The Violence Beneath Our Plates: How Carnism Fuels Human Atrocities
The Ethics of Eating and the Origins of Oppression

It sounds incendiary, and it should. The scale, the brutality, and the moral numbness embedded in carnism mirror the darkest chapters in human history. Billions of animals are confined, mutilated, and slaughtered each year, not for survival, but for preference, profit, and power. If this were done to humans, we would call it a holocaust. And yet, the machine turns quietly because it has always served more than just the appetite. It has shaped civilization itself.
‘‘Once life becomes property, exploitation becomes normalized, from farm animals to enslaved humans.’’
What we call “meat” today was once a living being. And how we got from that being’s birth to its body in shrink wrap is not just a story of farming, it’s a story of control. The domestication of animals was not an isolated agricultural shift, it was the start of a mindset, a civilizational fracture that normalized hierarchy, violence, and exploitation. Once life could be owned, bred, branded, and killed, the door was opened not only for animal oppression but for the domination of humans as well.
This is not a metaphor. This is history.
The Birth of Domination
Carnism is the invisible ideology that conditions people to eat certain animals while loving or protecting others. Coined by social psychologist Melanie Joy, the term captures something most of us inherit without question. We do not ask why cows become hamburgers while dogs become companions. The system ensures we never have to.
But to understand how carnism shaped our treatment of each other, we must go back to the domestication of animals 10,000 years ago. Before the Neolithic era, most humans were nomadic, gathering plants and occasionally hunting wild animals. The shift to settled agriculture changed everything, but it was the domestication of animals that changed us.
When early humans corralled sheep, goats, and cattle, they didn’t just gain a food source. They invented property. They invented breeding. They invented selective death. These animals became tools, resources, and commodities. And once we learned to treat life this way, we replicated the model across all aspects of society.
From Pastures to Empires
Animal agriculture helped birth empires. As societies grew around herding and farming, land became the most valuable resource, and violence was required to control it. In Eurasia, livestock allowed tribes to expand, feed standing armies, and transport goods. In turn, expansion demanded conquest. Meat wasn’t just food—it was fuel for domination.
From Rome to Genghis Khan’s Mongol empire to the American West, pastoralist cultures often became militaristic. Warrior traditions and slaughterhouse logic go hand in hand. Herding societies tend to develop rigid hierarchies, masculine dominance, and control-based economies. They also develop systems of ownership, where women and slaves, like cattle, can be traded and controlled.
Indigenous societies based on foraging or permaculture were often less hierarchical, less violent. It is not a coincidence. Once you view the world through the eyes of control and extraction, peace becomes an obstacle. Carnism taught humans that killing can be normalized, even sacred. War is just the extension of that ethic.
The Blueprint for Slavery
Slavery is not merely a historical injustice, is a direct extension of the logic of animal domestication. When animals became property, it created a precedent: life could be owned. That logic was not forgotten when Europeans trafficked millions of Africans to build colonies in the Americas.
In the United States, the plantation system depended on enslaved Black people raising enslaved animals. Both groups were bred, bought, sold, and killed for profit. Black bodies and animal bodies were commodified side by side. It wasn’t just dehumanization, it was animalization. And it was justified using the same framework. They don’t feel like we do. They’re lesser. They’re here for us.
Even abolitionist literature often used comparisons to livestock—chains, brands, and auctions to elevate animals, but to show the depths of human cruelty. But it missed the deeper truth: the mechanisms were never separate. Carnism helped create slavery’s infrastructure and ideology.
‘‘Carnism is not just about eating meat. It is about organizing society around domination and control.’’
Capitalism’s Bloody Foundation
Modern capitalism was not built on industry alone; it was built on flesh. The factory farm is simply the logical end-point of centuries of thinking that treats life as capital. It is not just about eating meat. It is about organizing the world around endless growth, domination, and exploitation.
The meat industry today is one of the most powerful and corrupt on Earth. It relies on migrant labor, suppresses whistleblowers, externalizes environmental costs, and funnels billions into lobbying and marketing. Governments subsidize animal agriculture because it props up the illusion of abundance and the control of working-class diets.
But it comes at a cost. Deforestation, pandemics, antibiotic resistance, and greenhouse gases are not side effects. They are symptoms of a diseased worldview. Carnism does not just hurt animals. It poisons entire economies, corrodes justice, and fuels planetary collapse.
From Slaughterhouses to City Streets
There is a documented link between slaughterhouse employment and increased local rates of violent crime, particularly domestic violence. It makes sense. When your job requires you to kill sentient beings all day, empathy becomes a liability. The psychological toll is immense, often resulting in PTSD-like symptoms. But society turns a blind eye because the victims are animals—and the profits are high.
What does it mean when we normalize such environments? What does it teach children to see dismembered bodies in the grocery aisle? What kind of culture do we create when life is disposable?
Desensitization is not compartmentalized. The same numbness that allows someone to ignore the screams of pigs allows them to ignore suffering in general. Carnism teaches indifference. It teaches us to ignore systems of harm when they are profitable or traditional. It teaches us to protect cruelty so long as it tastes good.
‘‘The same worldview that sees animals as commodities built the machinery of slavery, capitalism, and war.’’
The Culture of Corruption
From lobbyists to lawmakers, the animal agriculture industry thrives on silence. Whistleblowing is criminalized. “Ag-gag” laws punish those who expose cruelty. Education campaigns are underfunded. Schoolchildren are taught the myth of the happy cow, not the truth of industrial slaughter.
Globally, powerful meat-producing nations use trade deals and economic coercion to flood markets with cheap animal products, undermining local plant-based traditions in the Global South. This is carnist imperialism exporting addiction to suffering under the banner of progress.
Even as the climate crisis worsens, international summits often ignore or downplay the role of meat and dairy. Why? Because to challenge carnism is to challenge capitalism itself.
A Path to Peace
Rejecting carnism is not just about personal purity. It is about aligning our values with our actions. It is about creating a world where compassion is the norm, not the exception.
Veganism is often dismissed as fringe, idealistic, or elitist. But in truth, it is one of the most radical acts of resistance a person can take. It refuses to cooperate with systems of violence. It refuses to accept that suffering must be normalized. It is a declaration that peace must begin with the powerless.
Every social justice movement has faced ridicule before it was embraced. Abolitionists. Feminists. Civil rights activists. Today, animal rights advocates carry that torch. Not because animals are more important than humans, but because the same mindset that harms animals has always harmed humans, too.
Carnism Is a Mirror
The systems we build reflect the beliefs we hold. Carnism teaches us to devalue life, to hide suffering, to consume without conscience. If we want a world without war, exploitation, and injustice, we cannot build it on a foundation of blood.
It is no accident that the Holocaust itself borrowed language and logistics from slaughterhouses. As Charles Patterson wrote in Eternal Treblinka, “The road to Auschwitz was paved with slaughterhouses.” The devaluation of life is a template that can be scaled up. If we accept the mass killing of animals, we open ourselves to the mass killing of people.
‘‘Rejecting carnism is an act of radical resistance in a world built on cruelty.’’
We Have a Choice
What would a world without carnism look like? A world where we raised food, not sentient beings, for sustenance? Where children were taught empathy, not entitlement? Where economies were rooted in sustainability, not extraction?
That world is not utopian. It is necessary.
The end of carnism would not just save animals. It would restore our humanity. It would challenge every system built on domination, patriarchy, racism, imperialism, and offer a new ethic based on compassion and justice.
We say we want peace. We say we want justice. But as long as our plates are soaked in blood, we lie to ourselves.
The first step is simple: stop feeding the machine.
Recommended Reading
The World Peace Diet by Will Tuttle
Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows by Melanie Joy
Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust by Charles Patterson
Aphro-ism by Aph and Syl Ko