A crucial and under-examined aspect of “The Walrus and the Carpenter” in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass (1871) is the relationship between euphemism and atrocity in the dealings with the anthropomorphised entities that are – or are in danger of becoming – food. Based on a close reading of the poem, this article explores how aesthetics and ethics work in considerations of form and courtesy, which impact the lives of such anthropomorphised entities. Situated at the intersections of anthropomorphism studies, animal ethics, and Carrollian scholarship, it is argued that nonsense, heightened by anthropomorphism, is a powerful means of aestheticizing contradictions. Regarding food anthropomorphism as both rhetorically and ethically invested reveals the contradictions between aesthetic forms of society and the grisly truth of human intraspecies relationships and human-animal relationships from the imperialist context to the contemporary situations of meat eating.