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For human culture, the consumption of food has always been a complex set of traditions, rules, and prepositions that formed around both our need for survival and the necessity to justify and regulate some of the aspects of our lives. Humans, for the longest time believed to be omnivores, have developed different methods of preparing their food, and organized a system that declares which things are acceptable or not acceptable to eat. This essay proposes that humans solve ethical concerns related to food consumption by either emotionally distancing themselves or finding justification for their actions. As a source, this paper will be using two excerpts: The Omnivores Dilemma by Michael Pollan and Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace.
Michael Pollans The Omnivores Dilemma explores the titular concept and discusses the moral side of eating animal produce. The author describes the way human society shaped the understanding of what is considered suitable in the way of food, and how the modern philosophical movements alter the way we perceive consumption of meat and its implications (Pollan, p. 2). Pollan speculates that one of the ways that people make eating animals justifiable to themselves is either by not thinking about it or internally separating their consumption of meat from the process of slaughtering animals. He states: The meat industry understands that the more people know about what happens on the kill floor, the less meat theyre likely to eat. Thats not because slaughter is necessarily inhumane, but because most of us would simply rather not be reminded of exactly what meat is or what it takes to bring it to our plates (Pollan, p. 3). People detach themselves from the ethical concerns of eating meat by emotionally distancing themselves from animals altogether, as exemplified by one of the paragraphs on page 4. It reads: &the life of the pig has moved out of view; whens the last time you saw a pig in person? Meat comes from the grocery store, where it is cut and packaged to look as little like parts of animals as possible. (Pollan, p. 4). By preventing themselves from emotionally empathizing with animals that are considered suitable for food, humans managed to keep their gastronomical enjoyment.
Another author that touches upon the ethics of consuming other living beings, David Foster Wallace, describes the experience of attending the Maine Lobster Festival and his concerns about killing and eating sentient creatures. He delves much deeper into the emotional aspects of the issue, speaking about the procedure of preparing live lobsters and their ability to feel pain (Wallace, pp. 3-4). Determining whether an animal has the capacity to suffer can be accomplished by studying how much of the neurological hardware required for pain-experience the animal comes equipped with , according to Wallace (p. 4). Taking that into account, one of the methods of coming to terms with animals being killed for food is by thinking that they do not have the same emotional capacity as humans. This approach can ease ethical concerns because if animals are not able to suffer the same way humans do when they are killed, it becomes a lot easier to justify both slaughtering and eating them.
In conclusion, one can say that humans have constructed an intricate set of beliefs that help them to justify killing other creatures for their own consumption. People separate their food preferences from their moral concerns by either emotionally detaching themselves from the process of slaughtering animals or by explaining why killing them is not cruel.
Works Cited
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Pollan, Michael. Excerpt from The Omnivores Dilemma. The Penguin Press, 2006, pp. 1-4.
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Wallace, David. Excerpt from Consider the Lobster. Little, Brown and Company, 2005, pp. 1-6
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