For as much time as I had spent facing human mortality, I didn’t recognize a dead animal that didn’t come wrapped in plastic and Styrofoam. French anthropologist Noëlie Vialles wrote of the food system in France, though this could be said of almost any country in the West: “slaughtering was required to be industrial, that is to say large-scale and anonymous; it must be non-violent (ideally: painless); and it must be invisible (ideally: non-existent). It must be as if it were not.” It must be as if it were not.
