Absence of Disgust

Like most young children growing up, my favorite meal was chicken fingers. I find it funny now, that when I was younger I never found disgust of the connection that I might actually be consuming chicken's fingers. Today, if I had no knowledge of what chicken fingers were actually made of, if someone offered a chicken finger to me, I know I would cringe in disgust just thinking how I could eat somethings fingers the same way I cringe at the though of consuming a testicle. Melanie Joy explains in "Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows : An Introduction to CARNISM" that "What is most striking about our selection of edible and inedible animals is not the presence of disgust, but the absence of it." (Joy 431) Growing up I had a complete absence that eating chicken fingers was killing an animal, and as an animal loving human and child I would looked at eating chicken the same way I looked at my spinach, inedible. 

The man in this picture, like majority of humans, may have empathy about the chicken that he is now consuming, but lacks any apathy. Like him, I too have been blinded by the process of "psychic numbing"  creating an image of what I deem acceptable and unacceptable. And, I too, use "invisibility" and "dissociation" to eat beef, chicken and other animals without envisioning the actual animal I am eating.  Some people say that if slaughterhouses had glass walls we would all be vegetarians, however I feel that we need to completely change the way we feel about eating animals, sometimes seeing is not just enough. If slaughterhouses caused minimal pain, people would feel okay about eating any meat that is acceptable in their given society.

"It has been said that denial is one of the most powerful forces in the universe" (Masson 463). Agreeing with Jeffrey Masson, I believe that denial is overwhelmingly strong. Being in denial is like living in a false reality. Everything we see, do, and feel can be masked by denial hiding the harsh truth. Masson explains that "children are trained to disassociate. they eat in kind of a trance of denial" (Masson 468), thus explaining how I could never get enough chicken fingers as a child or had a preference of the leg and thigh when eating chicken for dinner. Denial over powered the reality that I was eating an animal that was tortured and suffered. Now being older, I know what my food is made out of and after watching Earthlings,  I have seen, and felt the fear and disgust of watching these animals suffer every day. Masson says "willed ignorance is surely just one more form of denial." (Masson 463). Since, I eat a burger and know its made from innocent cows who suffered, what does that make of me? I know what has happened to the cows but I do not see their face in my burger so I continue to eat it. I know if it stood their looking right back at me, I just couldn't bear to be in a 100 mile radius of it. Like Masson says on page 470, "We must remove ourselves from whatever blind hides our vision...we owe animals no less." I just need to figure out how.