Images of meat on the Internet is possibly the greatest portal through which the giants of the meat industry reach the subconsciousness of the public. Two of the greatest ways that they do this through the Internet are advertisements and online gaming.

We always see animal products in Internet advertisements. 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 of their newest fat-free hamburgers. We may all hate most advertisements and immediately X out pop-ups, but whether we notice it or not, these ads still 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 what America is – 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-product foods such as 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 in the popular virtual world Club Penguin, in which 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 eating of fish by penguins, making the game more “realistic”; however, I would counteract that argument by pointing out that in Club Penguin, you are the penguin. Therefore, in a way, you are the one eating the fish, which is just what a child might do after playing this game. The fish in this image even looks terrified. This game, like all other games containing animal-products, is seemingly innocent, but it is actually part of a huge driving force that turns people to meat.

Meat and seafood also appear in tons of games when they are not the main focus of the game, such as bacon on the plates of virtual computer-made people in a virtual restaurant. Companies like Taco Bell also pay gamemakers to put their products in games, which is an example of subliminal messaging and underhanded advertising. Food companies even create their own online games that appeal to young children surfing the Web and pull them into their products, such as McDonalds’ line of McWorld games for kids.

Mouthwatering sidebars strategically placed on nearly every website that we visit are 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 running the meat industry. And this is causing a devastating and incredibly-frustrating amount of harm to our health and billions of living creatures.