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Why it's easy being a vegetarian

2009; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 24; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/09502360903230870

1470-1308

Erica Fudge,

Agriculture Sustainability and Environmental Impact

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgements A version of this paper was given at the Wellcome Trust Biomedical Ethics Summer School in September 2008 and I am grateful to all participants for their suggestions and questions which have helped me immensely. I also wish to thank Susan McHugh for looking at an early draft and offering some vital comments. Notes Jacques Derrida, ‘Eating Well, or the Calculation of the Subject: An Interview with Jacques Derrida’ in Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy (ed.), Who Comes After the Subject? (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 112. Nick Fiddes, Meat: A Natural Symbol (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 2. Fiddes, Meat, p. 65. Roland Barthes, ‘Myth Today’ in Mythologies, translated by Annette Lavers (1972, reprinted London: Vintage, 1993), p. 129. Barthes, ‘Steak and Chips,’ in Mythologies, pp. 62–63. The masculine pronoun and ‘man’ are used deliberately here. Carving as a masculine domain has its history in the presence in wealthy medieval and early modern households of a male servant with a special skill in carving. As households became smaller so this specialist role was taken up by other members of the household, and ultimately by the head of the household himself. Hence it remains conventional in many homes in the UK in which the male partner may have little to do with the preparation of food at any other time he has the role of carving the meat on special occasions. This was certainly the case in my own childhood home. Questions of visibility and invisibility are significant in another way in Carol J. Adams’ The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory (Cambridge: Polity, 1990). She argues that ‘Through butchering, animals become absent references. Animals in name and body are made absent as animals for meat to exist’ (p. 40). I have been unable to verify my recollection of this suggestion which was perhaps made in a radio interview rather than in print. I am grateful, however, to Su Taylor at the Vegetarian Society of Great Britain, for attempting to help me track it down. Fiddes, Meat, p. 14. Fiddes, Meat, p. 4. I use ‘not edible’ rather than ‘inedible’ here and throughout to signal the distinction between what is inedible because poisonous or disgusting and what is not edible because of the prohibitions attached to it. In this sense, horse is not edible because it is perceived to be a non-meat animal for cultural rather than gustatory reasons in the UK. Parts of the fugu – also known as the blow fish – are inedible because highly toxic. So – as an aside – to say that eating is a fundamental part of human life is to miss out the fact that, on numerous occasions, what is truly fundamental comes before and informs the decision as to what is edible. What is really essential when thinking about meat are the categories into which animals are placed (meat/non-meat exists alongside and inseparable from, for example, non-pet/pet; non-vermin/vermin etc.) It is, you might say, the categories that produce the taste. On the significance of the non-pet/pet distinction and questions of edibility see Marc Shell, ‘The Family Pet’, Representations 15 (1986), pp. 121–53. See, for example, http://www.ridingsteers1.netfirms.com/ [accessed 29 September 2008]. Of course there are contradictions within vegetarianism in that, as Peter Singer made so uncomfortably clear in Animal Liberation, the dairy industry is inseparable from the meat industry, and thus to drink milk, for example, is to support the practices of meat production. The logical solution here is to become a vegan, a practice wherein animal flesh and all other animal by-products – milk, leather, eggs, wool, honey – are avoided. See Singer, Animal Liberation (1975), 2nd ed. (London: Jonathan Cape, 1990), pp. 95–157. Other potential contradictions within vegetarian practice might include, for example, the status of road kill: an animal living outside of the restrictions of the food industry and killed accidentally can be acceptable food for vegans. Likewise, the status of what might be termed voluntary cannibalism – where a person offers themselves to be someone else's meat – may not exist in contradiction with the ethics of veganism in that here the provision of one's flesh for consumption is self-willed, and not imposed by an outside agency, and thus the power relations inherent in the meat industry are absent. For the purposes of this essay I am thinking about vegetarianism in its broadest terms to mean a diet that avoids the flesh of any self-moving non-human animal. Plutarch, ‘Essay on Flesh Eating’ in Howard Williams (ed.), The Ethics of Diet: A Catena of Authorities Deprecatory of the Practice of Flesh-Eating (London: Pitman, 1883), p. 46. An important study of the perception of animals in classical writings is Richard Sorabji, Animal Minds and Human Morals: The Origins of the Western Debate (London: Duckworth, 1993). The graphic nature of Plutarch's words is, of course, central though. In The Lives of Animals J.M. Coetzee presents ‘The Plutarch Response’ as the position of his central character Elizabeth Costello: ‘Plutarch is a real conversation stopper: it is the word juices that does it. Producing Plutarch is like throwing down a gauntlet: after that, there is no knowing what will happen’. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals, Amy Gutmann (ed.) (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 38. The emphasis on animal voice sets Plutarch apart from orthodox ideas in which speech is regarded as a significant moral marker – and speech, of course, is only human. See, for example, Irven M. Resnick and Kenneth F. Kitchell Jr., ‘Albert The Great on the Language of Animals,’ American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 70.1 (1996), pp. 41–61. William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, in Gary Taylor and Stanley Wells (ed.), The Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), 3.1, 59–60. Porphyry, On Abstinence from the Flesh of Living Beings in Williams (ed.), Ethics of Diet, p. 70. These and other statistics are collected at the Vegetarian Society of the UK's website: http://www.vegsoc.org/Info/statveg.html [accessed 29 September 2008]. This failure of Plutarch's and Plutarchan's arguments to take power in England is not because they disappeared or were not voiced. I have traced the significance of just this kind of thinking in early modern England in my Brutal Reasoning: Animals, Rationality and Humanity in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006). What is significant is how far this way of thinking was effaced in post-Cartesian (and especially in modern) thinking. See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, translated by R.J. Batten (London: Blackfriars, 1975), pp. 19–21. Importantly, in the context of my discussion of cannibalism below, the tiger Richard Parker is named after the cabin boy on the Mignonette which went down in the South Atlantic in 1884. This cabin boy was killed and eaten by the three other survivors of the wreck who were then picked up by another vessel. On their return to England the survivors confessed their crime and two were tried, found guilty and given a death sentence which was commuted to 6 months hard labour. ‘R v Dudley and Stephens’ (1884) established the legal precedent that ‘necessity’ is not a defence against murder. See http://www.justis.com/titles/iclr_bqb14040.html [accessed 12 October 2008]. It is strangely appropriate that I – a person called Fudge – am a distant relative of Richard Parker (a fact I owe to my Auntie Doll and to my cousin Ian Hunter's genealogical research). Yann Martel, Life of Pi (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2002), pp. 31 and 36. Philip Armstrong, What Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008), p. 178. Martel, Life of Pi, pp. 273–274. Martel, Life of Pi, pp. 213 and 224–225. See, for example, Joyce E. Salisbury, The Beast Within: Animals in the Middle Ages (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 44. See also Erica Fudge, ‘Saying Nothing Concerning the Same: On Dominion, Purity, and Meat in Early Modern England’, in Fudge (ed.), Renaissance Beasts: Of Animals, Humans, and Other Wonderful Creatures (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004), pp. 79–80. Indeed, Elaine Showalter has argued that the cannibalism in Heart of Darkness – as in H.G. Wells' The Time Machine (1895) and The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) – signifies ‘the final breakdown of civilised ethics.’ Showalter, ‘The Apocalyptic Fables of H.G. Wells,’ in John Stokes (ed.), Fin de Siècle/Fin du Globe: Fears and Fantasies of the Late Nineteenth Century (New York: St Martin's Press, 1992), p. 70. Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan of the Apes (London: Penguin, 1990), p. 53. On the role of the books in Tarzan see Jeff Berglund, ‘Write, Right, White, Rite: Literacy, Imperialism, Race and Cannibalism in Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan of the Apes,' Studies in American Fiction, 27.1 (1999), pp. 53–76. Burroughs, Tarzan, p. 115. Burroughs does not stop to consider how Tarzan knows how to transcribe the sound of his ape name into written language, something that would be impossible if – as is suggested – Tarzan writes and reads but does not have speech, and therefore does not know what letters and words sound like. Burroughs, Tarzan, p. 56. It is surely important that ‘M-A-N’ is in the singular while ‘A-P-E-S’ and ‘M-O-N-K-E-Y-S’ are plural: there is no individuality without language and it is language which gives Tarzan the power to proclaim and reflect upon who he is as an individual human. See, for example, Donald Griffin, Animal Minds: Beyond Cognition to Consciousness, revised ed. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2001), pp. 14–17. Quoted in F.R. Leavis, ‘Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture’, in Leavis, Education and the University: A Sketch for an ‘English School’ (London: Chatto and Windus, 1965), p. 150. Burroughs, Tarzan, p. 61. Burroughs, Tarzan, pp. 79–80. The racism of Tarzan is reflected in Burroughs' life: using the money he made from sales of his Tarzan novels, in the 1920s he bought up land in southern California ‘which he later subdivided and marketed exclusively to white homeowners’. The town is called Tarzana. Catherine Jurca, ‘Tarzan, Lord of the Suburbs,’ Modern Language Quarterly 57.3 (1996), p. 489. For William Gleason, Tarzan of the Apes is a ‘paradigmatic tale of racial recapitulation’. ‘Wild child becomes savage boy becomes civilized man, who in due evolutionary turn outstrips even his own aristocratic forebears. For only by returning to racial origins, recapitulation theory argued, might one move the present race a step ahead.’ Gleason, ‘Of Sequels and Sons: Tarzan and the Problem of Paternity,’ Journal of American and Comparative Cultures, 23.1 (2000), pp. 42 and 41. Burroughs, Tarzan, p. 80. Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Thyestes, translated by Jasper Heywood (1560), ed. Joost Daalder (London: Ernest Benn, 1982). Cited in Steve Baker, The Postmodern Animal (London: Reaktion, 2000), p. 86. Greenaway regarded the cannibalism as literal and metaphorical: ‘in the consumer society, once we have stuffed the whole world into our mouths, ultimately we will end up eating ourselves’. Greenaway cited in Helen Tiffin, ‘Pigs, People and Pigoons’ in Laurence Simmons and Philip Armstrong (ed.), Knowing Animals (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2007), p. 248. http://www.new-harvest.org/default.php [accessed 30 September 2008]. I am grateful to Susan McHugh for pointing this website out to me and allowing me to read her unpublished work on meat production. Similar developments – in fact and fiction – are discussed in Traci Warkentin, ‘Dis/integrating animals: ethical dimensions of the genetic engineering of animals for human consumption,’ AI & Society: The Journal of Human-Centred Systems 20:1 (January 2006), pp. 82–102, especially pp. 97–99. The novel discussed by Warkentin in this context is Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake (2003) which is also discussed by Tiffin: ‘Pigs, People and Pigoons’, pp. 258–60. See http://www.peta.org/mc/NewsItem.asp?id=11306 [accessed 30 September 2008]. See Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, Marie-Louise Mallet (ed.), translated by David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), passim. Derrida, ‘Eating Well’, pp. 112–113. Derrida, ‘Eating Well’, pp. 114–115.