least resistance.”
Rating: really liked it
I LOVE how Dr. Joy so concisely expresses how we see, feel, and believe about these issues and why we choose consistent ethical vegan living over the moral inconsistency that harms the vulnerable.
This is a MUST read for all of us; it's been a real EYE-OPENER for a great many whom I've met recently who also have read this book (or heard Dr. Joy speak).
