The psychology of meat
What we eat can say a lot about us, but sometimes it goes beyond the political.
This is the introduction of my series on ‘meat’. I am not a psychologist, nutritionist, historian, anthropologist, philosopher, animal rights advocate, or expert of any kind. I am writing on this topic out of personal interest. Please tell me where I have got the facts wrong and by all means, share your experience!
Meat is a topic close to many people’s hearts — and mouths. Fuelled by burgeoning populations and incomes, global consumption of animal products has quadrupled over the past 50 years, with the production of over 350 million tonnes of meat a year.
Behind this mid-boggling statistic is an even more mind-boggling one: we collectively kill over 75 billion land animals a year, or hundreds of millions per day. Numbers this large are simply impossible to imagine, even excluding the fish we eat — approximately 200 million tonnes per year.
In fact, for many, it seems these numbers are so large as to be meaningless. Vegan activists and advocates often highlight the invisibility of these animals — most are bred and slaughtered in factory farms out of sight from the general populace. It would be hard, on this basis, to compare these lives to those of humans, or animals we live alongside, even given our great capacity for imagination and empathy.
At the same time, you could say many of those who kill animals for a living lead invisible lives. Even somebody who eats meat might look down on the butchers, and farmers, and abattoir workers — people who, we assume, have no qualms about killing potentially thousands of animals a day. Because, of course, eating something that is already killed and packaged for a consumer is not the same as killing it yourself.
I hope it is not too much of stretch to say that these contradictory beliefs are normal — expected, even — in many societies. But I am not interested in calling us out as hypocrites. Meat, and how we consume all things, can never be reduced to a binary moral choice. One in five people around the world rely on livestock as their main source of income, and around 60 million people work in the fishing industry. Without weaponising them against veganism, these statistics matter too.
If, indeed, major meat-producing nations do adopt a more plant-based diet in the future, the reasons will not be simple. Maybe meat will get dramatically more expensive because of harsher climate conditions. Or, perhaps, the quality and production of lab-grown meat will improve. Or crop agriculture will become the more profitable choice for farmers.
Yet there is always the possibility that we will change how we think about meat, as the growing vegetarian and vegan movements are demonstrating. In the process we might redraw the lines between what we consider to be acceptable and unacceptable animals to eat. We can see this already happening in Europe, for example, with horse meat. Though consuming it has always been a taboo in several countries, it is only because of recent changing attitudes in France and Italy that their appetite for the food is diminishing.
However, it’s hard to judge another culture for eating horses or dogs when your own is obsessed with beef. What makes some mammals edible and others companions? In terms of intelligence, companionability, and ability to develop strong relationships with their young, cows are comparable not only to horses and dogs, but humans.
I write this having eaten a beef burger only yesterday, something I have mixed feelings about (particularly because it was a bit overdone). On the one hand, the meal seemed perfectly justifiable: I don’t eat beef very often; I was eating out; the animal was already dead. On the other hand (or hoof) I know I would never kill the animal with my own hands; I know it probably suffered horribly; I know, at some level, that it was intelligent and emotionally complex.
Of course, if I really thought any of this, I might have hesitated to eat the burger. And of course, I didn’t. My only grievance was not that I had done something morally wrong, but that it was a bit tough to chew.
I want to talk about meat because of this conflict I feel. It’s not that I entirely feel guilty — at some level I really can justify my decisions. I also don’t think my experience is exceptional. There are people who think consuming meat is their divine right, and people who see it as no less than murder, but I believe that most people — vegans and vegetarians, pescatarians and flexitarians included — sit somewhere between these polarities.
It is this ambiguous sphere of behaviour that interests me. While there is now more awareness about the cruelty and destructiveness of animal production than ever, and more readily available alternatives, old habits die hard. For every omnivore who successively transitions onto a vegan diet, there is at least one vegan who finds themselves ungracefully transitioning back. Some omnivores may be surprised to learn that non-meat-eaters are often entirely tolerant of them (they would be very lonely if not), just as they are tolerant of other vegetarians and vegans who occasionally submit to the allure of fried chicken. Though what we eat can say a lot about us, we must admit that sometimes it goes beyond the political. We are animals after all, driven by instincts and biases that happen at the atomic level.
There’s my pitch. In a bite-sized series of articles, I want to explore the psychology of eating meat.
Two questions stick out to me: Why do we eat meat? And what does it say about us?
I will look at meat-eating through the lens of such areas as language, identity and ethics. In the process I hope to understand both my own actions and our collective actions: why Hong Kong (as of 2020) consumes more meat per person on average than any other country; and why India consumes the least. Why some of us are more likely to definitively cut out meat from our diets than others, and what motivates us to do so. Why, indeed, so many of us resist even when we think reducing consumption of animal products is the more empathetic, morally sound and environmentally friendly lifestyle choice.
This is not my area of specialism, so I will rely on experts: from Pythagoras to Melanie Joy, an influential vegan psychologist who coined the term ‘Carnism’ to explain the system of beliefs that justifies eating meat.
Now there’s something to chew on.
