Melanie Joy on the ideology of Carnism

  • Thread starter Thread starter spencelo
  • Start date Start date
Status
Not open for further replies.
“Often, vegan advocates assume that a person’s defensiveness is the result of selfishness or apathy, when in fact it is much more likely the result of systematic and intensive social conditioning.”

― Melanie Joy, Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows: An Introduction to Carnism: The Belief System That Enables Us to Eat Some Animals and Not Others
 
“There is a vast mythology surrounding meat, but all the myths are in one way or another related to what I refer to as the Three Ns of Justification: eating meat is normal, natural, and necessary. The Three Ns have been invoked to justify all exploitative systems, from African slavery to the Nazi Holocaust. When an ideology is in its prime, these myths rarely come under scrutiny. However, when the system finally collapses, the Three Ns are recognized as ludicrous.”
Click to expand...
― Melanie Joy,
Click to expand...
 
“Violent ideologies speak their own language; core concepts are translated to maintain the system while appearing to support the people. Under carnism, for instance, democracy has become defined as having the freedom to 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. But violent ideologies are inherently undemocratic, as they rely on deception, secrecy, concentrated power, and coercion–all practices that are incompatible with a free society. While the larger system, or nation, may appear democratic, the violent system within it is not. This is one reason we don’t recognize violent ideologies that exist within seemingly democratic systems; we simply aren’t thinking to look for them.”
Click to expand...
― Melanie Joy
Click to expand...
 
April,

You can post quotes all day. Why not engage them and say why you think they’re wrong?
 
I couldn’t get past the first part of the video, it’s so stupid.

I realize there are middle-class and wealthy Americans who think it’s “advanced” not to eat meat. The woman asks why we don’t eat dogs. Some people on earth do, but we don’t because it isn’t part of western culture and their meat is hazardous. Why isn’t eating dogs part of western culture? Because westerners are largely the descendants of steppe herders. You can’t raise herds of dogs at all, and certainly not on the grassland steppes.

1/3 of the world’s habitable surface is grassland. It won’t grow anything but grass. Grass is indigestible to human beings. It is to dogs and many other animals as well. It is digestible, however, to ruminants like cattle and sheep. This provides humans (and their pets) with high-quality protein and minerals from a resource that’s otherwise useless. That’s why, in western culture, we eat beef and mutton for the most part. Hogs will eat anything, including the manure of cattle and sheep, so they’re the “garbage can” animals that are, in some ways, the easiest to raise on meager resources, including things we would sicken or die if we ate.

So, perhaps some people are willing to see 1/3 of the habitable world go back to wild animals (particularly wild ruminants) and feed nobody. A lot of people will die in that event.

Further, a lot of what can be grown on the rest of the land isn’t particularly useful as human food, by itself. Try a diet of grain alone and see how you do. Hogs and poultry can do it without a lot of trouble. But it isn’t sufficient for humans, generally speaking; especially the types of corn and sorghum that people can’t digest well, but which hogs can.

Vegetables? Only a limited part of the earth’s surface can be used to grow vegetables. We would have little of them but for chemical fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides and irrigation. It’s nowhere near as easy to grow them as it is to buy them in the store. If one insists on organic vegetables, they are eating from a very small slice of the world food supply, and reliance on food of that kind would doom the majority of mankind to starvation.

We eat ruminant animals because God has been kind to us in providing us with food resources. Jesus ate lamb at the Last Supper. Do we really think we’re better than Him?
 
spencelo said:
April,

You can post quotes all day. Why not engage them and say why you think they’re wrong?
Click to expand...
So it is fine for you to spam this forum with questionable links but it is not fine for another poster to quote nonsensical statements form the people you link too? :rolleyes:
 
Ridgerunner said:
So, perhaps some people are willing to see 1/3 of the habitable world go back to wild animals (particularly wild ruminants) and feed nobody. A lot of people will die in that event.

Further, a lot of what can be grown on the rest of the land isn’t particularly useful as human food, by itself. Try a diet of grain alone and see how you do. Hogs and poultry can do it without a lot of trouble. But it isn’t sufficient for humans, generally speaking; especially the types of corn and sorghum that people can’t digest well, but which hogs can.

Vegetables? Only a limited part of the earth’s surface can be used to grow vegetables. We would have little of them but for chemical fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides and irrigation. It’s nowhere near as easy to grow them as it is to buy them in the store. If one insists on organic vegetables, they are eating from a very small slice of the world food supply, and reliance on food of that kind would doom the majority of mankind to starvation.
Click to expand...
this is why with in the united states it is currently 98%+ undevoloped there is a lot of room for peoples God clearly designed earth for Human race:amen:

Shalom
God bless
 
Ridgerunner said:
I couldn’t get past the first part of the video, it’s so stupid.

I realize there are middle-class and wealthy Americans who think it’s “advanced” not to eat meat. The woman asks why we don’t eat dogs. Some people on earth do, but we don’t because it isn’t part of western culture and their meat is hazardous. Why isn’t eating dogs part of western culture? Because westerners are largely the descendants of steppe herders. You can’t raise herds of dogs at all, and certainly not on the grassland steppes.

1/3 of the world’s habitable surface is grassland. It won’t grow anything but grass. Grass is indigestible to human beings. It is to dogs and many other animals as well. It is digestible, however, to ruminants like cattle and sheep. This provides humans (and their pets) with high-quality protein and minerals from a resource that’s otherwise useless. That’s why, in western culture, we eat beef and mutton for the most part. Hogs will eat anything, including the manure of cattle and sheep, so they’re the “garbage can” animals that are, in some ways, the easiest to raise on meager resources, including things we would sicken or die if we ate.

So, perhaps some people are willing to see 1/3 of the habitable world go back to wild animals (particularly wild ruminants) and feed nobody. A lot of people will die in that event.

Further, a lot of what can be grown on the rest of the land isn’t particularly useful as human food, by itself. Try a diet of grain alone and see how you do. Hogs and poultry can do it without a lot of trouble. But it isn’t sufficient for humans, generally speaking; especially the types of corn and sorghum that people can’t digest well, but which hogs can.

Vegetables? Only a limited part of the earth’s surface can be used to grow vegetables. We would have little of them but for chemical fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides and irrigation. It’s nowhere near as easy to grow them as it is to buy them in the store. If one insists on organic vegetables, they are eating from a very small slice of the world food supply, and reliance on food of that kind would doom the majority of mankind to starvation.

We eat ruminant animals because God has been kind to us in providing us with food resources. Jesus ate lamb at the Last Supper. Do we really think we’re better than Him?
Click to expand...
40% of the population of India is lacto-vegetarian, while 30% only occasionally eat meat. How have they managed?

Isn’t there actually a food surplus in the world, and don’t most of us in western countries eat meat to supplement our diets with protein and iron, not as a primary source of calories?

Some evidence suggests that eating red meat more than twice a week significantly increases the likelihood of various cancers. Too much animal protein and fat appears to be problematic.
 
cynic said:
40% of the population of India is lacto-vegetarian, while 30% only occasionally eat meat. How have they managed?

Isn’t there actually a food surplus in the world, and don’t most of us in western countries eat meat to supplement our diets with protein and iron, not as a primary source of calories?

Some evidence suggests that eating red meat more than twice a week significantly increases the likelihood of various cancers. Too much animal protein and fat appears to be problematic.
Click to expand...
Too much or too little of anything is problematic. The reason why Indians are “lacto-vegetarian” is religion. They consider cows sacred. It has nothing to do with nutrition, though it’s interesting to speculate that perhaps that reverence has its origins in valuing herds millenia ago.

There are also studies purporting to establish that grass-fed beef does not have the negatives that grain-fed does. But that’s an argument for grass-fed and against grain-fed, not against eating red meat at all.

Interesting that Indians do consume milk. It’s a fact that Indo-Europeans retain lactose tolerance into adulthood while virtually nobody else on earth does. Undoubtedly that’s because Indo-Europeans spent tens of thousands of years as herders on the Eurasian steppes and gained that tolerance due to the necessity of surviving almost exclusively on milk and meat.

If Indo-Europeans developed lactose tolerance, is there any really good reason to imagine that they did not simultaneously develop an ability to survive on a high meat content diet if, indeed, it had not developed long before?

Julius Caesar, interestingly, noted the Teutons’ almost exclusive diet of beef and game, and attributed their stature and vigor to that diet. Possibly he was wrong in doing so, but he certainly did not record any observation of harm it did them.

Humans have been meat-eaters as far back as knowledge of human existence goes. So now, in the first quartile of the 21st century, we’re suddenly discovering that the diets upon which man thrived, sometimes almost exclusively, for hundreds of thousands of years is wrong for humans?

Too big a stretch to credit. Certainly, the longevity of Indians does not establish the superiority of their diet.

There may be a food surplus in the world, but take away all meat and you will reduce the food supply massively for a lot of people. It’s interesting to note that, prior to introduction of the horse, the plains Indians were very few and led a miserable existence. That’s because it was extraordinarily difficult to access the billions of pounds of protein on the hoof represented by the buffalo, and the plains could not, by and large, produce anything but grass. When Indians obtained the horse, they could chase buffalo down. Their populations increased and their health improved dramatically. Without ruminant animals, the great plains, indeed 1/3 the habitable surface of the earth are just one big grassy desert.
 
We don’t eat dogs because they protected us, gave us warmth and companionship, and helped us hunt pigs.

We eat pigs because they are tasty.

Cro-magnon man was a taller more robust specimen than later homo-sapiens because he existed entirely on hunted meat and foraged berries.

Homo sapiens shrank and developed all kinds of debilitating diseases when they started to farm grain.

This is what happens when you become a vegan:
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top