The Animals We Eat
Walk through any supermarket and you'll see something that should feel strange, but rarely does.
Walls of meat.
Chicken breasts stacked in perfect plastic trays.
Rows of steaks.
Shelves of prawns, salmon, tuna and bacon.
An abundance so normal that almost nobody stops to ask the obvious question:
Where is all of this actually coming from?
Not in the vague sense—farms, oceans or supply chains—but in the simple numerical sense.
Because animals do not grow like plants.
You cannot plant a cow and harvest it three months later.
Animals require space, food, time and biological limits.
Yet modern supermarkets make meat appear as abundant as bread or rice.
And in a way, it is.
Just not because nature provides it that way.
Industrial Animals
That abundance comes from systems most people never see.
Modern meat production bears little resemblance to the image many people carry in their heads—a quiet farm with a few cows grazing in open fields.
It is closer to manufacturing.
Animals are bred to grow faster than their ancestors ever did.
Chickens that once took months now reach slaughter weight in around six weeks.
Thousands of pigs live inside controlled environments designed for maximum efficiency.
Feedlots hold cattle in numbers that would have been unimaginable a century ago.
Globally, around 75 billion land animals are slaughtered every year for food.
The number is so large it almost stops meaning anything.
To sustain it, animals move through an agricultural system built on the logic of factories:
Scale.
Speed.
Standardisation.
The abundance is real.
But it is engineered.
The Sea's "Insects"
Then there is another strange thing about what we eat.
Take a prawn.
Or a shrimp.
Or a lobster.
Look closely and the resemblance becomes difficult to ignore.
Segmented body.
Shell.
Antennae.
Jointed legs.
Biologically, they belong to the same enormous family as insects—arthropods.
In other words, a shrimp is not that far removed from a giant water bug.
Yet throughout much of the Western world, people happily eat prawns and lobster while recoiling at the idea of eating crickets or grasshoppers.
The distinction feels natural.
It isn't.
It's cultural.
In Mexico, grasshoppers are a common snack.
In Thailand, fried insects are sold in street markets.
In parts of Africa, caterpillars and beetle larvae are common sources of protein.
More than two billion people eat insects regularly.
So why do they seem strange in some societies and perfectly normal in others?
Because food taboos are rarely about biology.
They're about history and familiarity.
Coastal European cultures built food traditions around fish and shellfish.
Insects, meanwhile, became associated with crop pests or famine.
Over time, those associations hardened into rules.
One creature became cuisine.
Another became unthinkable.
Even though, scientifically speaking, they are not very different at all.
The Illusion of "Normal"
What begins to emerge from all of this is something uncomfortable.
Much of what we think of as normal food is simply what we grew up seeing.
Prawns are elegant seafood.
Crickets are disgusting insects.
Remove the cultural story, and the distinction becomes much harder to defend.
The same pattern exists throughout human culture.
Cows are sacred in parts of India.
Dogs are eaten in parts of East Asia.
Horse meat is ordinary in some European countries and shocking in others.
None of those categories come from nature.
They come from collective agreement.
A quiet social contract about what counts as food—and what does not.
A System We Don't See
Most people never question it because the system hides itself.
Animals arrive already processed.
Fish appear filleted and pink, not whole and staring back.
Prawns come peeled and cleaned, not with antennae and legs still attached.
The distance between the animal and the plate removes the friction that might otherwise make people pause.
Without that friction, the system becomes invisible.
Food becomes product.
Animals become ingredients.
And the scale of it disappears behind supermarket lighting and plastic packaging.
The Strange Thing About Humans
None of this necessarily means the system is wrong.
Humans are omnivores.
We've always eaten animals.
But it reveals something deeper about how humans operate.
We don't simply eat.
We construct food cultures.
We draw lines between creatures that are edible and creatures that are not.
Those lines often have less to do with biology than with tradition.
A prawn swims across the ocean floor and ends up on a plate with garlic butter.
A cricket hops across a field and ends up as a pest.
Not because one is objectively food and the other isn't.
But because, somewhere in the past, a culture decided it that way.
And once enough people inherit the same decision for long enough, it stops feeling like a choice.
It starts feeling like reality.