What Dr. Joy concluded is this. “Eating (certain) animals results from extensive social and psychological conditioning that causes naturally empathic and rational people to distort their perceptions and block their empathy so that they act against their values of compassion and justice without fully realizing what they’re doing. In other words, carnism teaches us to violate the Golden Rule without knowing or caring that we’re doing so.” By deconstructing the carnistic system, she learned how violent or oppressive ideologies are structured. (Powerarchy, 2019)

When Melanie was twenty-three years old, she ate a contaminated hamburger (campylobacter) and became severely sick, needing hospitalization. Surviving this incident—and questioning other aspects of how she and most of the rest of us were raised—took her on a journey from meat-eater, vegetarian to vegan and activist, theorist, author, social entrepreneur, and the eighth recipient of the Ahimsa Award for her work on global nonviolence. The Dalai Lama and Nelson Mandela received this same award.

 Today, our purpose is not to transform you into eating a plant-based diet. However, the evidence is compelling if you do not want to die from heart disease, lung disease, digestive cancers, infections, diabetes, high blood pressure, liver disease, blood cancers, kidney disease, breast cancer, suicidal depression, prostate cancer, Parkinson’s disease, or Iatrogenic causes (dying from Doctors who know how to treat acute diseases, broken bones, and chronic infectious diseases but, do not know how to prevent disease)¹. So instead, we are here to create an awareness of Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows. Dr. Joy’s book was first published in 2010, and a tenth-anniversary edition was released in 2020. We discuss the global plant-based movement 10 years later and her work in over 50 countries.

You can get beyond carnism by bridging the gap between our professed values and those values we practice and by understanding the many ways carnism conditions us to be nonrelational. We discuss:

• The tenants of carnism and how these tenants are woven into our systems.
• Being trained to psychologically distance from our empathy.
• Classifying animals as edible and nonedible.
• How the dominant culture oppresses and what it teaches us about moral superiority.
• What does eating meat have to do with nonrelational relating?
• Do we think eating meat is normal or abnormal?
• Becoming an Ally and being as vegan as possible.

An affirmative conversation you can lean into to get beyond carnism. DOWNLOAD