Dining like Darwin: When scientists swallow their subjects (2015)

Funny enough, I'm not too critical of it. I can't drive or operate a ship. Humanity is a bunch of disparate people trying to accomplish things together and sometimes it leads to very funny scenarios.

Flanders and Swan: The Reluctant Cannibal:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjAHw2DEBgw

There is beauty to a freshly cleaved piece of anthracite (like your cow example), but an industrial pile of coal does not.

Over the lifetime our cognition, through conditioning, accumulates or eliminated emotional associations with things. E.g. the common person from our culture that didn’t know they were eating a dog would have a visceral physiological response to the associated disgust their brain launches once they were told that in fact they ate the dog.

And it’s okay, these associations exist and people have initially little control over them.

But people in cultures other than ours don’t have this association conditioned, and for them it’s perfectly fine to eat dog.

This shows that this is just a thing in the head, not physiological. I used to be together with a farmer girl and she saw and raised a cow with her father from it’s beginning until it’s meat ended in her stomach as chewed through juicy steak.

Who’s “right” here? Nobody, it is what it is. Everything is possible.

One day, my daughter named three of the cows: Treemore, Chicken Nose, and Looneycake.

Chicken Nose had a pattern on her nose that looked like a chicken. I don't remember what the other two names meant.

Around that same time, we went to a friend's barbecue. His dad was a butcher, and he cooked the thickest steak I've ever seen. It must have been two inches or more.

"Cooked" may be overstating it. When he brought in the steak on a platter, it was all loose and jiggly, with blood dripping out of it.

When I asked him about it, he said "That's not blood. It's juice!"

I kind of lost my taste for beef after that. Pork too.

But some exceptions apply. I don't enjoy a hamburger or a pork chop, but on occasion I would have a hot dog or a piece of crisp bacon.

I guess if the meat is disguised enough I don't mind it as much?

People who live closer to the slaughtering process have a more flexible view of the pet/food distinction.

Cod was much more common period prior to 1992.

I think you're right, or at least it's a major reason.

Before this article I have also observed that the only wild animals that people generally eat (at least in much of the developed world) is seafood. Most other meat, for most people, is farmed. Its not uncommon to eat fish that someone caught from the ocean, but it is uncommon to eat a bird that was shot out of the sky.