You are not asked to believe that animals are not killed for your dinner. You are simply never put in a position where you have to think about it. The killing happens, but it happens off-stage, behind walls, on the far side of a supply chain engineered so thoroughly that the average person can pass an entire life eating meat daily without once encountering the fact of an animal dying.
This is worth noticing on its own terms, independent of whatever conclusion you reach about eating meat. Because hiddenness is not an accident and is not neutral. A system has been built whose effect, whatever its intention, is to keep the morally relevant facts out of view at exactly the moment a person might otherwise weigh them.
Two kinds of hiddenness
It helps to separate two things that usually get blurred together.
The first is the physical hiddenness of the production itself. Industrial animal agriculture takes place in facilities that are, by design, difficult to see into. They are situated away from population centres. They are not on the tourist trail. There are laws — the so-called “ag-gag” statutes — that specifically criminalise filming or documenting what happens inside them. Think about what that implies. We have an industry so confident that the public would object to what it sees that it has lobbied to make seeing it illegal. The wall around the slaughterhouse is not just a wall of bricks. It is a wall of policy and discouragement.
The second kind is subtler and, more interesting: the hiddenness inside our own social practices. This is the part that operates not at the level of the farm but at the level of the dinner table, the menu, the supermarket aisle, and the language we use.
The animal is edited out of the language
Consider how rarely the word for the animal survives the journey to your plate. You do not eat pig; you eat pork. You do not eat cow; you eat beef. Not a calf but veal, not a deer but venison. This is one of the more remarkable linguistic artefacts in English, and it is not an accident of history so much as a quiet convenience we have all agreed to keep. The living creature gets one set of words; the edible object gets another. The two are kept lexically apart so that the second never quite reminds you of the first.
The same editing runs through the whole presentation. Meat arrives wrapped on a tray, a tidy pink rectangle with no head, no eyes, no feet, nothing that looks back. The supermarket lighting is tuned to make it appear fresh. The blood is called “juice.” A whole roast chicken is about as close as most people get to the original shape of the animal, and even that has been beheaded and plucked into something that reads as food rather than body.
None of this is hidden in the sense of being secret. It is hidden in the more powerful sense of being so normalised that you stop perceiving it. The information is technically available. You know, if you stop and think, that the burger was a cow. But the entire apparatus is arranged so that you almost never have to stop and think.
Why “everyone knows” is not a defence
The obvious objection is: so what? Everybody knows meat comes from animals. There is no real deception here, only squeamishness, and adults are entitled to not want to look at unpleasant things.
I think this objection is weaker than it sounds, for two reasons.
First, there is a difference between knowing something abstractly and confronting it. Most of us “know” the number of people killed in car accidents each year, but the figure does not move us the way standing at the scene of one does. Moral psychology runs on the concrete, the vivid, the present. A system that keeps the vivid version permanently out of reach is not merely respecting our squeamishness; it is exploiting a known feature of how our moral attention works. It lets us hold the fact in the part of the mind that does not generate feeling or action.
Second, the “everyone knows” defence proves too much. If the practice were genuinely something people would endorse on reflection, the hiddenness would be unnecessary. We do not hide the things we are proud of. We do not pass laws against filming the bakery. The elaborateness of the concealment is itself evidence that, at some level, the industry and its customers suspect that full visibility would change behaviour. The discomfort people feel when shown a slaughterhouse video is not irrational squeamishness to be overcome; it is, plausibly, the correct emotional response finally reaching its proper object.
The point is not the conclusion
I want to be careful here, because this is the spot where these arguments usually overreach. I am not claiming that the hiddenness proves eating meat is wrong. That would be a non-sequitur; the fact that we are shielded from how something is made does not, by itself, settle whether the thing is permissible. You can construct an honest defence of eating animals, and plenty of thoughtful people have, even if I personally currently believe none of those arguments succeeds in permitting factory farming and possibly not even eating meat at all. But that is a subject for another post.
The narrower and, I think, harder claim is this: whatever your conclusion, you ought to reach it with the facts in view rather than arranged out of view. A choice made under a system specifically engineered to suppress the relevant considerations is not really a free choice; it is a default dressed up as one. The test of whether you actually endorse eating meat is not whether you do it — almost everyone does it — but whether you would still do it if the wall came down: if the language named the animal, if the tray showed the body, if the farm had windows.
Maybe you would. Some people genuinely would, and there is an honesty in that I respect far more than the comfortable not-looking most of us practise, myself included, for most of my life.
But notice that the question can only even be asked once you have done the one thing the whole system is built to prevent.
A note on AI use: I drafted and refined this post with the help of an AI assistant. The Argument, the position, and the final edit are mine.
Further reading
- This Is Vegan Propaganda: How a Plant-Based Diet Can Improve Your Health and Save the Planet by Ed Winters
- Slaughterhouse: The Shocking Story of Greed, Neglect, And Inhumane Treatment Inside the U.S. Meat Industry by Gail A. Eisnitz
- Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight by Timothy Pachirat
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