The animalizing of protein is the main agent in the structure of the absent referent. The term “animalized” in describing meat achieves the goal of reinserting the absent referent into the discussion, acting as a reminder of what process is used to produce meat—the feeding and fattening of animals. Through the animalizing of protein animals are reduced to being means to our ends, converted from being someone to something. They are seen as bodies to be manipulated as incubators of protein. As a concept, the animalizing of protein posits that this is the proper way for humans to get their protein, and that the proper role for animals is to produce this protein. But as a phrase, animalized protein insists that animals cannot be left out of the definition of meat eating.
A corollary and prelude to animalized protein is feminized protein: milk and eggs. Again, animals are means to our ends, this time as producers of dairy products. Besides the bee’s production of honey, the only beings who produce food from their own body while living are females of child-bearing age who produce milk and eggs.52 Female animals become oppressed by their femaleness, and become essentially surrogate wet-nurses. These other animals are oppressed as Mother animals. When their productiveness ends, then they are butchered and become animalized protein. “Complete” or “total” vegetarians and vegans boycott feminized and animalized protein.
New naming: Vegan
The word “vegan” coined by Dorothy Watson in 1944 overcomes the dilution of the word “vegetarian” by the dominant culture. A vegan avoids all products arising from the exploitation of animals, not only animalized and feminized proteins, but also, for instance, fur, leather, and honey. Veganism is an ethical stance based on compassion for all beings.
The word vegan explicitly incorporates concerns for all animals. There is no possibility to claim one is a “pollo-vegan” The new naming recognizes the problem with “feminized protein”—i.e., that female animals are doubly oppressed, in their living and in their dying.
As Jo Stepaniak explains the coining of the word in The Vegan Sourcebook, the impetus was finding a word to replace
total vegetarian to describe vegetarians who do not use dairy products. The term prevailed over other suggestions at the time including dairybans, vitans, neovegetarians, benevores, bellevores, all-vegas, sanivores, and beaumangeurs. It was derived from the word vegetarian by taking the first three letters (veg) and the last two letters (an) because “veganism starts with vegetarianism and carries it through to its logical conclusions.”
The Oxford Illustrated Dictionary recognized the word vegan in 1962. At some point, toward the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, Microsoft Word’s spelling program stopped underlining the word “vegan” as though it were a misspelling of something. For any vegan writer, this was a moment of lexicographical liberation. The word veganism, however, took longer.
The Sexual Politics of Meat is truly a feminist-vegan critical theory.
New naming: The fourth stage
New naming is required to identify the recent developments in the way animals animalize protein. Since World War II, a new way of treating animals has evolved that is named in euphemistic terms, “factory farming.” I suggest we consider the development that incarcerates animals into these misnamed factory farms as the fourth stage of meat eating. The first stage in the development of people’s meat eating was that of relying predominantly on vegetarian foods, and what little meat (from small animals or bugs) consumed was acquired with one’s hands or sticks, or from scavenging carcasses. The first stage of meat eating met Plutarch’s “do-it-yourself” standards for eating animals described in the previous chapter.
Hunting is the second stage of meat eating. When meat is obtained through killing animals who are not domesticated, there is little reliance on feminized protein. With the second stage, implemental violence is introduced, as well as the selection of some members of a community to be hunters. Distance from the animal is achieved through the implements used to kill the animal as well as from the division of a culture into hunters and nonhunters.
The third stage of meat eating is the domestication of animals, providing them with the trappings of care and security while planning their execution. With the third stage, meat consumption increases because meat is now from domesticated, easily available, animals. Domestication of animals provides another food resource: feminized protein. Locavores seek to return to this stage.
The fourth stage of meat eating involves the imprisoning of animals. In the fourth stage we find the highest per capita consumption of animalized and feminized protein: 60 percent of the food Americans now eat is provided by the meat, dairy, and egg industries. Animals are separated from most people’s everyday experience, except in their final fate as food. With the fourth stage, we have started thinking in terms of how much meat or dairy products we need, rather than how much protein we need. This is because, for several decades in the mid-twentieth century, animalized protein and feminized protein made up two out of the four basic food groups. Seventy percent of protein for Americans is derived from these two food groups; in contrast, 80 percent of the protein in many Asian countries came from vegetable proteins.
The changes in the stages of meat eating signal the increasing dependence of a culture on the structure of the absent referent. In addition, the changes in the stages of meat eating signal the increasing interpolation of white racism—because of failure to understand alternative protein sources—into the structure of the absent referent. If androcentrism through white racism eliminates competing models for relationships between men and women, white racism upholds a model of consumption that fixates on animalized protein and obscures the use of alternative protein sources that characterize the majority of second stage cultures. White racism distorts cultures that were or are gynocentric and not completely dependent on animalized protein.53
New namers: Charlotte and vegetarian protest literature
A model for alternative naming can be found in one of the most famous writers and weavers of webs: Charlotte in E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web. Charlotte weaves words into her web to prevent the butchering of Wilbur the pig. Rather than accede to the false naming of Wilbur the pig as pork, bacon, and ham, Charlotte effects new naming: Wilbur is “some pig,” not a meat-bearing animal but rather “terrific.”54 Charlotte’s words are a form of vegetarian protest literature. The alternative naming of this protest literature attempts to keep all Wilburs alive and whole, rather than dead, fragmented, and renamed.
Once we stop thinking of meat eating as a set of nutritional or evolutionary givens, we are free instead to examine language about meat eating as historical justificatory strategies. Language about eating animals creates cultural meaning in support of oppressing animals. Protest literature that challenges this cultural meaning has most frequently appeared in the form of the essay, which can be traced from Plutarch to contemporary nonfiction works. These attempt to untangle the web of violence against animals and weave new words. This protest literature is characterized by a self-conscious tradition with certain recurring themes and images. An essential aspect of this protest literature is the rephrasing of questions meat eaters pose. Plutarch says in response to the question of why it was that Pythagoras abstained from eating flesh: “You ought rather, in my opinion, to have enquired who first began this practice, than who of late times left it off.”55 Or Bernard Shaw who retorted when asked why he was a vegetarian, why do you call me to account for eating decently?
The following chapter explores the dynamics that occur when meat eaters try to call vegetarians to account for eating decently. This analysis pinpoints that which prevents the vegetarian word from being made flesh. The subtle barriers which prevent the hearing of vegetarian words represent the final elements in the patriarchal texts of meat.
CHAPTER 4
THE WORD MADE FLESH
The teachings of Pythagoras
There was a man here. . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . .
He was first
To say that animal food should not be eaten,
And learned as he was, men did not always
Believe him when he preached, “Forbear, O mortals,
To spoil your bodies with such impious food!”
—Ovid, Metamorphoses
A Word made Flesh is seldom
And tremblingly partook.
—Emily Dickinson
This chapter considers the dialectic between those who hear vegetarian words and become vegetarians and the majority who do not. While there are many who follow in Pythagoras’s steps and say “Forbear, O mortals, / To spoil your bodies with such impious food!” most people respond as did Pythagoras’s listeners: they do not believe the words they hear. The proselytizing vegetarian, no matter how learned, encounters subtle barriers which prevent hearing the protests being articulated. Most vegetarians do not perceive these subtle barriers. One reason is that their own conversion to vegetarianism leads them to believe that others can also be converted. Another factor in the failure to perceive these barriers is the absence of a feminist perspective on the issue of eating animals that would emphasize the primacy of political and cultural forces. A major factor in weakening the vegetarian argument is the time and place during which vegetarian ideas are discussed: frequently at dinnertime over a meal, a time when vegetarians often find themselves in the minority. This creates a political climate in which the idea of vegetarianism is defeated both by the presence of meat and the idea of meat eating. A cultural perspective determines this defeat as well; I will argue that it is connected to our ideas about stories and their proper endings.
After considering the reforming impulse of vegetarians—the fact that vegetarian conversion does take place and is related to reading vegetarian protest literature—this chapter offers an analysis of those subtle political and cultural forces that prevail over vegetarian words.
Various meanings to the idea of the word made flesh exist. The first meaning is perhaps the most obvious: converting from meat eating to vegetarianism as a result of hearing or reading someone’s vegetarian arguments; this embodies in the flesh the vegetarian word. At dinnertime, conversations about meat eating involve an alternative word made flesh: meat eaters’ arguments are reinforced by the literal presence of animal flesh. Their words endorse this flesh; the flesh reinforces the words. Lastly, in the subtle ways that meat eating adheres to traditional narrative structure, the words of stories and the flesh of meals become interchangeable.
Vegetarian protest literature
For what is finally at stake is not so much how “to make visible the invisible” as how to produce the conditions of visibility for a different social subject.
—Teresa de Lauretis1
A body of literature that proclaims vegetarianism’s legitimacy stretches from Plutarch’s two essays against meat eating to contemporary books such as Vegetarianism: a Way of Life, The Vegetarian Alternative, and A Vegetarian Sourcebook.2 They argue for the reasonableness of vegetarianism and the necessity to adopt it. Historical examples of this genre can be found in numerous vegetarian writings of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. My three-and-a-half-year-old son determined to add his own voice to this body as a way of convincing his father to stop eating dead chickens. Frustrated that conversations over dinnertime were not succeeding, he created a “Don’t Eat Meat” book. As he wrote in it, he reported on what he was writing:
Don’t eat fish.
Don’t each chicken.
Don’t eat crabs.
Don’t eat whales.
Don’t eat roosters.
Don’t eat octopus.
Don’t eat chicken.
Don’t eat fish.
Don’t eat lobsters.
Unable to spell, what he inscribed were signs meaningful only to him. These are emblematic of the way a meat-eating culture greets vegetarian writings: they may be well written but ultimately they are without meaning. Vegetarians, despite the variety of ways in which to argue their perspective, always appear to be saying, “Don’t eat meat.” Meat eaters cannot make sense of this because a part of their definition of what makes sense is eating meat. Yet, vegetarians believe that they will be heard by a meat-eating culture. Literal faith in the word made flesh through books was not lost on my son. Once he had written down his important injunctions he announced to his father, “Sorry, Daddy, but you can’t eat meat anymore. I wrote it.”
The vegetarian word made flesh
As my son may have intuited, vegetarians’ relationships to earlier vegetarian writings demonstrates that vegetarianism is often parented to a large degree by books. Their own vegetarianism becomes a way of making the vegetarian word flesh. Historian Keith Thomas describes this influence: “Their inspiration was often literary, many claiming to have been converted by reading the arguments of Pythagoras or Plutarch.”3 In a culture where the majority eat meat, reading texts is often the only way by which vegetarianism is presented in a positive light. In essence, the authority of previous vegetarian texts authors new vegetarians who take vegetarian words literally.
It is thought that Percy Shelley’s vegetarianism arose from reading Plutarch’s two essays on flesh eating. By patterning the title of his first vegetarian essay—A Vindication of Natural Diet—after Mary Wollstonecraft’s infamous A Vindication of the Rights of Woman he intimates that he may be bearing a feminist word as well.
Aphra Behn celebrates seventeenth-century vegetarian Thomas Tryon’s methods for healthy living and explains that his writings have influenced her to try his methods.4 After reading Tryon, Benjamin Franklin tried vegetarianism for a while as well.5
Joseph Ritson, author of the 1802 An Essay on Abstinence from Animal Food as a Moral Duty, became a vegetarian by taking literally the words of an earlier text. Ritson reports—in introducing himself as the author of his vegetarian book—that he was
induc’d to serious reflection, by the perusal of Mandevilles Fable of the bees, in the year 1772, being the 19th year of his age, has ever since, to the reviseal of this sheet, firmly adhere’d to a milk and vegetable diet, haveing, at least, never tasteed, dureing the whole course of those thirty years, a morsel of flesh, fish, or fowl.6
The passage from Mandeville that prompted this change of diet reads:
I have often thought, if it was not for this Tyranny which Custom usurps over us, that Men of any tolerable Goodnature could never be reconcil’d to the killing of so many Animals for their daily Food, as long as the bountiful Earth so plentifully provides them with Varieties of vegetable Dainties.7
Historian James Turner implies that Ritson took Mandeville’s words literally when they were meant ironically. Mandeville’s book, Turner writes, “belittled the supposed differences between men and animals and wondered (tongue in cheek?) whether people would continue to eat animals if they stopped to ponder what they were doing.”8 One of Ritson’s biographers acknowledges that the influence of Mandeville on Ritson “notably reveals the vital way in which his reading affected him.”9 Near the end of his Essay, Ritson refers to the similar effect the speech of Pythagoras in Ovid’s Metamorphoses had upon Lord Chesterfield, who reported that “it was some time before I could bring myself to our college-mutton again, with some inward doubt, whether I was not making myself an accomplice to a murder.”10
As a teenager, Robert Browning read Percy Shelley’s writings and became a practicing vegetarian for two years.11 When he arrived in London, Gandhi’s discovery of the writings of his British contemporary, Henry Salt, specifically his A Plea for Vegetarianism, provided the ethical grounding he needed to continue his vegetarianism. Gandhi reported, “From the date of reading this book, I may claim to have become a vegetarian by choice.”12 Bernard Shaw attributes his vegetarianism to the influence of Percy Shelley: “ ‘It was Shelley,’ he recorded in one of his Sixteen Self Sketches, ‘who first opened my eyes to the savagery of my diet,’ though ‘it was not until 1880 or thereabouts that
the establishment of vegetarian restaurants in London made a change practicable for me.’ ”13 Feminist, vegetarian, and pacifist Charlotte Despard was greatly influenced by Shelley’s Queen Mab.
Today many people encounter the idea of vegetarianism not through reading vegetarian words but by discussing vegetarianism with a vegetarian. This often occurs over a meal. What transpires is the opposite of the vegetarian word made flesh. At dinnertime, vegetarians can become unwittingly embattled when the texts of meat are simultaneously broached conversationally and incarnated on the dinner plate.
Embattled conversations
An individual woman who appears as the spokeswoman for the freedom of all women is a pathetic and isolated creature. . . . She presents no threat. An individual “emancipated” woman is an amusing incongruity, a titillating commodity, easily consumed.
—Sheila Rowbotham14
Remark upon learning of the death of Dr. Lambe, early nineteenth-century vegetarian author:
“If he wished, rather rashly, to deprive us of flesh diet, nevertheless he must be forgiven. For whom then did he harm? So far as I know none, unless it were himself, for no-one else paid attention to it.”15
Vegetarianism provokes conversation, but vegetarianism faces the problem of making its meanings understood within a dominant discourse that approves of meat eating. A sempiternal concern of vegetarians is the fate of their beliefs when talking with meat eaters. The most likely place to experience a conflict in meaning between vegetarians and meat eaters is during dinnertime. That vegetarians discuss their vegetarianism is inevitable. For if vegetarians do not volunteer opinions, like Sir Richard Phillips “who once rang a peal” in William Cobbett’s ears “against shooting and hunting,” they are continually called upon to defend their diet.16 Harriot Kezia Hunt, nineteenth-century American feminist health reformer and friend of vegetarian and feminist Mary Gove Nichols, demonstrates this in reporting that “I always quarreled with her Grahamism.”17 John Oswald opens his 1791 vegetarian book by stating that he is “fatigued with answering the enquiries, and replying to the objections of his friends, with respect to the singularity of his mode of life.” With the publication of his The Cry of Nature; or, an Appeal to Mercy and to Justice on Behalf of the Persecuted Animals, he expresses the hope that he can pursue his diet “without molestation” as he now has set forth his thoughts about meat eating.18
The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory (Bloomsbury Revelations) Page 13
