Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows

You have a dog at home and may have cried when he got sick. At lunch, your plate might have had pork, an animal that, as the author points out, feels pain, forms bonds, and has a personality, in ways comparable to many dogs. Psychologist Melanie Joy starts from this contradiction to ask why we treat such similar animals in such opposite ways.

The book doesn't come out of a discussion about recipes, but about social psychology. The author wants to understand how good people, who would never want to cause unnecessary suffering, manage to take part in practices that do exactly that, without feeling much discomfort. Her answer lies in a belief system that is rarely called by its name.

She names this system carnism, and the rest of the book is an attempt to make it visible. The premise is that only those who can see an ideology can choose whether or not to follow it.

To feel the unease she wants to provoke, imagine the reverse: a dinner where the main dish was made from the meat of a dog like yours. The reaction of disgust shows that our line between eating and not eating comes from somewhere, and the book wants to investigate exactly where.

Carnism is the term Joy uses for the belief system that leads people to eat certain animals and not others, as if that were natural and required no reflection. The word follows the logic of vegetarianism: just as there is a name for those who decide not to eat meat, she proposes a name for the ideology that makes meat the default.

According to the book, when a behavior is so common that it seems obvious, it stops being seen as a choice. Eating meat is treated as the way of life, and it's the person who steps outside the rule who has to justify themselves. This erasure of choice is what allows the practice to continue unquestioned.

The author draws a comparison with other dominant ideologies that were invisible for a long time, like certain forms of prejudice. The comparison is controversial, and we'll come back to it in the criticism section, but it helps clarify the argument: a system stays strongest when nobody notices it exists.

One of the book's most instructive arguments is cultural variation. In the United States, most people find eating dog shocking, but see a backyard barbecue as a moment of joy. In other countries, the logic flips. For many Hindus, the cow is sacred. In Jewish and Muslim traditions, pork is forbidden. In some parts of Asia, eating dog meat is part of the food culture.

If the biology of these animals doesn't explain the difference, what does? For Joy, the answer is cultural and psychological: from childhood we learn to classify certain animals as companions and others as food, and that classification comes to feel natural. It isn't born from a truth about the animal, but from custom.

The example helps show that what we feel as moral instinct may be, in large part, social training. When we move to another country, we discover that our disgust and our appetite are more flexible than we thought.