Dr. Melanie Joy: Why good people don't want to know

About this episode

Dr. Melanie Joy discusses the concept of carnism and why compassionate people often resist confronting the realities of their dietary choices.

"Let's say that you eat meat and you're sitting down and you're biting into a juicy hamburger, and your dining companion turns to you and says, 'Elizabeth, you know that hamburger is actually not made from beef. It's made from golden retrievers. '" – Melanie Joy Melanie Joy is a psychologist, author, and the person who gave a name to something that most of us have been living with our whole lives without noticing. She coined the term carnism, the invisible belief system that conditions us to eat certain animals but not others. And her best selling book, Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs and Wear Cows , has been asking people to question that conditioning for over a decade. We talk about how Carnism works, why even compassionate people resist the information and what it actually takes to change not just what we eat, but how we relate to each other and ourselves. It's a conversation that starts with food and ends with something much bigger.

People in this episode

Host: Elizabeth

Guest: Dr Melanie Joy

Topics covered

• carnism
• psychology
• animal rights

Keywords

• meat consumption
• belief systems
• animal welfare

Mentioned in this episode

Products: Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs and Wear Cows

Books & works: Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs and Wear Cows ,

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