idk how to describe it exactly but i really love how hearty fall is. like it's all refreshing weather, strong earthy smells, sturdy boots and thick knit sweaters, bold colors and warm, filling meals like soup and mash potatoes and oatmeal with golden syrup on top. it's the comfort season.

To the untrained eye, it might look like a pleasant stretch of the Long Island Sound off the coast of Connecticut. But Suzie Flores sees a side gig—and the future of American agriculture.

“It’s farming, just like somebody who has a tomato farm or vegetable garden,” she says. “It’s just I do it out on the water instead of on land.”

Flores is a kelp farmer. She heard about growing sea vegetables for food (which is common practice in Asia) and wanted to try to grow some for herself—because kelp is what’s for dinner. Learn more about the U.S. kelp farming business in the latest Macroscope video.

speaking as a Jew, i’m extra-super dubious of all that stuff that talks about cartoon witches being an antisemitic stereotype. I can get where the thing with the nose is coming from, but the claims about the hats are based on flimsy claims that require a lot of mental reaching. The hats that Jews were forced to wear were not a universal thing, and I’ve yet to see any evidence that they were part of the cultural consciousness by the time the image of the pointy-hatted witch became common.

The biggest points against the hat hypothesis:

You know what kind of hat does closely fit?

The hat in this painting (“Portrait of Mrs Salesbury with her Grandchildren Edward and Elizabeth Bagot” by J.M. Wright; circa 1675) was “a type worn by affluent women throughout Britain at this date”. Look at that hat. Any modern viewer looking at this painting might think it was supposed to be a character created by J.K. Rowling.

It’s a match in design, gender, region, and most importantly, time period: by the time that pointed witch hats started to appear in artwork in England and English colonies, this style of hat would have been associated in the cultural consciousness with elderly women, especially those who were clinging to decades-old fashions.

The easy, simple answer to where the witch hat came from: it’s exactly what a woman with all the stereotypical qualities of a witch would have worn in the first place, in the time and place the trope originated. 

Old-fashioned but not by several centuries, severe and somber, and popular with a class of women that people would have spread nasty rumors about in the first place (so many accusations of witchcraft were directed specifically at women who were independently well-off, whether out of simple envy or else scheming).

Seemed like about time to bring this back up.

Another very obvious and often explicitly stated basis for the CLOTHING of the cartoon witch is Puritan costume from the 18th century… seeing as Puritans were famous for their witch trials. The green skin, curly hair, big nose, warts etc are all definitely at least racialized things. Though big nose and warts are associated with age the combined picture is pretty much just a racial caricature.

The green skin is a product of old makeup practices. To make something look extra-pale on black & white film, you didn’t use white, because the monochrome film was blue-sensitive:

This is why so many classic movie monsters were rendered as green—because public appearances and the rare color image of he actors in full makeup would be a blueish-green. Filming for black & white even affected the props and scenery. This is what the Addams Family’s house really looked like:

Important input on the witchy costume debate, from a Jewish person who’s clearly done a bit of homework on the origins of pointy hats and green makeup. (And who also seems to be a pretty cool person into the bargain.)

@ayellowbirds - Thank you for this! :)

I’ve reblogged this before, but it’s got new info, which is great

I’d also argue that, though certain aspects of the stereotypical witch align with antisemitic tropes, it’s far more likely that witches’ stereotypical looks actually emerged by being the polar opposite of what the beautiful, and therefore ideal, 17th century woman looked like. This was to emphasize that a witch was the OPPOSITE of an ideal woman, and she could thus be placed in opposition to the beautiful, ideal heroine.

Where beauty (according to 17th century standards) was young, witches were old. Where beauty had fine, delicate features, witches had exaggerated, rough features. Where beauty was relatively unmarred (a rarity in pre-vaccination days), witches had moles and other marks. Where beauty had silky blonde hair (a treasured prize in Renaissance times, to the point that women falsely lightened their hair or wore wigs), witches had rough black hair.

As I said, some of these line up with antisemitic tropes. However, I’d argue that associating Jews with these tropes was a result of already-established patriarchal beauty tropes that had been ingrained in northern Europe for centuries. The fact that the stereotypical Jewish woman happened to defy the beauty ideals of northern Europe was used as an excuse to further oppress Jewish people, not the other way around.

In other words, I’d guess that it went like this:

“Ugliness/evil looks like this” -> “Some Jewish women (who we hate) look like this” -> “here’s proof that Jewish women are ugly and evil”

Rather than:

“Jewish women look like this” -> “we hate Jewish people” -> “Ugliness and evil looks like this”

Of course, once both tropes (ugly witches, ugly Jews) were established, I imagine that they fed into one another, but I’m dubious of the claim that the source of the ugly witch was the Jewish woman, especially since northern European ideas of beauty and fears of malevolent witches seem to go back further than northern European stereotypes of the ugly Jewish woman.

Augh, and COMPLETELY forgot to talk about this, but the stereotypical witch outfit? It comes from traditional English brewsters/alewives, aka, female beer-brewers.

Who used brooms mounted above the door as a way to signal their trade to passerby: 

And who made their trade making strange concoctions in cauldrons: 

And who happened to wear hats just like this:

Brewsters/alewives used to have a monopoly on beer-making. They handed down brewing secrets from mother to daughter and basically controlled the alcohol market. And men weren’t terribly keen on that - they wanted in on this immensely lucrative, influential field. There were some male brewsters, but the trade was overwhelmingly female, to the point that even male brewsters were still called brewsters - a female noun. 

So what do men do when they want to push women out of a trade? They demonise them. 

Suddenly the broom isn’t just a business sign, it’s a tool for going to meet the devil. The cauldron isn’t just a tool, it’s a place to create evil. The hat isn’t just a trade uniform, it’s a mark of malevolent intent and arcane knowledge. 

Coincidentally, many women who became brewsters/alewives became independently wealthy and quite powerful locally. They didn’t need to marry and could provide for their entire households with their trade. They could grow old without marrying, or they could stay unmarried after their first husband dies rather than remarrying. They could also pull strings and influence things in their favour, making local politics ‘mysteriously’ go their way.

And so the stereotype of the ugly spinster brewster-witch is born.

And, as I’ve said above, ugly women look a certain way: harsh, marred features, dark, tangled hair, and above all, old.

Note old Mother Louse up there. She was a well-respected brewster in her town, with plenty of influence, but here she is already being portrayed with stereotypical witch features: a big, hooked nose, and a pointy chin, hollow eyes, sharp cheekbones (not a good thing in premordern times - beauties had rounder faces, as sharp cheekbones were a sign of hunger or oldness). Mother Louse isn’t being portrayed as Jewish, but as an elderly, ugly spinster, who engages in the lucrative, powerful - but suspect - business of brewing.

Know who else this happened to? Midwives. Another female trade, passed down from woman to woman, dealing in business secrets from which men were barred - and this in regard to the most mysterious power of all: the power to bring life into the world. And midwives do pretty well for themselves, too: plenty of families are willing to pay a bundle to make sure their babies are delivered safe and sound in a world with high infant mortality. Just like male physicians, midwives knew how to create tinctures and mix herbs, but now, once again, rudimentary chemistry and herb-lore become demonised when women are the ones doing it. Now, if your baby is born sick, deformed, or dead, it’s clearly the spinster midwife’s doing, full of spite because she has no children of her own.

Anyway, there’s your witch history for the day. The hooked nose and black hair are already something of a stretch, but the claim that the typical witch hat is somehow linked to anti-semitism and not brewsters is totally ahistorical.

This is all incredibly interesting but it does not, in any way, absolve cartoon witches of antisemitism. I mean… literally nobody without specialist knowledge today knows about medieval English beer manufacture but anyone with half a brain cell knows that a woman who

stinks of antisemitic caricature.

So yes, the hat and the cloak and the green skin might all have their origins in things that are completely racially benign but that doesn’t mean that witches, as a whole, are absolved of antisemitism. I want to point out that things which goyim consider sinister are frequently associated with Jews simply because it’s a convenient way for antisemites to communicate that something is evil.

I guarantee you that antisemitism has been folded into the mythology of witches over the centuries. Even when various features of the witch can be traced to obscure, non-antisemitic origins many other features are most certainly racist.

Like… even if witches originated as a caricature of alewives someone, at some point, sat down and thought to themselves “how do I make it clear that they’re sinister and evil” and decided to throw in a metric tonne of antisemitic Jew coding.

… and it stuck.

re: the “men don’t get to have emotions under patriarchy” thing, because someone asked

men and boys under patriarchy are socialised to have a very limited range of emotions (anger and entitlement but not vulnerability, hurt, or actual empathetic love) and a very limited range of ways to express those emotions (physical or emotional violence or else withdrawal but not conflict resolution or open communication). often this socialisation is enforced through abuse or through invalidation or mockery of feelings of vulnerability and hurt, including hurt caused by (emotional, physical, and sexual) abuse. so men and boys grow up not knowing how to express hurt or vulnerability other than through violence, entitlement, and anger. they grow up not knowing how to behave with empathy, care, compassion, commitment, and respect in close relationships, including romantic relationships both with men and with women. (they are capable of that kind of love, all human beings are, but most of them are not taught how to have it, and they have to want to learn.) all of this causes suffering, through chlidhood and into adulthood, including in men’s relationships with other men, and to insist that men do not suffer under patriarchy is to issue a moralistic claim about who “gets” to have suffered.

however it’s also incorrect to claim that men and boys are socialised not to experience emotions under patriarchy. as I said earlier, they are socialised to sublimate those emotions into forms that are more in line with ideals of masculinity. and it’s women who suffer most when men sublimate emotion into entitlement and anger, or when men feel entitled to enact their anger in the form of violence. this violence can fall on men’s sisters, their female friends, their girlfriends and wives, their mothers. because of course the other side of the coin of men being socialised out of vulnerability is women being socialised into it. women and girls are taught to accept hurt from men in romantic relationships as our due, to see violence or jealousy as evidence of love or passion, to see callousness or lack of reciprocation as “just how men are.” this has a material corollary in how women are taught to expect to carry most of the burden of domestic labour & childrearing (and these tasks can also fall onto any woman in the household) just as they are taught to expect to carry most of the burden of keeping a relationship together, coddling men & leading them patiently into open communication, accepting the blame if and when they fail. the “psychological burdens” that men are made to bear are part and parcel of patriarchal domination: “the domination of men over women is to the advantage of men.” both men and women are kept from love under patriarchy (and this socialisation absolutely impacts lesbians too, in & out of romantic relationships), but men are the ones who materially benefit from it. plus it’s not as if women’s emotions aren’t invalidated under patriarchy as well–any negative emotion is liable to get us called hysterical, belligerent, shrill, crazy, to have us merely ignored or literally institutionalised & many things in between.

but, to double back, the fact that men under patriarchy are enabled and expected to use certain kinds of emotion to get their way (more control over female partners, less obligation to do the dishes or help with the kids, more sexual access, etc.) does not elide or render unimportant the fact that men and boys are not taught how to deal with other kinds of emotion except by sublimating them in this way. in fact you’re obligated to acknowledge that neglect in order to point out how it harms women. and the fact that women’s emotions are subject to ridicule and violence under patriarchy does not elide or render unimportant the fact that we are expected to express them, whether or not we’re mocked by the same token. women’s relationships between each other are expected and allowed to be emotionally closer, more physically affectionate, and more open than men’s. women’s emotional training, at the same time that it sets us up to fail, sets us up to pick up the pieces (although I’ve also seen female friendships credibly described as a patriarchal stop-valve mechanism for the same reason). and of course homophobia impacts all of this too but this is already longer than I wanted it to be & I’m not actually trying to write a book here

also, as an aside, a lot of black feminism tends to be more ready to acknowledge men’s suffering under patriarchy, & the importance of leading them back into love if it’s possible (while also recognising that this is not women’s duty and that they should walk away if they are being hurt), while white women’s feminism is more prone to separatist positions or to believing that men are irredeemable. which makes sense because these Black woman writers have had to struggle alongside men against white supremacy as well as struggling against them due to patriarchy, while white women don’t have the former experience. in reference to all of the above I recommend reading bell hooks’ all about love

also terfs & anyone else who wants to claim that trans women are unilaterally “male socialised” or w/e can kindly fuck off of this post

oh I meant to mention but, while it is true that this arrangement was ultimately created by men for the benefit of men, it’s a mistake to act like women can’t be responsible for the perpetuation of this kind of gendered socialisation. in fact, in their common role as primary caretakers, they’re often among the most prominent voices in a child’s life in coaching them, whether they strictly mean to or not, in how to become a proper (cisgender & heterosexual) member of their assigned gender. women can enact patriarchy & their identity does not save them from that. in fact it’s built into the system.

Continue Reading.

This is the greatest thing I’ve read in a long time and I want this experiment replicated everywhere as soon as possible.

My town would be a good start.

the funniest part is that everyone is so surprised.

“composting kitchen waste makes plants grow. who knew???”

well… everyone?

It’s not so much that they’re SURPRISED about it. That was actually the original plan.

This juice company agreed to donate a few acres of its own land to a bordering national park, and compost orange peels there to help restore the land. They were subsequently sued by a rival juice company for having “defiled a national park.” The law sided with the rival company, and the project was discontinued early.

This isn’t so much a “Wow SO SURPRISE!” as a “FUCKIN’ TOLD YOU SO!”

Plus also, sixteen years ago, we might’ve known the answer to the question “What happens when you compost kitchen waste?” but we DIDN’T know the answer to “What happens when you dump 12,000 tons of orange peel on 7 acres of ecologically depleted wasteland?”

And for the first six months, the answer was, “7 acres of nasty-smelling, fly breeding ex-fruit sludge, and a lawsuit from a rival juice company,” but 16 years LATER we can say, “A 176 percent increase in above-ground biomass, and a study site so transformed we couldn’t tell we had the right place until we dug the sign out of undergrowth consisting mainly of native shrubs and grasses, SUCK IT, TICO FRUIT!!!!”

I think we need to talk about the under appreciated Window Seat fandom

I mean really? With the book shelves?

It’s like an alcove of happiness.

You want a whole row of individual seats? Fine, here you go. Or how about a whole window bed for those snugglers out there.Curtains.. Guys this one has curtains.Seriously? This is basically a glass cube of bliss. You can even get them with corners! Not enough corners? Okay.Ba-BAM!! Corners for cocooning. There’s also the Roman-esque themed seat for the historians out there.  If you don’t want to snuggle up in blankets with hot cocoa in this then I don’t even know why you’re on this planet. I mean dat stonework. This one’s an entire rectangle. Just imagine all the cuddling that could happen in there. It’s practically a fortress.This one’s fucking curved okay? it’s just chillin, up of the ground, and curved for your lounging convenience. don’t like rectangles or square? Okay. Have a fucking trapezoid seat.

I love window seats.

How much longer until the utopic Solarpunk future where Capitalism is dead and we all live in ecologically sustainable high-tech forest cities? Asking for a friend.

Until we make those ecologically sustainable high-tech forest cities ourselves. It’s going to take a lot of us to do it though, so best to spread the word (and gather native tree seeds).

And, like, get started now. Then our “weirdo houses” will be the only thing functioning when everything falls apart!

The only reason why we don’t live in a solarpunk world right now is because no one has bothered to make it yet. 

We’ll have to make it ourselves, and we’ll have to help each other make it. That’s why it is solarpunk. 

Some resources to consider creating or joining or doing:

Grow food in 5 gallon buckets

Oh my god, food extract is not the same as an essential oil.

Food extract is the flavoring of something cooked down into a carrier oil or alcohol that is safe for human ingestion.

Essential oil is the pure extract of the plant refined down and distilled for concentrated medicinal purposes to a significantly higher strength than simply adding ground up mint leaves to your water. The two are not comparable in any way.

Cinnamon extract and cinnamon essential oil are not the same thing.

One is about 100 times the strength of the other and can also cause acute organ failure. I’ll give you a hint, it’s not the food extract.

Sweet gods I’m not trying to be mean, I want you to be aware and safe and stop putting yourselves and others at risk. Please.

Like maybe my tone is hard to read, maybe it just comes off as really angry but it’s not, it’s fear and worry. I read posts and clutch my head in alarm going “no! No! That’s how people die!” And then I get exasperated because a bunch of people not formally qualified chime in with “um actually this is a lie” and it’s not, it’s really, really not.

I’m not some big pharma advocate. I’m a crunchy witch hippy just like you with salt rock lamps and rose quartz all over my house. I just happen to have spent the last 15 years of my life studying the actual science of holistic medicines and I’m trying to help you not get hurt (or worse) becuase you trusted a sales person with no idea what the ever loving hell they were talking about beyond a sales pitch designed to maximize profit. Gah.

I see this so often in the Mommy world. There was a lady not long ago in one of the mom groups who was really worried about her toddler. He’d had a persistent cough for weeks and the doctor couldn’t figure out why. Someone asked, well what have to tried to treat it with, so far? She said she was using a humidifier, honey, and eucalyptus EO in the shower every night.

Yeah.

In case you were wondering, eucalyptus can cause respiratory distress in young children.

Sadly I don’t wonder. I have a friend whose daughter died from a home made menthol oil chest rub. She wasn’t even ten yet, but her mom– a qualified aromatherapist– thought she’d be old enough to handle it. She went into respitory distress and died seizing in her mother’s arms on route to the hospital. It was one of the most harrowing stories I had to listen to during my holistic training. She stood up there, on this podium next to a bunch of ponzy scheme essential oil sellers who looked like they wanted the floor to swallow them, and said “I killed my child with good intentions”.

I’ll never forget the look on her face.

So to reiterate, children under the age of ten should not be directly exposed to things like eucalyptus oil, peppermint or wintergreen. If you are using such things in your house and your child starts to complain of headaches, lethargy and general “feel worse”, don’t just assume it’s the cold/flu. Those are all signs of menthol sensitivity and they only get worse with increased exposure. Ventilate the room, take them outside if you can until the air clears. Do not apply again.

Rapid onset wheezing may be a sign of allergic reaction or possible asthma attack triggered by the menthol too. If they tell you their chest is warm or fuzzy when you use it, that’s another sign it’s not going down well with them. Again, ventilate the area or remove anything you applied to them. Administer inhalers if necessary. Watch for any more labored breathing or if they suddenly go limp or you can’t wake them up. If they do call 911.

This can also apply to people with allergies and asthma who are otherwise healthy.

One of the safest, natural ways to alleviate congestion is with just pure good old fashioned warm steam. Keep the air moist, drink plenty of warm fluids. Menthol can help relieve the feeling of congestion, but there’s limited evidence to suggest it actually clears the airways. And for the love of god don’t inhale mustard or horseradish (I’ve seen that suggestion on posts too, though how you’d get those oils I don’t know). That’s literally what tear gas is made of.

I apologize sincerely for bringing this long post back into your lives, fam, but I’m getting inundated with questions about what can the possible harm be if you dab a little neat peppermint oil on your child’s skin to help them with a little head cold, and this is the most succinct way I can put it.

The harm you may do, is in fact death. I am not telling you these things to be a kill joy, I’m telling you so you won’t accidentally kill yours.

there is a healthy, “natural” way to monitor your body and it’s called interoception. it’s feeling what you’re feeling; it’s awareness of fatigue, hunger, physical discomfort, the way emotions manifest physically, other needs/desires.

technology like scales & step counters, and constructs like BMI designations & clothing sizes are means by which we are alienated from our bodies.

we are first stripped of our interoceptive awareness (esp as women) by a culture that forces us into discomfort and pain in almost every area of our lives, and then we are sold devices and labels - external surveillance - as counterfeit substitutes for that healthy interoceptive relationship with our bodies

when i say let’s refuse to surveil our bodies, i’m not suggesting we become alienated from them, i’m saying exactly the opposite 

Human bodies are a part of nature — wild, various, and interdependent like forests and seas

Meadow and Fawn on Instagram

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Finding out that Frances Dana Barker Gage, a white woman, rewrote Sojourner Truth’s famous speech to be more stereotypically “Southern slave” (complete with slurs and misspellings like dat, dere, dey) when Sojourner Truth was actually from New York and spoke only Dutch until she was almost ten and wouldn’t have actually sounded that way linguistically and decidedly did not use the phrase “Ain’t I A Woman?” at all is…whew. And on top of everything, she embellished details about Sojourner Truth’s life (like the number of children she had/how many of them were sold into slavery), wrote that ST said that she could take beatings like a man, and the reception of the speech in the room (she claims ST was called a n*gg*r, earlier accounts say the room was welcoming).

Lmaooo peak white feminist antics.

https://www.thesojournertruthproject.com/compare-the-speeches/

I don’t think any of us, here in the eye of the storm, can grasp how devastating it has been for much of the human race to be alienated from their own bodies and the needs and desires of the body. The body is everything—the locus of all our experiences, our entire existence. To turn the nature of our relationship with the body from harmony & collaboration to antipathy & constant strife is to devastate us emotionally, cognitively, and biologically. Even if we begin to repair this damage now, and even if the earth body can support our human bodies for long enough, we’ll see the fallout from this devastation for many centuries, and likely longer

today in my economic botany class we learned why saffron is so expensive and i gotta go to work but im making this post to remind myself to talk about it later bc holy shit lmao

today in my economic botany class we learned about the ‘enfleurage’ method of extraction of pure essential oils from raw flower parts for expensive luxury perfumes and i need to tell yall about both of these things bc wow high end plant products sure are turning out to be something

okay i have *checks time* half an hour before i gotta TA so im gonna try and do a speed essay here

saffron

saffron is a plant in the iris family (it’s specifically a crocus) just to give a general idea of what it might look like, and it’s native to the Mediterranean, although it’s also grown commercially in Spain and Portugal. it’s used for both a spice for taste and for the bright yellow dye it produces, but including it in either of these things drives the price of the resulting product up immensely due mostly to the price of saffron alone. this is because only the stigmas of the flowers are used, and it all has to be processed by hand. so the female part of the flower that captures the pollen? only that. nothing else

so not only does an entire field of saffron only yield like….a few pounds of usable product, but people have to 1. go out and hand-remove the flowers and put them in baskets and 2. bring the baskets back to processing centers where people sit around tables with tweezers and deadass pluck out the stigmas. to give an idea of what this looks like, this is the flower:

the stigmas are the red things. those are the only usable portions of this. this is what processing looks like (this is in Afghanistan): 

that little pile of red stuff is the actual product. note the huge amount of discarded flowers and the pollen from the anthers covering the workers’ gloves. 

the resulting lot of actual useable saffron product is so valuable that they transport the initial lot in armored trucks to another facility to be dried, and then they’re split up into smaller lots based on quality to be packaged and stuff. i’ve personally never frequented like….any High End Spice Shops or anything, but my botany professor says that when u purchase saffron here in the states it comes in a tiny spice jar with a little foil packet inside holding a precious couple stigmas, and apparently it’s normal for that amount of saffron to cost $25+. so like. wild

fuck i dont have time to do talk about enfleurage rn but i’ll add onto this post with it when i can

The more you know, you know? 💫

A couple years back, a buddy of mine was stationed at the consulate in Sulaymaniyah, Iraq. When he got back to the states, he asked, “You cook, right?” Sure do.

So he shows me a 35mm film can full of Iranian saffron. This was about a cup (~250 mL) of saffron. He paid $20 for it at the bazaar. He was going to send it to his mom and his sister, but he kindly gave me about two tablespoons worth.

That would easily be over a few hundred dollars retail - if you could buy Iranian saffron in the US. My wife was absolutely sick of saffron rice by the time I’d used it all.

“country music” is a phenomenon that would not exist without early african american musicians and musical traditions. the banjo is an adapted african instrument. you can’t base a musical genre on appropriation (really a mix of cultural exchange and appropriation) and then pretend that you get to arbitrate whether members of the group you appropriated from are allowed into the genre. the white people who identify w country music and are rejecting lil nas x are not only racist but also demonstrating a truly embarrassing lack of knowledge about the history of the music they claim as their own

Does Klezmer Metal exist? I bet it exists. I should try and find it. 

I found some!

Also, approaching that thought from a different angle (thanks @internationalspacehobo):

Animal agriculture is one of the largest contributors to rain forest destruction, greenhouse gases, pollution, inefficient resource use / overconsumption (including grains, land, and water), and of course the death of billions of animals worldwide (both wild/endangered and domestic).

If you were thinking of making any environmental changes to your life this Earth Day, why not adopt veganism? If you think it’s an extreme lifestyle: is it really more extreme than the harm we cause by eating and exploiting animals?

And if you’ve ever been told you can’t go vegan (for whatever reason) click here! I’m sure there’s a solution for you.

Denial and meat-eating

All of the following is from The Face On Your Plate by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson.  It’s a little long but interesting.

“Denial…is simply a specific psychic defense against an overwhelming reality. … Those who eat meat are in massive denial. … We deny an idea and then repress the feelings that accompany that idea. … The feelings that accompany eating another being are stronger – much stronger – than the accompanying thoughts. … If the idea of eating a sentient being is conscious, the feelings of disgust, of horror, of guilt, may lie beneath our consciousness; in other words, we may well remain unaware that we have such feelings. … We train children from a young age by providing them with picture books about idyllic farms where the humans live in harmony with the animals and where we do not even obliquely refer to eating them. … The children are trained to disassociate. They eat in a kind of trance of denial. …

“What should we call something we deliberately choose not to know about? And what do we call it when an entire society takes this path? Consider slaughterhouses. They are remote from our homes and remote from our awareness. The ‘family farm’ conveys an image of a good life for humans and other animals alike. I doubt such a place ever existed anywhere except the human imagination. After all, how ideal could a place be when its raison d’etre is to kill the occupants? And these occupants, the animals on the farm, did not choose to be there. …

“As long ago as 1906, Upton Sinclair in his novel The Jungle wrote this searing passage: ‘The shriek was followed by another, louder and yet more agonizing, for once started upon that journey, the hog never came back. One by one the men hooked up the hogs and slit their throats. There was a line of hogs with squeals and lifebood ebbing away. Until at last each vanished into a huge vat of boiling water (some still alive). The hogs were so innocent. They came so very trustingly. They were so very human in their protests. They had done nothing to deserve it.’ …

“The kind of denial referred to above is the one we employ when it is in our interest, that is, when it leads to less guilt, less cognitive dissonance for us. We are concerned with our own suffering, not the animals’ suffering. Denial is a convenient overarching mechanism. But we employ other defenses as well: most simply, we just avoid thinking about something. This surely explains some of the unpopularity of the person who insists we pay attention. …

“When we see animals suffering, some people simply walk away. For others, the distancing mechanism is more psychological: they never connect the face on their plate with a single animal’s death. Food comes so disguised it often requires a conscious effort of the imagination to put the face back onto the meat. … When the underlying reality is particularly unpleasant, we minimize – numbing ourselves to the actual extent of the real story. We say, ‘Things can’t possibly be as bad as people tell us,’ because we don’t want them to be that bad. This is a form of magical thinking, a way of shutting our eyes. …

“The classic psychological defense of ‘splitting’ is another form of minimization. We can say that there are good farms and bad farms, and refuse to have anything to do with the latter. But it is still a defense mechanism, because we have split something in two that belongs as one: the animal who provides the food. Whether she comes from a good farm or a bad farm, her life is still taken from her long before she is ready. …

“Other times we use the awkward defense of ‘reversal.’ Instead of concerning ourselves with the suffering of the animals, we claim that it is we who are the ones who suffer by having to keep these animals fed and safe. We act put upon. We become testy. We make fun of animal rights activists. Sometimes we even make fun of the animals themselves. Notoriously in the footage taken by the Humane Society of cruelty in slaughterhouses, we saw men mocking the animals they were torturing. … The psychology of such behavior is worth an entire book. It is odd, when you think about it, that some people may hurt animals or other people as a way of dealing with their own terror of being hurt, or as a means of running away from the feelings of responsibility and guilt.

“In severe cases we can even dissociate. I think of children who understandably do not want to recognize the animal on their plate as the animal they were playing with earlier in the day. … The psychologically healthy reaction of mourning the animal who was their friend is not encouraged by adults, primarily, I think, because it raises uncomfortable questions that are difficult for any adult to answer honestly. ‘Dad, I thought you raised me to show compassion to those less unfortunate than we are, or for those who suffer?’ There is no good answer to this good-faith question. …

“You could argue over whether the denial is conscious, pre-conscious, or unconscious, or when it begins to shade into ‘disguisal’ (a parallel to denial), as when we disguise what we eat either literally (in packaging) or with euphemisms – pork, bacon, or sausage, not pig; beef, steak or hamburger, not cow; mutton, not sheep; venison, not deer; veal, not calf; and perhaps most notoriously, pate de foie gras, not diseased goose liver. … Not only does industry profit [from denial], so do all the consumers who eat meat. It is in nobody’s interest to acknowledge the reality, the suffering, the horrible lives, and the savage deaths of the animals, except for the animals themselves and their few, but growing, number of advocates.

“In the past, some animal scientists have engaged in a kind of willed ignorance, falsely claiming that animals feel nothing. This position became increasingly less tenable as more research became available, but there were still the objections that what animals feel may well be beyond our understanding, and hence outside the realm of our possible empathy. Yet one need not know all the details of what another person suffers to know that they do suffer. More and more, people are giving animals the benefit of the doubt.  Could we not at least maintain that while they feel pain (perhaps even more keenly than we do), they do not reflect about the pain, and hence avoid the kind of suffering that comes from contemplation, self-awareness. or memory?  This is an unlikely source of comfort:  we need only observe how dogs avoid a person who has been unkind to them to recognize that the memory of pain is critical to their very survival. …

“It is only when the curtain of denial has been torn aside that we are free to make the choices each of us must make for ourselves. We must remove ourselves from whatever blind hides our vision, and look out at the horizon to face what we see there. We owe animals no less. We also owe ourselves no less, it turns out.”

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