Through a Vegan Studies Lens

Textual Ethics and Lived Activism

Laura Wright, Laura Wright

• Publisher: University of Nevada Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781948908115
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Sociologia

Interest in the vegan studies field continues to grow as veganism has become increasingly visible via celebrity endorsements and universally acknowledged health benefits, and veganism and vegan characters are increasingly present in works of art and literature. Through a Vegan Studies Lens broadens the scope of vegan studies by engaging in the mainstream discourse found in a wide variety of contemporary works of literature, popular cultural representations, advertising, and news media.Veganism is a practice that allows for environmentally responsible consumer choices that are viewed, particularly in the West, as oppositional to an economy that is largely dependent upon big agriculture. This groundbreaking collection exposes this disruption, critiques it, and offers a new roadmap for navigating and reimaging popular culture representations on veganism. These essays engage a wide variety of political, historical, and cultural issues, including contemporary political and social circumstances, emergent veganism in Eastern Europe, climate change, and the Syrian refugee crisis, among other topics. Through a Vegan Studies Lens significantly furthers the conversation of what a vegan studies perspective can be and illustrates why it should be an integral part of cultural studies and critical theory. Vegan studies is inclusive, refusing to ignore the displacement, abuse, and mistreatment of nonhuman animals. It also looks to ignite conversations about cultural oppression.

PART I

VEGAN STUDIES, EXPANDING ECOCRITICISM(S)

CHAPTER 1

Vegans in Locavore Literature

Kathryn Kirkpatrick

Several years ago, I attended an evening reading by a locavore writer my university had brought in as convocation speaker. Her morning talk had subjected us to a slide of the heads of the two pigs she had raised and taken for slaughter. Although she had not been present at the killings and admitted their bruised bodies afterward suggested that their deaths had not been particularly painless or easy, she nonetheless said that the expressions on their postmortem faces encouraged her to feel they had died happy. This “humane death” trope is central to the discourse of locavorism, because like vegans, locavores are motivated in part by concerns about the suffering of animals. So the very different solutions to this problem constitute a key area of contention between the two groups and one in which many locavore writers resort to ad hominem attacks on vegans, tapping stereotypes and prejudices that disparage and belittle vegans, much as they degrade the animals that locavores are preparing to kill.¹ My locavore writer is a case in point. Introducing her talk that evening, she characterized the vegan activists working for ordinances against backyard slaughter in her inner-city neighborhood as “pasty-skinned people who look like they crawled out from under rocks.” Making use of a hierarchy in which reptiles and insects are devalued, this writer was suggesting that when humans do not eat meat, the result is something inhuman—the bloodless undead.

“Vegans,” Carol Adams has observed, “are the locavore’s Other.”² To Other is to project unacknowledged, unwanted, and unintegrated sides of the self onto another group that is thereby demonized. Locavore literature uses vegans to reassure other meat-eaters that despite the UN climate report citing animal agriculture as one of the leading causes of climate change, it is vegans who indulge in what Michael Pollan dismisses as “dreams of innocence” which depend on “a denial of reality.”³ Even though locavore meat-eating practices might well be described as a form of niche pastoralism available to gentlefolk farmers in First World nations rather than a viable way to feed the world, locavore writers project the impracticality of their own vision onto vegans, who in their texts appear as utopian, unrealistic, and obsessed with purity. In Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006), Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (2007), and Novella Carpenter’s Farm City (2009), vegans are consistently represented as naïve, uninformed, and out of step with human evolution. In The Vegan Studies Project, Laura Wright identifies post-9/11 US culture as generating a backlash against all and any outlying cultural practices. Allison Carruth in Global Appetites locates the rising popularity of the locavore diet in the same period. The locavore project therefore needed to situate itself in a comfortable and unthreatening liberal center, and to create that center, it needed to generate an Other to balance the horrors of factory farming. So locavores looked under stones and found vegans, their walking dead.

In the discussions of locavore texts that follow, I focus on close readings of the rhetorical strategies these writers employ to cast vegans as misguided in their own responses to the abuses of the industrial food system. In taking a vegan studies approach to the politics of representation in locavore writing, I do not intend to discount the important cultural work these locavore texts do in educating readers about the pesticide toxicities, soil depletion, corporate overreach, and animal abuse of industrial agriculture. Rather, I suggest that the negative representation of the vegan these narratives rely on supports a similarly rigid and mystified discourse about local food, a discourse of pastoral nostalgia that reverberates in the white rural nationalism of the Trump era. As Carruth observes, “the locavore desire to restore agricultural and culinary practices elides the histories of empire, territorial war, and slavery that define food in the era before American agribusiness and that . . . continue to in the era since” (159). By understanding better the ways vegans are represented in locavore texts, we might disentangle the affirmational support for local organic farmers from the pastoral nostalgia that obscures the sexism, racism, and speciesism of locavorism’s agrarian roots.⁴

LOCAVORE WRITING AND GENRE

Emily Lind Johnston locates Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, along with Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and Carpenter’s Farm City, in the emerging genre of the “life narrative of alternative food” (10), a genre that combines elements of the conversion story, shtick lit, immersion journalism, and the adventure tale to produce “a narrative of discovery in which the narrator pursues a path of foodie enlightenment” (13). Johnston charges that locavore writing’s autobiographical mode employs selective remembering of an idealized and static agrarian past “that never was” (11), and that the ways such distorted retrievals reproduce “the inequitable social and economic order of neoliberalism remains largely unexplored terrain for literary studies” (11–12). I want to add to Johnston’s collection of generic influences the bildungsroman, the novel of formation.

Bildung is the German word for education, and the bildungsroman emerged at the end of the eighteenth century as a coming-of-age genre that fashions the Enlightenment subject to the requirements of modernity. Having charted the protagonist’s psychological and moral development through experience, the bildungsroman integrates a transformed main character into an existing social structure with a reconciled sense of his or her role in the larger world. In some ways, the genre has much in common with autobiography as “a distinct Enlightenment-era formation that privileges the autonomous, self-interested individual who gives a biographical account of himself [sic]” (Johnston 12). But for my analysis of the locavore text, the bildungsroman’s emphasis on the intersections of private and public narratives is key. N. Nardini observes that “the work performed by the Bildungsroman is always, in an important sense, political. From its earliest examples, the Bildungsroman has been just as concerned with the emergence of communities as with the emergence of individuals” (160). Laura Wright argues that veganism has been put under pressure by national narratives of identity, particularly after 9/11 when the non-WASP Other came under scrutiny as un-American—a term that readily included such a non-normative practice as veganism (23). At the same time, the locavore project needed to represent itself as essentially mainstream and meat-friendly—carnist.

Psychologist Melanie Joy coined the term carnism in Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows (2009) in order to name the pervasive ideology that eating animals is “normal, natural, necessary, and nice.” Her work also addresses the defense mechanisms—denial and justification—that those who ascribe to this worldview, carnists, use to ward off the cognitive dissonance involved in eating animals. In an extension of Joy’s work, psychologist Hank Rothgerber found that the cognitive dissonance inherent in the practice of meat-eating is heightened and defended against more vigorously in the presence of vegetarians or vegetarian ideas (33). Drawing on the ideology of carnism, locavore life-writing inscribes meat-eating as essential to being human. The killing of another animal therefore becomes a significant rite of passage. The bildungsroman is structured by obstacles whose overcoming will forge the new self. In the carnist bildungsroman, the vegan is necessary as the significant antagonist: indeed, he or she must be continually evoked in order to be banished, for the vegan presents the alternative view that another animal need not be killed in order to eat sustainably and well. The carnist bildungsroman therefore deploys rhetorical strategies that defend against the unsettling of the human that the vegan represents.

The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006)

In the introduction to The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan suggests that one of the many choices confronting the human omnivore is whether or not to eat other animals: “Shall I be a carnivore or a vegetarian? And if a vegetarian, a lacto-vegetarian or a vegan?” (5). Yet this stated choice among diets sits undigested within an opening that everywhere works to naturalize meat-eating. Indeed, the next sentence reinscribes the eating of animals as the only real choice:

Like the hunter-gatherer picking a novel mushroom off the forest floor and consulting his sense memory to determine its edibility, we pick up the package in the supermarket and, no longer so confident of our senses, scrutinize the label, scratching our heads over the meaning of phrases like “heart healthy,” “no transfats,” “cage-free” or “range fed.” (5)

Here, even as he acknowledges the array of diets on offer for late twentieth century eaters in the US, Pollan immediately reminds readers of our “hunter-gatherer” history and the carno-normative diet in which “cage-free” and “range fed” are operative. Having named vegetarian and vegan diets as apparently legitimate in his opening, he addresses his readers as carnists: everywhere the assumption is made that to be human is to eat meat.

Pollan kills two animals as individuals in his narrative, and those killings are in close proximity to vegetarians and vegans. The first killing, of a chicken, is under the tutelage of celebrity locavore farmer Joel Salatin at Polyface Farms, a figure who emerges as the first of Pollan’s significant guide figures in this carnist bildungsroman. The chapter, “Slaughter: In a Glass Abattoir,” opens with the symmetry of the “food chain” standing in for natural law: “the sun fed the grass, the grass the cattle, the cattle the chickens, and the chickens us” (226). Pollan is taught to collect five chickens in one hand, holding them by the feet, an action that renders them collectively as a thing, and a cheerleader’s thing at that: “I had five chicken legs and a giant white pom-pom of feathers in my right hand” (228).⁵ This objectification of the chickens is the prelude to a feeling of meat-eater’s authenticity, manifested in his willingness to do the deed himself: “It seemed to me not too much to ask of a meat eater, which I was then and still am, that at least once in his life he take some direct responsibility for the killing on which his meat-eating depends” (231). Though Pollan meets the eye of the first bird he ever kills, he renders his chicken an object who does not return his gaze: “I looked into the black eye of the chicken and, thankfully, saw nothing, not a flicker of fear” (254). Unlike Derrida’s cat, Pollan’s chicken does not respond, though the “thankfully” here suggests that Pollan is most interested in protecting himself from his response to her death. In what might be read as a moment of visual denial, his own gaze is obscured by the killing: in the process of cutting her throat, “an errant droplet spattered the lens of my glasses” (254). She is the only individual chicken he even partially sees. After killing “a dozen or so,” he acknowledges his own numbness: “the most morally troubling thing about killing chickens is that after a while it is no longer morally troubling” (233). If it is morally troubling that killing a lot of chickens is not morally troubling, one has to wonder why killing the first was so easy. In a chapter that might have been called “The Making of an Absent Referent,” the chicken bodies have their feathers spun off, and “they emerge as naked as supermarket broilers.⁶ This is the moment the chickens passed over from looking like dead animals to looking like food” (233).

At the table when Pollan serves his Polyface chicken is a vegetarian: “Matthew, who’s fifteen and currently a vegetarian (he confined himself to the corn), had many more questions about killing chickens than I thought it wise to answer at the dinner table” (271). Indeed, yes. Matthew might have raised morally troubling issues. And Pollan admits that enjoying his meal and protecting that enjoyment relies on obscuring and mystifying the process not only for others at the table but for himself. “Thankfully all of that, the killing cones, too, had retreated to the mental background for me, chased by the smokey-sweet aromas of the meal, which I found myself able to thoroughly enjoy” (271).

Having tried to established a discourse of meat-eating as so physically and culturally embedded in our humanness as to be practically unassailable, Pollan feels able to adopt a tone of respectful regret toward the animals he has killed while also appearing wise and mature in his embrace of what amounts to being human. Key here is that the counter to his argument that humans can not only survive on vegetarian and indeed vegan diets but also thrive appears marginal and unthreatening. Matthew is only fifteen, and so he is represented as going through an adolescent developmental phase on the way to adulthood. He is “currently a vegetarian” because his status is likely to change, not least, perhaps, because it’s clear that vegetarianism, among unaccommodating carnists, is a diet of scarcity.⁷ No apparent attention has been given to his dietary needs, so he is left to eat what he can. Matthew is a questioning, non-conforming type—the vegetarian teenager going through a phase. He has not yet, as has Pollan, mastered the art of transforming his chickens and the site of their slaughter into absent referents.

Pollan’s second killing of an animal, a boar, is coupled with a more intense and challenging encounter with the figure of the vegan in the form of Peter Singer’s text, Animal Liberation. When Pollan wins a concession from Singer through email over whether or not a chicken or a cow might have “a sense of its own existence over time, and have preferences about its own future” (327), Pollan returns to his inherent conviction that “What’s wrong with eating animals is the practice, not the principle” (328). That is, having satisfied himself that the leading contemporary male vegan could be answered, Pollan is confirmed in his decision to kill the boar as a rite of passage. In The Aesthetics of Care: On the Literary Treatment of Animals, Josephine Donovan observes, “The rite of animal sacrifice may be seen as encompassed in the developmental process of ‘becoming men.’ Intimately connected to or derived from male bonding rituals, animal sacrifice enables a distancing from the feminized abjection the victim represents” (167). Accordingly, Pollan will need to seek out a male guide for his nostalgic pastoral: Angelo Garro is an Italian emigrant intent on recapturing a lost pastoral, “the flavors and foodways of his childhood” (283). Extravagantly praised by Angelo for his “first pig,” Pollan admits a “powerful upwelling of pride” (353). Although this feeling is later replaced by disgust as he struggles to help clean the dead body, Pollan has clearly succeeded in passing through the central initiation rite of his carnist bildungsroman: “I had actually done this thing I’d set out to do, had successfully shot a pig. I felt a flood of relief, too, that the deed was done, thank God, and didn’t need to be done again” (353). Pollan thus presents the killings narrated in The Omnivore’s Dilemma as having earned him, and by symbolic proxy his readers, the right to eat other animals. Dismissing the vegan antagonist has been central to that project.

ANIMAL, VEGETABLE, MIRACLE (2007)

Although Barbara Kingsolver’s locavore memoir is significantly different from Pollan’s, not least in its multivoiced narrating of her family’s year of growing and eating local food, it nonetheless features the generic conventions of the carnist bildungsroman I have been charting. Kingsolver’s gender identity mak...