When I was six my pet rabbit, Peter, went on a “vacation in Florida” and never came back. As years passed, I eventually intuited that he was likely not living out his golden years in the sand and sun, but instead probably met the business end of a Michelin tire or got himself mixed up in the wrong patch of greens. The horrid truth of Peter’s demise, however, was not revealed to me until many years later. My beautiful furry friend had been slaughtered, butchered, sautéed and fed to me for Christmas dinner.
My parents casually revealed this to me some time around my sixteenth birthday. The shock and disgust was compounded by the wry smiles smeared across their faces as they recounted the story, subtly suggesting what, you think that’s the only pet you’ve eaten? As a child with a perhaps unhealthy affinity for animals (e.g. I was once bitten on the thigh by a friend’s dog but didn’t tell for fear of getting the dog in trouble) this was a crushing psychological blow.
I use this story in class lectures to introduce the theory of cognitive dissonance – the idea that psychological discomfort arises when there is a discontinuity between a person’s attitudes (love for animals) and behavior (eating a pet). One way to reduce such dissonance is to align one’s attitudes and behavior. I accomplished this by becoming fervently omnivorous. The thought of eating my loved pet was so discomforting, it caused a seismic shift in my attitudes towards all animals. This was a way to justify what I had done. I transformed them from loveable companions to nothing more than meat.
These days it’s increasingly common to judge others in accordance with what’s on their plate. Meat-eaters are chided for their callousness in the face of clear harm to entities worthy of care, while herbivores are accused of being moralizing hypocrites. But these preferences, like all others, are shaped by a confluence of variables that often times say less about a person’s character than about their experiences.
To an important degree, food choices hinge on what types of entities we think qualify for our moral concern and compassion. And recent research has told us that such judgments can be easily manipulated. We can be compelled to anthropomorphize or dehumanize non-human (and human) agents, and our compassion for others can be turned on and off. In other words, there is flexibility in the psychological mechanisms that determine whether we look at a rare steak and see an atrocity or a thing of beauty.
So, the line we draw around those entities that we consider worthy of moral concern is difficult to define. And tempting though it may be to call foul on those whose eating habits differ from our own, it's important to acknowledge just how blurry it can be. My own food preferences were significantly shaped by a desperate attempt at dissonance reduction from a childhood trauma. What could be the story behind that person sitting next to you ordering the vegan pizza or the blood sausage?
