Photo: Turn to 10

Customers camped outside a Chik-Fil-A in Warwick, Rhode Island (my home state!), for two days, in the hopes of getting free Chik-Fil-A for a year. It was the grand opening and the first of the fast food chain in the state.

It’s completely bizarre to me that not only eating animals, but also encouraging the raising, suffering, and killing of them (“Eat more chik’n!”), has become so normalized. So much so that the desperation and obsession with eating animals, seen here in how these people waited TWO DAYS IN A PARKING LOT, is not thought of as strange to most people. It should be strange to us that a large group of people is this desperate to taste chicken flesh and skin. Their preference for animal flesh comes with an enormous cost, which is of course the life of the chicken, who doubtlessly suffered. All chickens suffer immensely to become our food products, and because of their size, it takes so many more chickens to make food products. Billions of chickens are raised and killed — just for a taste preference.

It’s also bizarre to me that carnists will be quick to proclaim veganism as “brainwashing,” and the mere mention of veganism will evoke a “Stop shoving your beliefs in my face!” response. And yet, those same carnists don’t even consider how deeply they’ve been influenced by a corporation like Chik-Fil-A, whose advertising is literally a demand to eat more chicken. Chik-Fil-A tells them what to do, and they run out and do exactly that — no questions asked.

If anyone is brainwashing or shoving beliefs in faces, it’s the dominant culture that’s continually bombarding us with demands of who to eat and where to eat them.  Consider this: Here’s another photo from the news article, with its original caption:

Embarrassing.