The last time I ate a hamburger, the meat didn't taste as good.
That's because rattling around in my head was a fact that should have been obvious but hadn't dawned on me until recently: that meat patties aren't just made from the muscle tissue of a single animal, but from the fibers of as many as a hundred cows, or even more. We mix different kinds of cow tissue like one combines colors on a palette, potentially putting animals that once grazed next to each other into tightly packed beef discs.
It shouldn't matter how many cows go into a burger, but the number is a vivid and maybe even repulsive reminder that eating meat exposes us to a process where animals are slaughtered and mixed together for our eating pleasure. And while that may not change anyone's opinion about the morality of it all—it hasn't changed mine-—it still exposes us to a lingering pang of doubt about whether any of it is ethical.

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"If you have a negative reaction to it, it’s probably because it makes you realize how much of an industrialized process animal production is," said Peter Singer, a professor of bioethics at Princeton University, and acclaimed moral philosopher. "You might still have this ideal that there’s a farmer with cows, and every now and again he has to kill one. If that's the case, you might not have a good grasp of how modern meat production works