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Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

For sure. I've heard vegetarians call this idea complex "carnitarianism". If you suggest to most Americans that they eat dog or horse or elephant, they'll be horrified. But we're perfectly comfortable with eating animals designated as food.

I live these contradictions myself. When I meet individual cows, I'm often charmed. Or my friend keeps chickens that I enjoy feeding when I'm over. I would have a hard time eating the animals I had met, but I had a burger for dinner last night without the slightest problem.

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Bangladeshis often buy live cows to slaughter for Eid celebrations. My cousin posted a picture of a live cow chilling in their house, hanging out with their kids, etc. I remember riding one around our yard (which was in the middle of the city) and making friends with it.

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

Can sign this. I was on a farm with my girlfriend and she was shocked that the people there played and enjoyed time with the animals they are going to slaughter.

You don’t have to eat what you don’t like. However, you could (un-)train yourself to like what you didn’t like before.

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.

That's because a burger has become its own "thing", far removed from the "Cow". Like a chicken breast has become a "thing". Also calling meat with a different name (beef vs cow meat, pork vs pig meat, poultry, venison, etc) further removes the animal from what's on your plate. It's like in software, you use an OO language but you don't often stop to thing what's happening behidn the scenes.

Neither here nor there, but that "meat by a different name" is most likely due to class divides in England after the Norman conquest. The French(ish) speaking Normans were the upper class getting the finished product, so the language reflects that - beef(boeuf), pork(porc), and, a mostly forgotten one, but poulet for chicken. Whereas the farmers/lower classes - those dealing with the animals themselves, were speaking Old English with Germanic derived words - pig, cow, chicken.

Twenty years ago, I lived in San Jose's Almaden Valley, a block away from a dairy farm. On our walks around the neighborhood, we used to pick hay and feed it to the cows.

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?

He was right. One of the first steps of slaughtering is draining the blood. There isn't much left by the time it gets to the butcher. The red liquid you see after cooking red meat is myoglobin, which lives inside the muscle tissue itself as opposed to the vascular system. It also turns blood-red in the presence of oxygen.

To add detail for the curious:

Blood is hemoglobin, and circulates the body, delivering oxygen to where its needed. Whereas the "juice" from a piece of cooked meat is myoglobin, stores oxygen inside muscle cells until needed, and is responsible for the red color of meat in general.

In the same way we, as a collective, ascribed value to certain rocks and metals, certain living things have been designated as edible.

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

Yes, and in fact cultures that place fewer limits on what animals are edible are probably the sane ones (or at least logically consistent ones), and not the "weird" ones.

Cognitive Dissonance is a powerful force.

While what you said is funny and made me laugh, I completely relate.

My sister and I used to play with lobsters on my grandmother's sun-deck while we were waiting for the water to boil.

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