Cognitive Dissonance

From the NYT, "Chef's New Goal: Looking Dinner In The Eye"

[...] More chefs are trying to bridge that gap. Tamara Murphy, the chef at Brasa in Seattle, took delivery of 11 freshly killed piglets last Friday, destined for dishes of pork belly with braised greens and paprika-rubbed roasted chops. “I don’t name them,” said Ms. Murphy, who wrote a weekly blog in 2006, chronicling the short lives of some of the piglets earmarked for her restaurant from Whistling Train Farm. “They are being raised for food, and there is a respectful distance I need to keep” she said. Ms. Murphy visited the piglets weekly, starting the day after their birth, and accompanied them to the slaughterhouse before serving them in a dinner that was called a Celebration of the Life of a Pig.

“The hardest part of the slaughter was the betrayal,” she said. “The pigs get in the trailer because they trust you, they get out of the trailer because they trust you, they go into the pen because they trust you.”

If this language were being used to describe human children instead of pigs, we would rightly decry the speaker as a sociopath. I call serious bullshit on Ms. Murphy's "respectful distance" that's a euphemism for "if I named the animals I was going to kill, I couldn't do it because it would make me feel horrible about the horrible thing I'm doing." There's no respect in treating a living animal like a "unit of production," even if it gets to run around and have fun before you "celebrate its life" by turning it into a tasty feast that you will shit out 36 hours later. How is that a celebration of life? It's a celebration of our capacity to rationalize fucking everything under the sun, that's what it is. It's a celebration of our ability to make all kinds of excuses for satisfying our hunger for a brief sensation. What kind of person weighs the crunch of bacon over the trust of a piglet? Ms. Murphy isn't starving, is she?

I mean, if a guy takes me out to dinner, and we see an awesome movie, and I have the time of my life, it's gotta be okay at the end of the evening if he pins me down, shoves his cock in my ass and near-painlessly slits my throat as he comes, right? I mean, I've had a good, free-range life, it was over in a second, and really, in the guy's defense, there's just nothing like the orgasm you get while fucking a dying chick in the ass! And I'm sure the guy is really honoring me, you know, in his heart! He's really grateful for what I've provided! I mean, I had a good life, right? And hey, it wasn't like I lived chained to the wall of a brothel for years before I was "processed," that's for sure! Thanks!