4 ms·

Culinary Luddism is slaughtering a chicken at home and having your children abhor chicken meat forever (a few people I know).

• EdwardDiego 11y ago
  A while ago I decided that if I couldn't kill and prepare my own meat because I was too squeamish, I had no moral right to eat store-bought meat. So when I found processing my first rabbit a little challenging (they smell bad on the inside, and their teeth are long, yellow and very definitely rodent teeth), I kept the thought of steak and bacon in my mind and pushed on through. But I still find it interesting how I had trouble reconciling the fact that my meat used to be a corpse - when you're cooking game animals, the meat often retains a flavour that you can smell while processing the carcass. The first few times I ate something I had prepared, I ate sparingly, while my family tucked in. I think it was due to my own mental assocation of corpses with disease and decay. So yeah, I think a fair few people who eat meat would not do so if they had to process it from living animal to carcass to meat.
  • jessaustin 11y ago
    Perhaps we shouldn't take this squeamishness to signify anything other than a simple discomfort with novel sensory input, rather than any deep moral insights. I've butchered fish and game since I was in grade school. While I recognize the odors, textures, and sights involved as specific to that process, they don't put me off in any way. (Although perhaps in sufficient volume they would; I've never been in a Tyson chicken plant.) Does that mean that it's moral for me to eat all the meat I want, while more squeamish people must eat less? Frankly I'm not sure either way. Maybe the squeamishness of the most delicate among us indicts meat-eating for all of us?