The Violence We Normalize at the Table
My Favorite Vegan Memes
The image is unsettling not because it is graphic, but because it is ordinary. A smiling child sits before a plate of ham, a slab of meat, peas arranged neatly to the side, a glass of milk in her hand. The scene is wholesome, almost nostalgic. And that is precisely the point.
We spend enormous energy debating the impact of violent movies, video games, and online culture on young minds. We hold hearings, publish studies, and wring our hands about what children might absorb from fictional narratives. Yet we rarely question the daily ritual that places the body of another being at the center of a child’s plate.
The first lesson is not delivered through spectacle. It is delivered through normalization.
When killing is hidden behind packaging, euphemism, and tradition, it becomes invisible. We do not say “cow” or “pig.” We say “beef” and “ham.” We do not show slaughterhouses. We show farms bathed in golden light. Children learn, quietly and without instruction, that some lives matter and some are commodities. They learn that compassion has boundaries, drawn neatly around convenience and taste.
This is not about shaming parents. Most people are repeating what was modeled for them. It is about examining the moral architecture we pass down without scrutiny. If we tell children to be kind, to avoid harming others, to stand against cruelty, yet we finance an industry built on confinement and slaughter three times a day, the contradiction does not disappear. It simply becomes cultural background noise.
Choosing plant-based food is not a symbolic gesture. It is a refusal to outsource violence to someone else’s hands. It is a decision to align daily practice with professed values.
If we truly want a less violent world, the conversation cannot stop at screens. It has to reach the table.
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Addiction starts here, at home. Granted, they did what their parents and their parents did before, but those were simpler times. HOW MANY TIMES at the table I told my parents I did not want the meat (chicken, pork also). It was only later I acknowledged these foods gave me stomach aches, but I knew as a child these were formerly living creatures, not far from my cats and dogs... Then came this acknowledgement when reading this yesterday, and yes, another take on this:
https://www.transformwithsonja.com/blog/my-grandmother-was-my-first-drug-pusher"
Her grandmother for her, my mother and father for me, may they rest in peace, and I know they did the best they could, until they couldn't...