The book begins by asking the viewer to imagine enjoying a roast at a dinner party, which you learn mid-bite is actually golden retriever. Even just reading this, you probably immediately feel disgusted and also are imagining the living dog, right?

“Even stranger, though,” writes Joy, “is the way we don’t react to the idea of eating cows” and the other species we perceive as edible. Most never picture the cow or feel repulsed when eating “beef.” Why is this? As she demonstrates, the answer is complex, yet far from abstract.

Humans are naturally averse to blood and killing unless we've been desensitized. Since we care about animals and don’t want them to suffer, a good amount of mental gymnastics are necessary in order to feel perfectly comfortable consuming them – or more specifically, consuming the tiny handful of species we have designated as edible.

To alleviate this inconsistency between our own deeply held values and our behaviors, Joy describes our three options:

We can change our values to match our behaviors We can change our behaviors to match our values We can change our perception of our behaviors so they appear to match our values (hence the mental gymnastics)

It's the latter dominant unexamined, socially conditioned, misinformed, and/or uninformed default mode – which is anything but neutral and benign despite appearing so – which Joy defines as “carnism.” (This includes vegetarianism, which includes exploiting and killing animals for human use).

If you just automatically rolled your eyes at this new term, you are exactly the person whose mind will be most blown by Joy’s concepts. I promise. Previously, this dominant ideology had been invisible and unnamed, enabling our continued psychic numbing, denial, and avoidance of our own participation in violence against innocents on a positively epic scale.

“We send one species to the butcher and give our love and kindness to another apparently for no other reason than that it’s the way things are. When our attitudes and behaviors toward animals are so inconsistent, and this inconsistency is so unexamined, we can safely say we’ve been fed absurdities.”

Regardless of how absurd they are, the deeply entrenched beliefs and behaviors of the majority are seen as normal; a given rather than a choice. This is even the case for violent ideologies like the one Joy calls carnism. How can something that doesn’t even have a name be questioned, and when even calling it by a name is met with knee-jerk resistance and likely mockery?

To take it a step further, the carnist system actively keeps itself hidden due to the fact that its inner workings are so horrifying that most are altogether unwilling to witness them. (Witnessing includes taking the time to read, watch, or otherwise learn about standard animal farming and slaughter practices.) It's why we so often hear people say of the experience of the animals on their plates, "I don't want to know." That's understandable, because knowing might force us to do the following:

Acknowledge the painful reality of our own participation in suffering of such devastating magnitude

Feel powerless to change it

Challenge our identity as a human/perceived superiority over other animals

The paradox of the above is that we either agree or refuse to witness the suffering of these innocents for the same exact reason: because we care.

When people assert it’s possible to love animals yet eat them, they’re looking through the lens Joy describes. When we can’t bring ourselves to face the horrible truth about something we continue to justify and willingly enable, we can’t smell our own bullshit.

The Horror