Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

The Joke

A person announces they do not believe in eating some animals. Another person challenges them: "Goody, that wouldn't be ethical." The first person agrees -- they already avoid eating "larger mammals, our closest genetic relatives, sheep," and animals that are "smart enough to experience and process fear, and those that cannot be made to walk into the electro-chemical processor."

A third character (an alien) observes: "The most advanced creatures on this planet base their entire conception of conscious moral life around what should be eaten." Their companion agrees: "Probably grilled." The joke escalates as the alien notes: "That's the same way a hungry, bloody lion thinks -- it's not conscious, it's a straightforward mechanism." Then a large purple alien-like being says: "I'm offended because it is a caricature of my non-conscious brain." The final punchline is: "I heard my consciousness glow-worms have a religion, or something -- but that sounds like anti-matter something or something on Earth."

The Humor

The comic satirizes the ethical debates around meat consumption by escalating the argument to absurd levels. It starts with a recognizable real-world ethical stance (not eating certain animals based on intelligence or sentience) and then introduces aliens who view the entire human moral framework as primitive -- humans' most sophisticated ethical thinking still boils down to "what should we eat." The layered punchlines mock both meat-eaters and vegetarians by suggesting that from a sufficiently advanced perspective, all human ethical reasoning about consumption looks equally arbitrary and self-serving. The inclusion of progressively stranger alien beings who also have their own consumption-based moral hangups suggests the problem is universal, not uniquely human.