The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory (Bloomsbury Revelations)

by Carol J Adams

  THE PATRIARCHAL TEXTS OF MEAT

  * * *

  The selling should always be specific and mention a definite item.

  Wrong: “Anything else?”

  Weak: “What about something for breakfast?”

  Better: “We have some wonderful ham slices, Mrs. Smith—just the thing for breakfast. They’re right in the case.”

  Watch her face and if she doesn’t show interest then say:

  “Or perhaps you’d rather have fresh pork sausage tomorrow for breakfast.”

  This method centers her interest and attention on one item at a time and plainly implies that some meat item is necessary for breakfast.

  —Hinman and Harris, The Story of Meat

  The abbess has just put the kipehook on all other purveyors of the French flesh market. She does not keep her meat too long on the hooks, though she will have her price; but nothing to get stale here. You may have your meat dressed to your own liking, and there is no need of cutting twice from one joint; and if it suits your taste, you may kill your own lamb or mutton for her flock is in prime condition, and always ready for sticking. When any of them are fried they are turned out to grass, and sent to the hammer, or disposed of by private contract, but never brought in again; consequently, the rot, bots, glanders, and other diseases incidental to cattle, are not generally known here.

  —From a nineteenth-century guidebook to brothels

  CHAPTER 1

  THE SEXUAL POLITICS OF MEAT

  In the early times men and women lived apart, the former hunting animals exclusively, the latter pursuing a gathering existence. Five of the men, who were out hunting, being careless creatures, let their fire go out. The women, who were careful and orderly, always kept their fire going. The men, having killed a springbok, became desperate for means to cook it, so one of their number set out to get fire, crossed the river and met one of the women gathering seeds. When he asked her for some fire, she invited him to the feminine camp. While he was there she said, “You are very hungry. Just wait until I pound up these seeds and I will boil them and give you some.” She made him some porridge. After he had eaten it, he said, “Well, it’s nice food so I shall just stay with you.” The men who were left waited and wondered. They still had the springbok and they still had no fire. The second man set out, only to be tempted by female cooking, and to take up residence in the camp of the women. The same thing happened to the third man. The two men left were very frightened. They suspected something terrible had happened to their comrades. They cast the divining bones but the omens were favorable. The fourth man set out timidly, only to end by joining his comrades. The last man became very frightened indeed and besides by now the springbok had rotted. He took his bow and arrows, and ran away.

  —Myth from the Bushman

  I left the British Library and my research on some women of the 1890s whose feminist, working-class newspaper advocated meatless diets, and went through the cafeteria line in a restaurant nearby. Vegetarian food in hand, I descended to the basement. A painting of Henry VIII eating a steak and kidney pie greeted my gaze. On either side of the consuming Henry were portraits of his six wives and other women. However, they were not eating steak and kidney pie, nor anything else made of meat. Catherine of Aragon held an apple in her hands. The Countess of Mar had a turnip, Anne Boleyn—red grapes, Anne of Cleaves—a pear, Jane Seymour—blue grapes, Catherine Howard—a carrot, Catherine Parr—a cabbage.

  People with power have always eaten meat. The aristocracy of Europe consumed large courses filled with every kind of meat while the laborer consumed the complex carbohydrates. Dietary habits proclaim class distinctions, but they proclaim patriarchal distinctions as well. Women, second-class citizens, are more likely to eat what are considered to be second-class foods in a patriarchal culture: vegetables, fruits, and grains rather than meat. The sexism in meat eating recapitulates the class distinctions with an added twist: a mythology permeates all classes that meat is a masculine food and meat eating a male activity.

  Male identification and meat eating

  Meat-eating societies gain male identification by their choice of food, and meat textbooks heartily endorse this association. The Meat We Eat proclaims meat to be “A Virile and Protective Food,” thus “a liberal meat supply has always been associated with a happy and virile people.”1 Meat Technology informs us that “the virile Australian race is a typical example of heavy meat-eaters.”2 Leading gourmands refer “to the virile ordeal of spooning the brains directly out of a barbecued calf’s head.”3 Virile: of or having the characteristics of an adult male, from vir meaning man. Meat eating measures individual and societal virility.

  Meat is a constant for men, intermittent for women, a pattern painfully observed in famine situations today. Women are starving at a rate disproportionate to men. Lisa Leghorn and Mary Roodkowsky surveyed this phenomenon in their book Who Really Starves? Women and World Hunger. Women, they conclude, engage in deliberate self-deprivation, offering men the “best” foods at the expense of their own nutritional needs. For instance, they tell us that “Ethiopian women and girls of all classes are obliged to prepare two meals, one for the males and a second, often containing no meat or other substantial protein, for the females.”4

  In fact, men’s protein needs are less than those of pregnant and nursing women and the disproportionate distribution of the main protein source occurs when women’s need for protein is the greatest. Curiously, we are now being told that one should eat meat (or fish, vegetables, chocolate, and salt) at least six weeks before becoming pregnant if one wants a boy. But if a girl is desired, no meat please, rather milk, cheese, nuts, beans, and cereals.5

  Fairy tales initiate us at an early age into the dynamics of eating and sex roles. The king in his countinghouse ate four-and-twenty blackbirds in a pie (originally four-and-twenty naughty boys) while the Queen ate bread and honey. Cannibalism in fairy tales is generally a male activity, as Jack, after climbing his beanstalk, quickly learned. Folktales of all nations depict giants as male and “fond of eating human flesh.”6 Witches—warped or monstrous women in the eyes of a patriarchal world—become the token female cannibals.

  A Biblical example of the male prerogative for meat rankled Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a leading nineteenth-century feminist, as can be seen by her terse comment on Leviticus 6 in The Woman’s Bible: “The meat so delicately cooked by the priests, with wood and coals in the altar, in clean linen, no woman was permitted to taste, only the males among the children of Aaron.”7

  Most food taboos address meat consumption and they place more restrictions on women than on men. The common foods forbidden to women are chicken, duck, and pork. Forbidding meat to women in non-technological cultures increases its prestige. Even if the women raise the pigs, as they do in the Solomon Islands, they are rarely allowed to eat the pork. When they do receive some, it is at the dispensation of their husbands. In Indonesia “flesh food is viewed as the property of the men. At feasts, the principal times when meat is available, it is distributed to households according to the men in them. . . . The system of distribution thus reinforces the prestige of the men in society.”8

  Worldwide this patriarchal custom is found. In Asia, some cultures forbid women from consuming fish, seafood, chicken, duck, and eggs. In equatorial Africa, the prohibition of chicken to women is common. For example, the Mbum Kpau women do not eat chicken, goat, partridge, or other game birds. The Kufa of Ethiopia punished women who ate chicken by making them slaves, while the Walamo “put to death anyone who violated the restriction of eating fowl.”

  Correspondingly, vegetables and other nonmeat foods are viewed as women’s food. This makes them undesirable to men. The Nuer men think that eating eggs is effeminate. In other groups men require sauces to disguise the fact that they are eating women’s foods. “Men expect to have meat sauces to go with their porridge and will sometimes refuse to eat sauces made of greens or other vegetables, which are said to be women’s food.”9

&nbs
p; Meat: For the man only

  There is no department in the store where good selling can do so much good or where poor selling can do so much harm as in the meat department. This is because most women do not consider themselves competent judges of meat quality and often buy where they have confidence in the meat salesman.

  —Hinman and Harris, The Story of Meat10

  In technological societies, cookbooks reflect the presumption that men eat meat. A random survey of cookbooks reveals that the barbecue sections of most cookbooks are addressed to men and feature meat. The foods recommended for a “Mother’s Day Tea” do not include meat, but readers are advised that on Father’s Day, dinner should include London Broil because “a steak dinner has unfailing popularity with fathers.”11 In a chapter on “Feminine Hospitality” we are directed to serve vegetables, salads, and soups. The New McCall’s Cookbook suggests that a man’s favorite dinner is London Broil. A “Ladies’ Luncheon” would consist of cheese dishes and vegetables, but no meat. A section of one cookbook entitled “For Men Only” reinforces the omnipresence of meat in men’s lives. What is for men only? London Broil, cubed steak, and beef dinner.12

  Twentieth- and twenty-first-century cookbooks only serve to confirm the historical pattern found in the nineteenth century, when British working-class families could not afford sufficient meat to feed the entire family. “For the man only” appears continually in many of the menus of these families when referring to meat. In adhering to the mythologies of a culture (men need meat; meat gives bull-like strength) the male “breadwinner” actually received the meat. Social historians report that the “lion’s share” of meat went to the husband.

  What then was for women during the nineteenth century? On Sundays they might have a modest but good dinner. On the other days their food was bread with butter or drippings, weak tea, pudding, and vegetables. “The wife, in very poor families, is probably the worst-fed of the house hold,” observed Dr. Edward Smith in the first national food survey of British dietary habits in 1863, which revealed that the major difference in the diet of men and women in the same family was the amount of meat consumed.13 Later investigators were told that the women and children in one rural county of England, “eat the potatoes and look at the meat.”14

  Where poverty forced a conscious distribution of meat, men received it. Many women emphasized that they had saved the meat for their husbands. They were articulating the prevailing connections between meat eating and the male role: “I keep it for him; he has to have it.” Sample menus for South London laborers “showed extra meat, extra fish, extra cakes, or a different quality of meat for the man.” Women ate meat once a week with their children, while the husband consumed meat and bacon, “almost daily.”

  Early in the twentieth century, the Fabian Women’s group in London launched a four-year study in which they recorded the daily budget of thirty families in a working-class community. These budgets were collected and explained in a compassionate book, Round about a Pound a Week. Here is perceived clearly the sexual politics of meat: “In the household which spends 10s or even less on food, only one kind of diet is possible, and that is the man’s diet. The children have what is left over. There must be a Sunday joint, or, if that be not possible, at least a Sunday dish of meat, in order to satisfy the father’s desire for the kind of food he relishes, and most naturally therefore intends to have.” More succinctly, we are told: “Meat is bought for the men” and the leftover meat from the Sunday dinner, “is eaten cold by him the next day.”15 Poverty also determines who carves the meat. As Cicely Hamilton discovered during this same period, women carve when they know there is not enough meat to go around.16

  In situations of abundance, sex role assumptions about meat are not so blatantly expressed. For this reason, the diets of English upper-class women and men are much more similar than the diets of upper-class women and working-class women. Moreover, with the abundance of meat available in the United States as opposed to the restricted amount available in England, there has been enough for all, except when meat supplies were controlled. For instance, enslaved black men received half a pound of meat per day, while enslaved black women often found that they received little more than a quarter pound a day.17 Additionally, during the wars of the twentieth century, the pattern of meat consumption recalled that of English nineteenth-century working-class families with one variation: the “worker” of the country’s household, the soldier, got the meat; civilians were urged to learn how to cook without meat.

  The racial politics of meat

  The hearty meat eating that characterizes the diet of Americans and of the Western world is not only a symbol of male power, it is an index of racism. I do not mean racism in the sense that we are treating one class of animals, those that are not human beings, differently than we treat another, those that are, as Isaac Bashevis Singer uses the term in Enemies: A Love Story: “As often as Herman had witnessed the slaughter of animals and fish, he always had the same thought: in their behavior toward creatures, all men were Nazis. The smugness with which man could do with other species as he pleased exemplified the most extreme racist theories, the principle that might is right.”18 1 mean racism as the requirement that power arrangements and customs that favor white people prevail, and that the acculturation of people of color to this standard includes the imposition of white habits of meat eating.

  Two parallel beliefs can be traced in the white Western world’s enactment of racism when the issue is meat eating. The first is that if the meat supply is limited, white people should get it; but if meat is plentiful all should eat it. This is a variation on the standard theme of the sexual politics of meat. The hierarchy of meat protein reinforces a hierarchy of race, class, and sex.

  Nineteenth-century advocates of white superiority endorsed meat as superior food. “Brain-workers” required lean meat as their main meal, but the “savage” and “lower” classes of society could live exclusively on coarser foods, according to George Beard, a nineteenth-century medical doctor who specialized in the diseases of middle-class people. He recommended that when white, civilized, middle-class men became susceptible to nervous exhaustion, they should eat more meat. To him, and for many others, cereals and fruits were lower than meat on the scale of evolution, and thus appropriate foods for the other races and white women, who appeared to be lower on the scale of evolution as well. Racism and sexism together upheld meat as white man’s food.

  Influenced by Darwin’s theory of evolution, Beard proposed a corollary for foods; animal protein did to vegetable food what our evolution from the lower animals did for humans. Consequently:

  In proportion as man grows sensitive through civilization or through disease, he should diminish the quantity of cereals and fruits, which are far below him on the scale of evolution, and increase the quantity of animal food, which is nearly related to him in the scale of evolution, and therefore more easily assimilated.19

  In his racist analysis, Beard reconciled the apparent contradiction of this tenet: “Why is it that savages and semi-savages are able to live on forms of food which, according to the theory of evolution, must be far below them in the scale of development?” In other words, how is it that people can survive very well without a great deal of animal protein? Because “savages” are

  little removed from the common animal stock from which they are derived. They are much nearer to the forms of life from which they feed than are the highly civilized brainworkers, and can therefore subsist on forms of life which would be most poisonous to us. Secondly, savages who feed on poor food are poor savages, and intellectually far inferior to the beef-eaters of any race.

  This explanation—which divided the world into intellectually superior meat eaters and inferior plant eaters—accounted for the conquering of other cultures by the English:

  The rice-eating Hindoo and Chinese and the potato-eating Irish peasant are kept in subjection by the well-fed English. Of the various causes that contributed to the defeat of Napoleon at
Waterloo, one of the chief was that for the first time he was brought face to face with the nation of beef-eaters, who stood still until they were killed.

  Into the twentieth century the notion was that meat eating contributed to the Western world’s preeminence. Publicists for a meat company in the 1940s wrote: “We know meat-eating races have been and are leaders in the progress made by mankind in its upward struggle through the ages.”20 They are referring to the “upward struggle” of the white race. One revealing aspect of this “upward struggle” is the charge of cannibalism that appeared during the years of colonization.

  The word “cannibalism” entered our vocabulary after the “discovery” of the “New World.” Derived from the Spaniards’ mispronunciation of the name of the people of the Caribbean, it linked these people of color with the act. As Europeans explored the continents of North and South America and Africa, the indigenous peoples of those lands became accused of cannibalism—the ultimate savage act. Once labeled as cannibals, their defeat and enslavement at the hands of civilized, Christian whites became justifiable. W. Arens argues that the charge of cannibalism was part and parcel of the European expansion into other continents.21

  Of the charges of cannibalism against the indigenous peoples, Arens found little independent verification. One well-known source of dubious testimony on cannibalism was then plagiarized by others claiming to be eyewitnesses. The eyewitnesses fail to describe just how they were able to escape the fate of consumption they report witnessing. Nor do they explain how the language barrier was overcome, enabling them to report verbatim conversations with “savages.” In addition, their reports fail to maintain internal consistency.

  One cause of cannibalism was thought to be lack of animal protein. Yet most Europeans themselves during the centuries of European expansion were not subsisting on animal protein every day. The majority of cultures in the world satisfied their protein needs through vegetables and grains. By charging indigenous peoples with cannibalism (and thus demonstrating their utterly savage ways, for they supposedly did to humans what Europeans only did to animals) one justification for colonization was provided.