Question
Mmmm bacon...
Alternatives
"I love steak" is almost as common. Other lines from the toxic masculinity script.
Summary
Saying "steak" or "bacon" to someone vegan is meanness in the guise of humour. We tend to think of humour and laughter as positive human expressions, but they are actually a complex part of communication. Laughter can be joyous and sincere, or fake and hollow. Sometimes people can't help but laugh, sometimes they force out a chuckle, and sometimes people engage in fake performative laughter. The latter sort of laughter can be part of status displays, or of declaring our identity with a person, group or mob. One shouldn't look for much emotional depth in people overly prone to fake laughter. Humour that relies on cruelty or meanness reveals the shallow character of both the instigator and those who laugh along. Such people are to be ignored or avoided, certainly not worried about too much, because being a shallow person is its own karma.
Discussion
There can be good jokes that make light of veganism, even some jokes that vegans will tell among themselves: "I decided to go vegan when I realised I had too many friends". Like any type of joke, these jokes can be clever, surprising, or interesting. Then, however, there are attempts at jokes that have few positive qualities, usually told by people who have few positive qualities. I've attended many protests against animal cruelty where people, almost always young men, will walk past and say, “I like bacon”, “I'm going to have a steak”, etc. They are statements that anyone who has done much animal activism will have heard repeatedly, beyond all tolerance for boredom. The people who say such things will repeat these phrases with the seeming pretence of having thought of them themselves. It is unlikely, however, that such people have added any original thoughts to our culture. Jokes, and just for convenience, we will call these boorish ejaculations jokes, don't get funnier with repetition, in the same way that repetition doesn't make lies become true, or stupid statements intelligent.
Let's also be clear about what is involved in making your average strip of bacon. We start with a breeding sow that has only ever lived confined in a concrete shed and surrounded by steel bars. Given the chance, pigs naturally build nests for their children, but this, along with fulfilling most other natural desires, will not be available to her. She will be artificially impregnated as soon as possible, something that will be repeated over her short life. After a gestation period between three and four months, she will give birth to a litter of piglets. Due to the immense size of genetically bred pigs, the concrete floors they live on, and the confined nature of factory farms, sows crush their piglets at much higher rates than they would in the wild. This has led to the use of farrowing crates, which confine the mother, in many cases not allowing them to turn around. As soon as the piglets are weaned at three to four weeks, about a third of the time they would spend being weaned with their mother in the wild, her piglets will be taken, and she will be almost immediately impregnated again. The piglets will then have their tails, ears and teeth removed without anaesthetic. They will then be crammed into similar sheds that the mother they will never see again endured, with concrete floors and steel bars. The stress and boredom of this confinement will see common behaviours such as bar biting, attacking each other, and they will exhibit signs of chronic distress such as repetitive swaying, head bobbing and pacing back and forth. They will then be fed on a diet optimised to interact with their genetic breeding to bring them to market weight as soon as possible. After six months of this repetitive confinement, they will then be sent to slaughter. This short life is the product of intensive breeding that has doubled and tripled the rate at which pigs grow. Common methods of slaughtering pigs include suffocating them together in groups in gas chambers utilising carbon dioxide, or stunning them with an electrical current, hoisting them upside down, and "sticking" them with a sharp knife. It takes about 30 seconds of extreme stress for carbon dioxide to kill a pig. Studies have shown that up to a third of pigs are still conscious after electrical stunning, and are conscious while being hoisted and "stuck". This life of confinement and slaughter is experienced by one and a half billion pigs every year.
So that's what people participate in, and the more sadistic among them like to joke about.
Ugly humour
Human laughter is complicated, and science struggles to understand all the many reasons people laugh. Plenty of animals laugh as well, though seemingly for simpler expressions of joy or to communicate that they are playing. What is clear is that people often laugh at things not because they are spontaneously funny but for performative social reasons. This kind of laughter often sounds fake, like a jarring echo from a hollow, unkind place. Fake laughter often sounds like somebody read in a book about laughter and is trying to replicate it, but failing. You can recognise ugly laughter primarily by the way it seems forced out. It usually happens when someone is trying to assert their superiority, or put someone else down; what we call "laughing at" rather than "laughing with". Laughing at others' misfortunes is correlated with psychopathy and other destructive, including self-destructive, personality traits.
Many words have been spent arguing about what things it is OK to joke about. I personally enjoy a dash of schadenfreude. Humour, and perhaps especially dark humour, can make light of dark times and places. It can help us deal with painful or uncomfortable things without having them overwhelm us. The rich, deep humour of some Holocaust survivors is evidence of this. Sometimes it is life-affirming to laugh when the alternative is to cry, or to laugh when we don’t want to or think we should. We can take all of the world’s ugliness and misfortune and find something to smile about in it. However, jokes that reinforce or give space to existing evils in the world, jokes that have victims, must be held to a higher standard.
Humour, or the pretence of it, isn't inherently moral or immoral. In addition to easing our load, humour can be used to bolster oppression and cruelty. A smile can be a leer, a smirk or a sneer; it can be a mask hiding the mob's ugly face. Humour can be used by the angry, irrational part of us to drown out the quiet voice of the intellect, of introspection, empathy and subtle thoughts. Sartre famously said, "Hell is other people", but hell is only some other people, and a sign of this sort of person is how much of their humour is jeering and ill-intended. Witness how the laughing emoji on social media started out as a positive expression, but has since been used and abused by conspiracy theorists and trolls who need to mock people kinder and more mature than themselves.
Humour and empathy
Psychologically, there is something called a cold joke. It's been witnessed in atrocities towards humans for centuries. Perpetrators of immoral acts, killings, torture and the like, use the pretence of humour to avoid the psychological ramifications of something disturbing they are participating in. They bond using jeers and fake laughter with other damaged souls, exhibiting the same insincerity and toxic emotion that probably defines most of the relationships in their lives. If someone can laugh about atrocities, such as billions of innocent animals suffering in factory farms and slaughterhouses, and if they see a person caring about this suffering as weak or pathetic, we might ponder how capable they are of true, empathetic connection with another sentient being. Would such a person be able to love anyone else fully and selflessly in their lives? We might even pity the shallowness they wear so proudly, because emotional connection, the ability to empathise and care for others, to be able to be vulnerable and trust others at a deep level, is among the things that most give life beauty and meaning.
Pigs, sheep, goats, chickens, cows: We should recognise something of ourselves when we look into the face of another sentient creature. These are thinking and feeling beings we share our evolutionary kinship with, who seek to be happy as we do, and we can witness that when our eyes connect. Each animal in a factory farm or slaughterhouse is a thinking, feeling individual that matters. We can forget that on the inconceivable scale of animal agriculture. More animals suffer and die in our industrial prison systems every week than humans killed in all wars during our entire bloody history. We look away from this reality, and perhaps that helps us keep its existence from our daily awareness. In modern times, we have outsourced our killing to others, usually poor and disadvantaged slaughterhouse workers. We have pushed the sight, sound and stench of killing to the outskirts of cities. For most of history, people lived closely with wild animals and felt a kinship with them. They knew that the animals around them had family and relationships of their own, that they were intelligent, and worthy of respect. They would call other animals brothers and sisters, other species fellow nations. Even when they needed to kill an animal to survive, they would often apologise to them and thank them for their sacrifice. That respect has been replaced by the morality of out of sight, out of mind. We now mock the animals we rely upon by using their names as insults. What have we become?
Wanting to believe
The blood of this terrible industry stains the hands of all who participate in it. We can start repairing our relationship with the non-human world by at least showing higher levels of respect for the lived experience of farmed animals. The beings we force to live in lightless sheds, in cages, taken from their families, whom we line up for their turn in slaughterhouses, are not simply a product of mass consumption. They are each a unique somebody, with their own personality, relationships, desires and purposes. These lives and deaths over which we wield a god-like power can, according to our choices and whims, be either more terrible or bearable, more beautiful or ugly, confined or free. Motherhood, love, friendship, society, we take from them so much, and part of the reason we so easily rob other creatures of these experiences is that many anthropocentrically think of high emotions as uniquely human. All animals evolved from a single ancestor, but mammals are our especially close evolutionary kin. Much of how they interact and process the world is similar to our own experience. We know this when we interact or play with them. We selectively, however, choose to forget this when we associate them with our food. Studies have been done that ask people about the internal lives of animals. Study participants will tend to rate animal sentience much lower if they are eating an animal product at the time, and higher if they are eating a plant-derived snack. How much animal suffering has occurred because of our subconscious need to deny their ability to suffer?
If humans actually needed to eat animals, if there were nothing else we could survive and thrive on, then ethics would still demand a radical overhaul of our farming system. However, we are omnivores who can eat a wide variety of foods; therefore, eating animals is a choice we can make and unmake. The world will be a better place when animals are no longer the intended victims of our food system. The alternative to a plant-based diet is playing a greater part in oppression. We might even have to join the cold jokers and try to feel better about our involvement in killing animals by saying cruel and offensive things, and pretending that our boorishness and sadism are humorous. Or we could take a more heroic stance.
A kinder path
Hopefully, one day, keeping animals in factory farms, and maybe even killing them, will be illegal. Currently, though, people have the choice to do so and pay for others to do so. To choose to treat other beings as purely a means to our ends, whether for food, entertainment, clothing or other consumer goods, is a barren, life-diminishing choice; a choice many people aren't even making entirely consciously. The less ethical and open-minded people are, the more tightly they will cling to their existing habits and try to hamper anyone on a nobler path ahead of them. Indeed, many people seem to be obsessed with ethical status, and especially the idea that anyone tries to do better by following a more compassionate diet. It is sad to see people trapped in prisons of habitual mediocrity, so unable to imagine a different self that they fear escape from their self-imposed walls. It is a poor use of the possibilities of life, peering out suspiciously at the world, at difference, fearing change and growth, despising anybody who reminds us by word or example that there are kinder and better ways we can live. The simple truth is that when people are mocking others, they feel better because at least they aren't thinking about their own flaws, limitations and failed dreams. There is, however, a better way, one that leads to our greater individual and collective flourishing. In a world full of expansive, beautiful possibilities for our relationship with other life, why wouldn't we want to spend our time pursuing a kinder path? Many great deeds need to be done to heal the world, things that can challenge us to embody our highest selves. The animals and the world need us to be heroes.
The greatest potential a person can try to fulfil is their ethical potential. With respect to animals, most of us have room for improvement. While we confront the darkness and suffering all too present in life, even confronting our own limitations, humour can be a balm that helps keep us motivated and sane. Laughter is a mysterious gift, and life is too short and precious to squander our time with fakeness and meanness. Let us all laugh less often at others, and more often at ourselves and our shared predicament.
Finally, a joke I hope carnists can appreciate: How many meat eaters does it take to change a lightbulb? None, they prefer to stay in the dark.