Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
—ALDOUS HUXLEY
In chapter 3 we explored the lives and deaths of the animals most commonly raised for meat, eggs, and dairy products in the United States. For the sake of brevity, I did not discuss the less-frequently consumed animals, such as lambs, goats, and ducks. I also didn't mention an important group of animals who are the other casualties of carnism, animals who are the all-too-often-overlooked collateral damage of animal agribusiness.
Like pigs and other species we have discussed, the vast majority of these animals—over 300 million of them—are treated as commodities, as means to ends. Like the other animals, their welfare impedes profit. And like the other animals, they are offered little protection by the law.
These other casualties of carnism are rarely the focus of attention when discussing carnistic production. They, too, are invisible victims—not because they are not seen, but because they are not recognized. They are the human animals. They are the factory workers, the residents who live near polluting CAFOs, the carnistic consumers, the taxpayers. They are you and me. We are the collateral damage of carnism; we pay for carnism with our health, our environment, and our taxes—$13.2 billion a year (in farm subsidies), to be exact.121*
Workers in meatpacking plants** spend virtually all of their waking hours in crowded factories with floors that may be covered in blood and grease.124 The relentless pace of the disassembly line keeps them at constant risk of serious injury or even death.125 And CAFO employees—who are exposed to noxious gases from concentrated wastes—may develop serious respiratory disease, reproductive dysfunction, neurological degeneration, and seizures; and they may even fall into comas.126
Such congested and dangerous working conditions can lead to a variety of other physical maladies,127 but these employees rarely receive medical treatment since it is more cost effective to lose some of them prematurely than to attend to their physical needs. Not surprisingly, like other animals who must be prodded along when they resist following orders, workers in animal factories may be bullied, both physically and psychologically, if they fail to respond to demands.128
Residents who live near CAFOs have been poisoned by factory wastes, including sulfites and nitrates. These toxins contaminate the air and drinking water and can lead to chronic asthma and eye irritation, bronchitis, diarrhea, severe headaches, nausea, spontaneous abortions, birth defects, infant death, and viral and bacterial disease outbreaks.129
And meat, egg, and dairy consumers—over 317 million Americans—are unknowingly fed an array of contaminants. Carnistic foods are often laced with synthetic hormones, some of which have been linked to the development of various cancers and are banned from both human and animal consumption in the European Union;130 massive doses of antibiotics; toxic pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides that are known carcinogens; potentially deadly strains of bacteria and viruses; petroleum; poisoned rat carcasses; dirt; hair; and feces.131
In Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser captures the essence of the collateral damage of carnism: “There's shit in the meat.” Yet while Schlosser was referring specifically to fecal matter, the subject of this chapter includes far more than just feces. It's everything that contaminates the meat, eggs, and dairy we eat, from corruption to disease. It is the refuse of a sick system.
The story of how shit got in our meat is the story of one of the central characteristics of carnism, and of other violent ideologies: the system depends on a constituency of indirect victims, inadvertent victims who not only suffer the consequences of the system, but who also help that system by unwittingly participating in their own victimization. The system creates such victims by appearing to be something it is not, so that we feel safe when we are at risk and free when we have been coerced. The story of how shit got in our meat is the story of the human casualties of carnism.
In 1906, Upton Sinclair published The Jungle, his famous exposé on the meatpacking industry. The Jungle documented the corruption of animal agribusinesses and the filthy, dangerous conditions that characterized meatpacking plants and slaughterhouses. Sinclair described factories where workers stood in half an inch of blood, on killing floors teeming with rats—living and dead—some of whom ended up processed along with the meat. The workers were at constant risk of getting their fingers sliced off and of falling into vats of lard, “overlooked for days, till all but the bones of them had gone out to the world as Durham's Pure Leaf Lard!”132 The Jungle exposed conditions so appalling and disgusting that the public and policymakers alike were outraged. Such widespread indignation led to the passage of the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act, which mandated regular inspections of slaughterhouses and meatpacking plants.
Many people have heard of The Jungle and its impact on laws regulating meat production. However, few realize that these laws were rarely enforced, and that the decades following the publication of The Jungle saw little improvement in factory conditions. In fact, in many ways, today conditions are even worse; the advent of larger plants and faster processing technologies, coupled with inadequate numbers of federal inspectors, have made workers more burdened and facilities even more crowded and difficult to police.
Inspections take place on two levels: up close and from a distance. In accordance with the Meat Inspection Act of 1906, USDA inspectors were to perform up-close inspections: they were to check animals' organs and other body parts for disease, equipment for microbes, carcasses for early signs of contamination and insects, and walls and rooms for proper sanitation. However, in the 1980s, new legislation shifted the burden of quality control from the government to the plants themselves133 (and recently, the Trump administration further aggravated the situation by nearly halving the number of federal inspectors required at a given plant).134 This means that the corporations' own employees, rather than federal inspectors, are now primarily responsible for the closer inspections—employees who receive virtually no formal training and can't identify many of the signs of contamination and disease, and who often don't speak English well enough to communicate what they do find.135 Since the passing of the new legislation, studies in several plants revealed that corporate inspectors didn't know that a piece of meat that had a USDA tag on it was condemned, and they couldn't recognize the signs of measles.136 These investigations also revealed that corporate inspectors were unable to recognize infections unless there was pus oozing out of an abscess. In fact, it appears that in our nation's meatpacking plants, contaminated meat is the rule, rather than the exception. A recent study in which retail meat samples were tested for E. coli revealed that 76.7 percent of ground turkey, 63.4 percent of chicken, 47.3 percent of ground beef, and 33.8 percent of pork chops were contaminated;137 and according to a study published in the Journal of Food Protection fecal contamination was found in 85 percent of fish filets procured from retail markets and the Internet.138 What's more, the World Health Organization has warned that avian influenza—the potentially deadly virus sometimes referred to as “bird flu”—may be spread through the fecal matter of infected birds.139
Even if workers were able to identify contaminated body parts, food quality standards are so low that many defective carcasses would still pass inspection.140 Consider the joint investigation by the Guardian and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) of unpublished US government records, which revealed a number of incidents, such as “pig carcasses piling up on the factory floor after an equipment breakdown, leading to contamination with grease, blood, and other filth; meat destined for human [consumption] found riddled with fecal matter and abscesses filled with pus . . . factory floors flooded with dirty water after drains became blocked by meat parts and other debris; [and] dirty chicken, soiled with feces or having been dropped on the floor being put back on the production line after being rinsed with diluted chlorine.”141 And in 2007, the Chicago Tribune ran an article exposing how the USDA deemed it acceptable for animal agribusinesses to sell meat that's been contaminated with E. coli, as long as the meat was labeled “cook only,” for use in precooked meat products (including those that ended up in school lunches).142
Unhygienic conditions of the buildings and machinery may also pose a threat to human health.143 The aforementioned joint Guardian-TBIJ report revealed that “diseased meat—condemned from entering the human food chain—was placed in a container meant for edible product; meat soiled with faecal matter was also recorded, with an inspector noting ‘. . . I observed a poultry intestine in the liver bin. The intestine was approximately 6.5 inches long and had visible faeces oozing out both ends;’ a pig's head was found to have partially covered a drain, leading to ‘bloody waste water filling the area’; inspectors found a stainless steel hand-wash sink ‘plugged and approximately one-quarter full of standing bloody water with pieces of fat and meat.’ Production employees use this sink to clean and sanitise their hands and gloves. . . .”
Some USDA inspectors have expressed grave concern about the unhygienic conditions in meatpacking plants, and yet they have little voice to enact change.144 The vast inadequacies of the current inspection system were described in another 2007 Chicago Tribune article. Felicia Nestor, a senior policy analyst for Food and Water Watch, a Washington, DC–based food safety group, told the Tribune: “Inspectors are not . . . in the vast majority of processing plants full time. For the most part, inspectors at processing plants are on patrols, meaning they cover a number of plants.”145And federal officers reported that inspection goals haven't been met for years; their workload is so overwhelming that they perform mere cursory checks of company records, rather than conduct physical examinations of the meat. Inspectors spend their time monitoring a meat company's hazard-analysis plan and have no time to actually enforce the USDA's inspection regulations. One inspector told the Tribune, “They [meatpacking companies] write their own plan. They write everything for themselves. We're ‘monitoring’ that now. It's just a joke. We mostly check paper now. You can put anything you want on paper.”
What this all comes down to is that corporations, whose primary objective is to increase their profit margin, are left to police themselves. We have left the fox to guard the chicken coop. And not surprisingly, we have ended up with shit in our meat.
Meat has long stood for the freedom to exploit freely.
—NICK FIDDES, Meat: A Natural Symbol
Many workers in US meatpacking plants are undocumented immigrants from Central and South America and Asia who receive little, if any, training.146 Schlosser interviewed a bleeder (slaughterhouse worker) who told him, “Nobody helped train me—no training how to use the knife. . . . So you see how the people on either side of you do the work, and then you do it.”147 Besides having to perform jobs for which they are wholly unprepared, these employees find themselves in working conditions that are exploitative, hazardous, unsanitary, and violent. They spend hour upon hour in a death-saturated, high-stress environment, and they suffer for it—imagine making one knife cut every two or three seconds, totaling approximately 10,000 cuts a day.148 In an interview with Mother Jones magazine, Schlosser commented on the relentless pace of the production line:
The golden rule in meatpacking plants is “The Chain Will Not Stop.” . . . Nothing stands in the way of production, not mechanical failures, breakdowns, accidents. Forklifts crash, saws overheat, workers drop knives, workers get cut, workers collapse and lie unconscious on the floor, as dripping carcasses sway past them, and the chain keeps going . . . a . . . worker told me, “I've seen bleeders, and they're gushing because they got hit right in the vein, and I mean they're almost passing out, and here comes the supply guy again, with the bleach, to clean the blood off the floor, but the chain never stops. It never stops.”149
Not surprisingly, meatpacking is arguably the most dangerous factory job in the United States,150 and it is undoubtedly the most violent. For instance, workers must wear hockey masks to prevent their teeth from getting kicked out by conscious animals being dragged along a conveyor belt.151 And consider the titles of accident reports issued by the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), which provide snapshots of the perilous conditions: Employee Hospitalized for Neck Laceration from Flying Blade. Employee's Eye Injured When Struck by Hanging Hook. Employee's Arm Amputated When Caught in Meat Tenderizer. Employee Decapitated by Chain of Hide Puller Machine. Employee Killed When Head Crushed in Hide Fleshing Machine. Caught and Killed by Gut-Cooker Machine.152 In fact, in 2005, for the first time ever, Human Rights Watch issued a report criticizing a single US industry—the meat industry—for working conditions so appalling they violate basic human rights.153
Given the brutality of the carnistic process, it's easy to assume that the people whose job it is to kill animals are sadistic or otherwise psychologically disturbed. Yet while psychological disturbance and even sadism may result from prolonged exposure to violence, they do not necessarily cause individuals to seek out a career in killing. In any violent ideology, those in the business of killing may not be jaded when they start out, but they eventually grow accustomed to violence that once disturbed them. Such acclimation reflects the defense mechanism routinization—routinely performing an action until one becomes desensitized, or numbed, to it. For instance, agricultural investigator Gail Eisnitz interviewed a slaughterhouse worker who told her:
The worst thing, worse than the physical danger, is the emotional toll. If you work in that stick pit for any period of time, you develop an attitude that lets you kill things but doesn't let you care. You may look a hog in the eye that's walking around down in the blood pit with you and think, “God, that really isn't a bad-looking animal.” You may want to pet it. Pigs down on the kill floor have come up and nuzzled me like a puppy. Two minutes later, I had to kill them—beat them to death with a pipe. I can't care.154
And the more desensitized workers become—the more they “can't care”—the greater the buildup of their psychological distress. Most people can experience only so much violence before they become traumatized by it; studies of combat veterans, for instance, demonstrate again and again the profound effect exposure to violence has on the psyche, particularly when one has also been a participant in that violence.155 Traumatized workers become increasingly violent toward both animals and humans, and may develop addictive behaviors in an attempt to numb their distress. The worker Eisnitz interviewed described how he'd “had ideas of hanging [the] foreman upside down on the line and sticking him.”156 This worker went on to explain:
Most stickers have been arrested for assault. A lot of them have problems with alcohol. They have to drink, they have no other way of dealing with killing live, kicking animals all day long. . . . A lot of guys . . . just drink and drug their problems away. Some of them end up abusing their spouses because they can't get rid of the feelings. They leave work with this attitude and they go down to the bar to forget. Only problem is, even if you try to drink those feelings away, they're still there when you sober up.157
Another worker told Eisnitz:
I've taken out my job pressure and frustration on the animals. [T]here was a live hog in the pit. It hadn't done anything wrong, wasn't even running around the pit. It was just alive. I took a three-foot chunk of pipe—and I literally beat that hog to death. Couldn't have been a two-inch piece of solid bone left in its head. Basically, if you want to put it in layman's terms, I crushed his skull. It was like I started hitting the hog and I couldn't stop. And when I finally did stop, I'd expended all this energy and frustration, and I'm thinking, what in God's sweet name did I do?158
And an undercover video shot by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals revealed workers slamming piglets onto the floor, bragging about stabbing rods into sows' hindquarters, and hitting pigs with metal rods. As one worker hits a sow with a metal rod, he yells, “I hate them. These (expletives) deserve to be hurt. Hurt, I say! Hurt! Hurt! Hurt! Hurt! . . . Take out your frustrations on 'em.”159
Though the behavior of meatpackers may seem extreme and irrational, it is the inevitable result of working on the front lines of an extreme and irrational system.* Traumatized workers who, in turn, traumatize others are yet another casualty of the violent ideology that is carnism. Violence does indeed beget violence.
THE UNTOUCHABLES
Most people, whether they eat animals or not, share the same attitude toward the slaughter process: they see it as disgusting and offensive. Just as a type of meat that one finds disgusting tends to render the foods it touches disgusting as well (would you continue eating a stew you'd picked dog meat out of?), so, too, does the process of slaughter seem to contaminate those who butcher animals.160
In various cultures and throughout history, professional butchers have been seen as impure, as taking on the immorality of killing animals and thereby protecting others from moral contamination. Often a group will have a designated individual or individuals who perform the butchering, and these people either will be “morally cleansed” before coming into contact with the others, or will live separately from the rest of the community. For instance, the designated butcher of the Bemba of Northern Rhodesia performs purification ceremonies after butchering, and the butchers of the ancient Guanches of the Canary Islands weren't allowed to enter others' homes or associate with those who weren't also butchers. In some cases, an entire social group is assigned the task of butchering: in Japan, for instance, butchers have been members of the Eta, an underclass whose members have been prevented from having contact with others; in India the Untouchables have been considered spiritually inferior and so have been relegated to spiritually “polluting” tasks such as butchering and working with leather; and in Tibet, professional butchers have been members of the lowest classes, because they violate the Buddhist tenet against killing.161
Even if you don't work in carnistic industry or eat animals, you are not immune to the consequences of the practices of the animal agribusinesses with which you share the planet. Carnistic production is a leading cause of every significant form of environmental damage: air and water pollution, biodiversity loss, erosion, deforestation, greenhouse gas emissions, and depletion of fresh water.162
In the industrialized world, the most immediate environmental consequence of carnistic production is the pollution caused by CAFOs.163 Mounds of chemical- and disease-ridden waste produced by these factories leach into the ground and waterways and evaporate into the air, toxifying the environment and sicking the humans who reside nearby. CAFO runoff has been linked with a number of maladies, including respiratory problems, severe headaches, and digestive disorders. CAFO waste has also been connected with spontaneous abortions, birth defects, infant death, and disease outbreaks. In fact, CAFOs pose such a hazard to human health that the US department of Public Health has urged a moratorium on their toxic dumping.164
Yet animal agribusinesses have continued their practices unremittingly—because they can. Even though they are systematically destroying the environment and the people in it, animal agribusinesses aren't necessarily breaking any laws. How is it that the legal system, which was established to protect us from exploitation, ends up instead protecting the very industries that exploit us? Whatever happened to democracy?
THE ENVIRONMENTAL COSTS OF CARNISM165
Bureaucracy helps render genocide unreal.
It . . . diminishes the emotional and intellectual tones
associated with the killing. . . . There is only a flow of
events to which most people . . . come to say yes. . . .
Mass murder is everywhere but at the same time nowhere.
—ROBERT JAY LIFTON, The Nazi Doctors
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.
In a democratic society, a central role of government is to create and implement policies and legislation that are in the best interest of its constituents. We therefore assume that the food that makes it to our plates isn't going to sicken or kill us. We assume this because we believe that those in our government work for us, the people who pay their salary; we assume the democratic process buffers us from those who might harm us.
However, when power is sufficiently concentrated within an industry, democracy becomes corrupted. Such is the case with carnism. US animal agribusiness is a $195 billion industry controlled by just a handful of corporations. These corporations are so powerful because they have become increasingly consolidated,173 buying out all related businesses, including agro-chemical and seed companies, which produce pesticides, fertilizers, seeds, and other products; processing companies that buy and process animals; food manufacturers that process the meat, eggs, or dairy into specific products such as frozen entrees; food retailers, including supermarkets and restaurant chains; transportation systems, including railroads and shipping lines; pharmaceuticals; farm equipment such as tractors and irrigators; and even financial management plans. Economists warn that when any industry has a concentration ratio that runs upward of four companies controlling over 40 percent of the market (called CR4), competitiveness declines and serious issues, notably in the area of consumer protection, arise; the conglomerates are able to set prices and determine, for instance, food quality. Carnistic industry far exceeds CR4; for example, four beef packing companies control 83.5 percent of the beef market. The power of animal agribusiness is such that the industry has become intertwined with government, blurring the boundary between private interests and public service.174
One process that has enabled the intertwining of the public and private sectors is the “revolving door” through which corporate executives and governmental officers exchange positions and strengthen networks. For instance, in 2004 both the current and former heads of the Grain Inspection, Packers and Stockyards Administration (GIPSA)—a division of the USDA that facilitates the marketing of livestock and other agricultural products—had worked with trade groups in the meatpacking industry.175 And the then–USDA secretary Ann Veneman and other high-ranking officials had close former connections to agribusiness, especially in those industries they were supposed to oversee: Dale Moore, Veneman's chief of staff, was executive director for legislative affairs of the trade association National Cattlemen's Beef Association (NCBA); James Moseley, deputy secretary, co-owned a CAFO; and Mary Waters, assistant secretary for congressional relations, was legislative counsel and senior director for ConAgra, one of the nation's leading meat corporations.176 And the process of the revolving door has not changed: in 2017, Craig Morris—who served as the deputy administrator of the Livestock, Poultry and Seed Program of the Agricultural Marketing Service at the USDA for thirteen years—became the vice president of international marketing for the National Pork Board.177 Also in 2017, after nearly forty years working for the USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service, Alfred “Al” Almanza was appointed to the role of Global Head of Food Safety and Quality Assurance for JBS USA, a leading beef and pork processor in the US and Canada and the second-largest poultry company in the US and Mexico.178
Another reason for such public-private overlap is the massive political funding and lobbying efforts on behalf of carnistic industry. For example, in 2018 the livestock industry contributed over $6 million to congressional candidates. (And often, much of the contributions from agribusiness giants ends up going to those on the House and Senate agriculture committees.)179 Lobbyists promote their clients' agenda to legislators. The success of lobbyists' efforts depends largely on the strength of their relationship with government officials; the more lobbyists can afford to provide politicians with niceties ranging from extravagant vacations to exclusive career opportunities, the stronger their relationship with those they seek to influence.
Put simply, carnistic industry can influence legislation to benefit itself, at great cost to us. Consider, for example, how the law requires that animal agribusinesses clean up at least some of the mess they've made after dumping their wastes—and yet it doesn't stipulate that these multibillion-dollar corporations cover the bill for their own cleanup. The Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP), a federal program that was ostensibly created to help improve the environmental quality and practices of farmlands and farmers, subsidizes the cleanup. EQIP has doled out $113 million (11 percent of its funds) to help agricultural corporations neutralize the wastes they've dumped.180 In other words, we help foot the bill for the damage done by corporations such as ConAgra, whose CEO earned $14.4 million in fiscal year 2019.181 Animal agribusiness subsidies have been criticized by those across the political spectrum as one of the most egregious corporate welfare programs in the history of the United States.
Consider, too, the USDA's gross mismanagement of the deadly E. coli public health threat in 2002. Children who had eaten contaminated hamburgers became infected with the bacteria. Symptoms of E. coli infection include fever, vomiting, defecating blood, bruising, bleeding from the nose and mouth, swelling of the face and hands, high blood pressure, and, eventually, renal failure. Both ConAgra—the company that had sold the beef—and the USDA had allegedly known the meat was contaminated, yet took no action until two years later, when a full-blown outbreak forced the recall of nineteen million pounds of meat that had already been released into the nation's food supply.182
If your child were one of those who had become ill from eating contaminated beef, you might want to warn others about the safety of their meat. And this course of action might be effective—as long as you don't make the mistake Oprah Winfrey did and reach too many people at once. In 1996, Winfrey was sued for over $10 million by a group of Texas beef producers for libeling beef. At the height of the mad cow scare in Britain, when twenty people had died from eating what was believed to be tainted beef, Winfrey claimed, on the air, that she would not eat another burger. Under the “food libel laws,” legislation that predated the Winfrey case and has been backed by agricultural corporations, it is illegal to criticize certain foods without producing “reasonable” scientific evidence. So you might find that, when it comes to speaking out about carnistic industry, some restrictions may apply—most notably those on your First Amendment rights.
When animal agribusinesses have become so powerful that they are not only above the law, but also of the law—shaping rather than respecting legislation—we can safely say our democracy has become a meatocracy.
If you walked into your local convenience store and bought a package of cigars, you would notice that it carries a label warning of the potential dangers of cigar smoke. Yet research suggests that cigar smoking poses a hazard only to moderate to heavy cigar smokers, who comprise less than 1 percent184 of the US population. More than 97 percent of adults,185 however, eat carnistic products, and despite much research demonstrating the connection between the consumption of such products and disease, we are not warned of these dangers.
According to a study published under the Disease Control Priorities Project, a joint enterprise of groups including the World Health Organization, the National Institutes of Health, and the World Bank, more than 90 percent of type 2 diabetes, 80 percent of coronary artery disease, 70 percent of strokes, and 70 percent of colon cancers may be prevented by a combination of lifestyle factors, including consuming a healthy, plant-based (vegan) diet.183
But let's imagine that you walked into that same convenience store to buy a hot dog. Now imagine that the US Department of Public Health had reviewed studies from the Harvard School of Public Health and other major research institutions and saw fit to include a warning label on carnistic products. The label might read something like this:
Surgeon General's Warning: Eating just one serving per day of unprocessed red meat can increase your risk of developing type 2 diabetes by 12 percent, eating one serving per day of processed red meat can increase it by 32 percent, and eating more than 28 grams of fish per day can increase it by 32 percent.186 Surgeon General's Warning: Eating more than five eggs per week can increase your risk of developing colon cancer by 42 percent and eating more than two and a half eggs per week can increase your risk of developing prostate cancer by more than 81 percent.187 Surgeon General's Warning: Eating poultry raises cholesterol levels similarly to red meat, increasing your risk of heart disease and stroke.188 Surgeon General's Warning: If you've been diagnosed with prostate cancer, consuming more than three servings a day of dairy products can increase your chances of dying from the disease by 141 percent.189 Surgeon General's Warning: The animal who became your meat may have been fed euthanized cats and dogs; rendered feathers, hooves, hair, skin, blood, and intestines; road kill; animal manure; plastic pellets that were harvested from dead cows' rumen; and carcasses from animals of their own species. Surgeon General's Warning: This product may contain dangerous levels of pesticides, arsenic, antibiotics, and hormones. Surgeon General's Warning: This product may contain microbial organisms that could lead to illness or death.190 Surgeon General's Warning: Production of this food has contributed to serious environmental degradation, animal cruelty, and human rights violations. Surgeon General's Warning: There is shit in your meat.
But, of course, carnistic products come with no such warnings, despite the fact that these foods are consumed by hundreds of millions of people on a regular basis. Violent ideologies follow their own logic, the logic that sustains the system—a convoluted logic that unravels when it, itself, is labeled.
As we've discussed, the most notable characteristic of all violent ideologies is invisibility, both symbolic (by not being named) and literal (by keeping the violence out of sight). I have, therefore, attempted to illuminate the hidden aspects of carnism, so that you might understand the truth about the production of meat, eggs, and dairy and why the system works so diligently to remain unseen.
Yet invisibility can only protect us so much. Hints of the truth surround us: “cruelty-free” veggie burgers at the grocery store; the resilient vein in the drumstick that's suddenly reminiscent of a living chicken; snapshots of meatpacking plants that occasionally make the news; vegan guests at dinner parties; dead piglets hanging in the windows of Chinatown markets; the hog on a spit at the company barbecue; and an endless supply of dead animals virtually everywhere we turn, in the form of meat. So when invisibility inevitably falters, we need a backup, something to protect us from the truth and to help us quickly recover should we suddenly begin to catch on to the disturbing reality of carnism. We must replace the reality of eating animals with the mythology of eating animals.
* Although carnistic producers do not receive direct financial support under the 2014 Farm Bill (nor did they under the pre-2014 program), they are nevertheless eligible for emergency and disaster relief, which cost $9.8 billion between 1995 and 2016.122 Similarly, in the EU, subsidies of approximately €30 billion go to carnistic producers, representing about 19 percent of the block's total annual budget.123
** Conditions in dairy and egg production facilities are similar to those in meatpacking plants.
* Some slaughterhouse workers no doubt enter the industry as sociopaths—individuals who are antisocial, clinically “conscienceless,” and often take pleasure in causing others to suffer. However, one must wonder at an industry that tolerates—indeed, requires—antisocial behaviors such as extreme aggression, remorselessness, and violence.