8tad3George Carlin once famously said, “I don’t like words that hide the truth. I don’t like words that conceal reality. I don’t like euphemisms or euphemistic language. And American English is loaded with euphemisms. Because Americans have a lot of trouble dealing with reality. Americans have trouble facing the truth. So they invent the kind of soft language to protect themselves from it.”
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the terminology used by animal exploitation industries for the products they promote to “conscious consumers” to get them to spend more money on the same suffering and death. Terms like “cage free”, “free range”, and “grass-fed” sound great and look even better on a carton of eggs or the wrapping of a steak. They evoke images of rolling green pastures on a small, family-owned farm and the romanticized agricultural practices of earlier rural society where all the milk came from your next door neighbor, several miles down the dirt road.