“Meat”

I just got back from vacationing with my friends. It was super fun but the meals were tough honestly. Everyone was eating animals except me, and that made me feel uncomfortable & isolated. I didn’t want to say anything though because that would make them all uncomfortable too. And worse, they might think I’m annoying & preachy. I want them to like me so I don’t say anything.

It wasn’t like this until recently, but being around meat actually puts me on edge these days. I think my cognitive dissonance around it all has just slowly broken down.

I always knew meat came from dead animals, but I didn’t really know. Not until recently at least. Even when I stopped eating meat a few years ago, it hadn’t fully sunk in. I’ve had to gradually chip away at this dissonance between food & animals. It’s painful sometimes.

Meat is someone’s corpse. It might sound weird to hear it that way. But yeah, animals are someones. They are individuals. They have desires & emotions. They have experiences and a will to live. Meat is someone who was brutally tortured their entire life, and then stabbed in the throat.

It’s tough because I know my friends think about it way differently than me. To them it’s food. To me it’s someone’s body. It’s a constant reminder of all the cruelty & violence that goes unnoticed.

It happens to me all the time now. I’ll walk into my living room and see my roommate thawing his beef. I’ll watch someone’s story and see the chicken wings. And of course, most meals I have with others, someone is chewing on an animal.

It makes me feel pretty isolated sometimes. Because I’m usually the only one who feels this way. And it’s not exactly an easy conversation to have. People literally get upset if you remind them they’re eating someone who used to be alive.

I don’t think eating animals makes you a bad person. We’re raised in a world that gives us every incentive to do so. It’s just so fucking sad. That we put bits & pieces of corpses on the dining table and cut them up and shove them down our throats. That we do so without a second thought. That we’re so removed from it all. If you were an animal, would you want someone to slit your throat?

Calling it “meat” is messed up itself. It conceals so much. Which is the only reason we can use the word so casually.

Meat is someone. Someone that was tortured. Someone that had everything taken from them. All for the sake of a 15 minute meal.

Animals want to live. They want to live. I’m fucking horrified by the slaughterhouse footage I’ve seen. Of the animals fighting for their lives, desperately trying to escape. They can’t do shit though. They’re so vulnerable, and humans have exploited that vulnerability. We have denied them their lives and made them our “meat”.

We can be so much better. This has to end.