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… the reason for the widespread but mistaken belief that America is rapidly going veg is the mismatch between what people say they eat and what they actually eat… The Campaign to Moralize Meat-Eating Has Failed… The great paradox of our culture's schizoid attitudes about animals is that as our concern for their welfare has increased, so has our desire to eat them. In 1975, the average American ate 178 pounds of red meat and poultry; by 2007, the number had jumped to 222 pounds…
"Moralization" is the cultural transformation of a preference into a value. Attitudes toward cigarette smoking is an example. About the same time the animal rights movement was gearing up in the 1970s, the anti-tobacco forces were also getting their act together. Since then, the rate of smoking among American adults has dropped from nearly 50% to less than 25%. In contrast, the number of meat eaters has remained stable, hovering around 98%…
Why has the effort to make smoking a moral issue been so successful while the anti-meat campaign has failed? I blame it largely on biology… Meat, it seems, is more addictive than nicotine…
In his book, The Happiness Hypothesis, the psychologist Jonathan Haidt discusses his reaction to reading Peter Singer's argument against animals. He writes, "Since that day, I have been morally opposed to all forms of factory farming. Morally opposed but not behaviorally opposed. I love the taste of meat, and the only thing that changed the after reading Singer is that I thought about my hypocrisy each time I ordered a hamburger." Leggi tutto.
