Chi mangiamo a cena stasera? Scelte alimentari e forme rimosse della violenza

This essay invites to reflect on the indirect and repressed, but nonetheless atrocious and answerable, violence that a large part of humanity daily exercises through its eating habits. The apparently innocent question “what to eat today?” could in fact, for most people every day, be translated in “who are we eating today?” This is done, generally, having little wish to remember that that food is the result of the detention and killing of beings able to rejoice and suffer, to have feelings and express themselves, to remember and think not less than us, even if in a different form. The way the entire system of production and selling of animal food is organized and the metropolitan lifestyle, in which any contact between consumers and farm animals is absent, favor this form of mental repression. However, there is no doubt that those who consume meat coming from intensive breeding (meaning the majority of the purchasers) make themselves accomplices of a process that implies an atrocious life and the premature death of at least 170 billions of animals a year, as well as significant damages to the environment and human health. The essay reports the data collected by people who have monitored these phenomena on global scale, and the reflections of thinkers who have stood up against the killing of animals to produce food, but also discusses the provocative positions recently assumed by Dominique Lestel, a prestigious scholar of animal behavior, in his Apologie du carnivore.