Pigs are incredibly intelligent, comparable with dolphins and dogs. The way they're raised and slaughtered is awful. The only reason I can continue to eat bacon is because I refuse to acknowledge the suffering behind food that I believe provides essential animal proteins and fats to my diet. Even so, I should switch to chicken or fish rather than continue my support for pig slaughter.
We need cloned meat to arrive yesterday. The current industry is unsustainable and absolutely brutal to captive animals -- and incapable of scaling to the needs of the 7-12 billion people who will demand meat over the next several decades. Bacon is delicious and wonderful, but let's not lie to ourselves about the cruel conditions that produce it.
You don't really need to read too much into it. I doubt folks refrain from referring to couscous as "wheat" because they're ashamed about the factory cultivation and wholesale destruction of this noble plant; we just like having specific names for specific preparations.
my point is that when you think about 'bacon', what is salient are only qualities related to it qua food -- that is to say, how it tastes, how nutritious it is, what to eat it with, etc.
bacon denotes only the food. but of course the fact that bacon is also an animal is relevant. i would argue, that is much more important than the qualities of it as food.
so here is the distinction with wheat: if i ground you up and put you on a bun, technically that would be a 'burger'. but there is something more we want to say about it -- sure its a 'burger', but it was also shog9!!! so in that sense, it seems like a trick to call the ground up shog9 merely a burger instead of 'ground up shog9 on a bun'. i feel this way about the entire meat industry.
You might, once in a while, go to a good restaurant and order a meal in which you specify in excruciating detail what you wish to be served and how you wish it prepared. But most of us, most of the time, are selecting common ingredients and common preparations from a very limited set of options. Being excessively detailed in this context is just a waste of time.
Most places that serve burgers offer one option: beef. Ground-up cow or steer. You don't even get to choose the cut - the flesh is likely a mix of cuts, blended to a consistent flavor profile and fat content, pre-measured and machine-formed to ensure consistent results and fast preparation. You might, if you go upscale a bit, have the option of a burger made from turkey or buffalo, or perhaps even one that doesn't contain meat at all; you'll indicate your desire for these with a convenient prefix: "turkey burger", "buffalo burger", "walnut burger", etc. If folks at some point developed a taste for gamey Coloradoan, you might briefly have the option of ordering a "shog9 burger"...
...all of these would be shorthand for "ground-up, seasoned patties of [prefix], served on a bun".
At some point, you learned this. Hopefully, you learned it young, from your parents or caregivers, who taught you where the meat came from, how it was prepared, showed you the cost to all involved in transforming a beast of the field into a meal... Hopefully you learned before you'd built up too many false assumptions about what food is.
Many, sad to say, do not - there is a troubling breakdown in our culture that distances folks' notions of sustenance from the knowledge of the cycles and processes that are prerequisites to sustain life - whether the meal consumed is a burger or a cabbage.
And that is truly disgusting.
I also have never heard a pig called smart. They're dirty, and the mothers sometimes eat the young. I thought Octopus was the animal of the week to defend.
Apparently ranked #4 in animal intelligence according to some random non factual comic
http://theoatmeal.com/comics/pigs
And the whole dirty thing is just wrong. Naturally they choose not to soil where they sleep or eat.
Granted spending their lives in a 6' pen they'll root it up and make a right mess, but then I expect anyone would.
Unless you mean the religious connotation, but then that is unclean rather than dirty, because it "has cloven hooves but does not ruminate"[1]
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unclean_animal
I've never farmed Octopus..
I'd be curious to know if "savaging" (eating/killing their young) occurs outside of factory farms. I imagine if it does, the likelihood is a lot lower.
There are plenty of languages in which the name of a meat product isn't an indirection. Do those speakers treat animals any better? IIRC stronger forms of Sapir-Wolf are more or less discredited nowadays. Even in English, we're happy to refer to "chicken," "turkey," and "fish." They're not treated particularly well.
Supposedly the demarcation line in English has to do with class and our Norman overlords in 1100. Rich folk ate in French, and that's why we get terms like pork (porc), beef (boeuf), veal (veau), and mutton (mouton). Poor peasants stuck with their poor peasant words when eating their poor peasant foods, so those foods retained the reference to the source when moved from field to table.
I don't know how true it is--if it were that uncomplicated, why do we have pollo and gallina?
And regarding "discredited", it seems (http://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Sapir%E...) that various strong forms of the hypothesis don't hold but there is support for a weak form (that linguistic differences have some effect on cognition).
I think you also need to accept that most people don't care that it was a living, intelligent, conscious creature. I know plenty of people who will vocally celebrate a meal with bacon (or steak or whatnot) with a blatant reference to the animal that died to be on the plate. I hope this attitude changes in our time, but it is the current reality.
My understanding is that the difference is because at one point in England the nobility (who ate the animals) spoke something closer to French while the peasants (who raised the animals) spoke something closer to German. So we get beef on our plate but a cow in the field, pork versus pig or swine. It wasn't to distance the food from the animal, but the lower classes from the aristocracy. Whether it now serves that role is another question.