P Singer bk

Vegetarianism brings with it a new relationship to food, plants, and nature. Flesh taints our meals. Disguise it as we may, the fact remains that the centerpiece of our dinner has come to us from the slaughterhouse, dripping blood. Untreated and unrefrigerated, it soon begins to putrefy and stink. When we eat it, it sits heavily in our stomachs, blocking our digestive processes until, days later, we struggle to excrete it.28 When we eat plants, food takes on a different quality. We take from the earth food that is ready for us and does not fight against us as we take it. Without meat to deaden the palate we experience an extra delight in fresh vegetables taken straight from the ground. Personally, I found the idea of picking my own dinner so satisfying that shortly after becoming a vegetarian I began digging up part of our backyard and growing some of my own vegetables—something that I had never thought of doing previously, but that several of my vegetarian friends were also doing. In this way dropping flesh-meat from my diet brought me into closer contact with plants, the soil, and the seasons.

 Our attitudes to animals begin to form when we are very young, and they are dominated by the fact that we begin to eat meat at an early age. Interestingly enough, many children at first refuse to eat animal flesh, and only become accustomed to it after

strenuous efforts by their parents, who mistakenly believe that it is necessary for good health. Whatever the child’s initial reaction, though, the point to notice is that we eat animal flesh long before we are capable of understanding that what we are eating is the dead body of an animal. Thus we never make a conscious, informed decision, free from the bias that accompanies any long-established habit, reinforced by all the pressures of social conformity, to eat animal flesh. At the same time children have a natural love of animals, and our society encourages them to be affectionate toward animals such as dogs and cats and toward cuddly, stuffed toy animals. These facts help to explain the most distinctive characteristic of the attitudes of children in our society to animals—namely, that rather than having one unified attitude to animals, the child has two conflicting attitudes that coexist, carefully segregated so that the inherent contradiction between them rarely causes trouble.

Now it is difficult to compare two sets of conditions as diverse as those in the wild and those on a factory farm (or those of free bf and slaves on a plantation); but if the comparison has to be made surely the life of freedom is to be preferred. Factory farm animals cannot walk, run, stretch freely, or be part of a family or herd. True, many wild animals die from adverse conditions or are killed by predators; but animals kept in farms do not live for more than a fraction of their normal life span either. The steady supply of food on a farm is not an unmitigated blessing, since it deprives animals of their most basic natural activity, the search for food. The result is a life of utter boredom, with nothing at all to do but lie in a stall and eat.