The Plant-based and Vegan Handbook: Psychological and Multidisciplinary Perspectives

In the dark of night, the princes of ancient Ethiopia had large quantities of boiled and prepared meat placed in a meadow not far from the country’s capital. The anecdote is reported by Herodotus circa 426–415 B.C.E. (1904, p. 160), in the third book of his Histories. During the day, wrote Herodotus, the city’s residents went to this place to feast. When travelers asked them where they thought this bounty of food came from, the Ethiopians replied that it was the land itself that produced it.
We may smile at the naiveté of these men and women of antiquity, in the same way that we may find it amusing that the fish drawn by schoolchildren are breaded and have a rectangular shape. However, there could be a touch of envy mixed with our amusement. When we wander through the supermarket aisles, many of us wish to be convinced that the finely cut meats on display naturally grew on some fruit tree or in some garden—that they are “offered up” to us by the Earth. In a way, we are grateful to the middlemen for helping us forget that what we are buying is part of the body of a once-living animal that someone has raised for slaughter and others have recently slaughtered. When the macabre idea of the actual origins of meat presents itself to us, we likely hasten to bury it in a corner of our consciousness.
This individual and collective blindness is occasionally undermined by the dissemination
of images secretly recorded in industrial livestock farms, aquaculture facilities, on trawlers, or in slaughterhouses. Faced with these images, most of us wish to look away in order to protect ourselves psychologically and perhaps morally.
Besides, we feel helpless in the face of such an avalanche of pain—particularly when billions of animals are slaughtered each year. The cruel paradox of the suffering of these creatures is that it overwhelms our imagination and can make us feel useless. So much so that we are dissuaded from even trying to remedy it. This weight is too heavy to carry…