Covering the Internet with images of meat is probably the largest portal through which the giants of the meat industry reach the public’s subconscious. Two of their favorite means by which they virtually reach into your brain are advertisements and online gaming.
Our screens are constantly plagued by flashy, annoying sidebars about everything meat– from the price reduction of McDonald’s chicken wrap to fad diet companies flaunting their newest fat-free hamburgers. We may all hate these advertisements and immediately ‘x-out’ the pop-ups, but whether we notice it or not, these short-term annoyances stay in our minds when we go grocery shopping. I recently saw a less-flashy advertisement that pictured America as a bountiful land, flowing with rivers of meat, peaked with mountains of meat, and filled with grand palaces of–you guessed it–meat. I found it to be absolutely nauseating. Ironically, the image actually quite accurately represents America–a land abundant in heart-stopping, artery-clogging, dead animal flesh.
You may not think of it at first, but online gaming is just as big a flaunter of meat as advertisements. There are hundreds of free online flash games in which players must accomplish simple tasks directly relating to meat, such as stealing as many chicken nuggets as possible from a virtual man whenever he looks away. There are also many games in which kids must customize animal food products like pizzas. In this particular flash game, “Burger Restaurant,”the player must make hamburgers for customers in a limited amount of time.
Another example is a “mini-game” found in the popular virtual world Club Penguin. In this “[human] kid-friendly” game, the player must catch as many fish as possible with his or her penguin character. A person might argue that the game is simply displaying the natural food chain, making the game more “realistic”; however, I would like to point out that in Club Penguin, you are the penguin…therefore you are the one eating the fish. Even the fish in this image even looks terrified! This game, like all other games containing animal products, is seemingly innocent, but I believe it is actually part of a huge driving force that turns people toward meat.
Meat and seafood also appear in tons of games, even if they are not the main focus. Bacon exists on the plates of virtual people in a virtual restaurant, for example. In a painfully-clear example of subliminal messaging and underhanded advertising, companies like Taco Bell pay game makers to virtualize their products and integrate them into games. Food companies sometimes even create their own online games that pull children into their products: McDonald’s has a line of McWorld games for kids.
Mouth-watering sidebars are strategically placed on nearly every website that we visit. This is an absolutely lethal form of advertising, and these corporations know it. Games that support the indoctrination of children ensure the continuous prosperity of the huge corporations that run the meat industry. These pitiful actions are causing a devastating and incredibly frustrating amount of harm, not only to our own health, but also to the billions of living creatures who perish at the hands of these companies’ misconduct.