It is awful to contemplate the misery we inflict on animals before we eat them – which is why, on the whole, we prefer not to think about it. Ironically, this squeamishness is itself a by-product of the food system. If we hadn’t learnt to cook and eat other species, we would never have developed our big, complex brains. And without those brains we would not be able to comprehend the moral consequences of what we have done. But neither would we have the intellectual muscle required to put right our mistakes.
