Making Sense of ‘Food’ Animals

A Critical Exploration of the Persistence of ‘Meat’

Paula Arcari

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9789811395840
• eBook ISBN:
  9789811395857
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book addresses the persistence of meat consumption and the use of animals as food in spite of significant challenges to their environmental and ethical legitimacy. Drawing on Foucault's regime of power/knowledge/pleasure, and theorizations of the gaze, it identifies what contributes to the persistent edibility of 'food' animals even, and particularly, as this edibility is increasingly critiqued. Beginning with the question of how animals, and their bodies, are variously mapped by humans according to their use value, it gradually unpacks the roots of our domination of 'food' animals – a domination distinguished by the literal embodiment of the 'other'. The logics of this embodied domination are approached in three inter-related parts that explore, respectively, how knowledge, sensory and emotional associations, and visibility work together to render animal's bodies as edible flesh. The book concludes by exploring how to more effectively challenge the 'entitled gaze' that maintains'food' animals as persistently edible.

© The Author(s) 2020

P. ArcariMaking Sense of ‘Food’ Animalshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-9585-7_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Paula Arcari¹

(1)

Department of Social Sciences Centre for Human Animal Studies (CfHAS), Edge Hill University, Ormskirk, UK

Paula Arcari

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

Vector image of cow with cuts of meat delineated (Image by FoxysGraphic on Vectorstock)

I use this introduction to explain the question that underpins and guides this book, which asks why cows, pigs, chickens, sheep, and goats¹ are not regarded as anything other than ‘food’ animals? Why do cartographies of meat, such as illustrated in the above figure, dominate humans’ understandings of these animals’ lives and bodies, thereby normalising and supporting the intensification of environmentally harmful practices that demand the termination of millions of lives every hour? My point of observation is an entirely different and hypothetical territory, one that is perhaps quixotic—and that is a vegan pantopia. This pantopia is conceived in contrast to utopia, described by Foucault (1967: 3) as “fundamentally unreal spaces”. Literally denoting “a place that does not exist … the ‘forever nowhere’” (Bauman 2002: 238), utopian imaginings conjure idealistic but also seemingly unattainable dreams (Bauman 2005). Pantopia is instead “the place of everywhere” (Jacobson 2013: 233), evocative of creative possibilities rather than impossibilities.

Though still a largely imagined, hoped-for future, the seeds of a vegan pantopia are present in very real but diffuse sites of resistance, or “effectively enacted utopias” (Foucault 1967: 3), which Foucault terms ‘heterotopia’. Heterotopia are sites that ‘disturb’ or ‘detonate’ the normalised social order, logic, and language (Foucault 1989; Dehaene and De Cauter 2008). Vegan heterotopia are therefore construed as sites where normalised constitutions of meat consumption and ‘food’ animals are at once “represented, contested and inverted” (Foucault 1967: 3; see also Meininger 2013). Crucially for my purposes, both Foucault and Meininger highlight the inherent power of heterotopia, simply by occupying the anomalous zones that normality negates, and from which the “self-propelling power of the othering and excluding normality” can be critiqued, disturbed, and challenged (Meininger 2013: 28).

Being myself an occupant of vegan heterotopia, I can exercise the power this offers to observe how ‘normal’ space is constituted and maintained, and subsequently challenge the associated mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion. As Hook (2007: 184) states, heterotopia “represent a point of destabilization for current socio-political or discursive orders of power”. In doing this, I intend to “trouble habitual ways of thinking and acting” (Castree and Nash 2004: 1342) in alignment with an openly emancipatory agenda with regard to humans’ current use of ‘food’ animals. As part of this, I imagine what it would take for vegan heterotopia to become a unified vegan pantopia. Therefore, building on my first question, more specifically, the central question that guides this book is, what is it about meat consumption and the use of animals as ‘food’ that keeps these animals persistently edible? This is what I endeavoured to understand through my research. For answering this question has revealed mechanisms of inclusion that are simultaneously mechanisms of exclusion that prevent the expansion of heterotopic sites of veganism. Chief amongst these is the ontological mapping of nonhuman bodies.

1 Animal Mapping, Practices, and Power

In Science and Sanity, Alfred Korzybski made the statement “a map is not the territory” (1958 [1933]: 58). He also said, “words are not the things we speak about” (222). Yet, for all the ways that animals used as food are spoken about, and their bodies literally mapped, their territory or undesignated ‘thingness’ remains enduringly unknown. In order to apprehend a life for them not predicated on the value of their bodies to humans—an unmapped territory of other possibilities—the current map would be discarded and the words used to speak about them would change.

In his investigation of Australian explorers’ texts, Simon Ryan notes that space is socially produced and describes maps as an imperial technology used to establish colonial space (1996: 5). Mapping, then, is centrally about control and colonisation—a distinctly non-neutral process which Ryan represents through his conception of the ‘cartographic eye’. Through the course of this book, this notion of the cartographic eye and its entitled, territorialising mission will resonate with references to the ‘arrogant eye’ in cinematic studies, and to theorisations of the gaze—patriarchal, colonial, and, ultimately, human. Indeed, since Ryan’s articulation, the ‘cartographic gaze’² has been defined by John Pickles as “a controlling gaze rendering the broad swathes of worldly complexity and enormity in miniature form for a discrete purpose” (2004: 80). Pickles’ reference here to visual rendering and reduction to miniature form becomes doubly meaningful when applied to animals used as food. Indeed, the lead character in Italo Calvino’s 1983 novel Mr Palomar makes the same connection:

On the wall a chart shows an outline of a bull, like a map covered with frontier lines that mark off the areas of consuming interest, involving the entire anatomy of the animal excepting only horns and hooves. The map of the human habitat is this, no less than the planisphere of the planet; both are protocols that should sanction the rights man has attributed to himself, of possession, division, and consumption without residue of the terrestrial continents and of the loins of the animal body. (69)

Drawing on Ryan’s terminology to consider cartographies of meat, the process of designating and charting the various locations, features, and landmarks in the life of a cow, sheep, pig, or chicken, or the journey of a steak, cutlet, loin, or breast, is the outcome of a long history of interconnected systems of human value and use that are not easily disentangled or dismantled. Eating meat is universally embroiled in social, cultural, and religious practices and recruits sensory and biological processes to create even more complex entanglements. Equally, its production is part of a tightly meshed, globalised network of economic, political, and scientific arrangements. Together they comprise the animal-industrial complex³ (Noske 1989; Twine 2012). If this extensive complex is to be dismantled, there first needs to be some understanding of what, besides a certain path dependency, makes eating meat such an enduring, and persistently alluring, part of social practices.

Practice theories comprise a vast and heterogeneous body of literature (Warde 2005) arguably characterised by four different ‘types’ (Schatzki 2001) and two generations of theorists (Postill 2010). In this book, I rely on the theoretical lineage traced by Warde (2005)—from Giddens and Bourdieu, through Schatzki, Reckwitz, and Shove—up to and including recent theorists who are applying social practice theories in diverse and distinctive ways to gain insight into the workings of the social world and how its less desirable trajectories might be altered (Hui et al. 2016; Strengers and Maller 2014; Shove and Spurling 2013). Social practice theories are united by a shared understanding of practices as the unit of focus rather than individual behaviour. Across the body of work I am drawing on, practices are commonly understood as a diverse nexus of bodily activities or routinised “doings and sayings” (Schatzki 1996: 89) such as driving, keeping warm, cooking, or eating breakfast (Maller 2015). Individuals are conceived as being recruited into, reproducing, or defecting from practices (Shove et al. 2012). As this account suggests, social practices are conceived as both entities and performances. This enables the constituent elements necessary to the existence and performance of practices to be determined, while also providing the opportunity to address questions of change—for example, exploring how or why certain practices persist, evolve, or die out, and how to approach more purposive intervention.

Practices as entities generally comprise material objects and infrastructures (living and non-living), common understandings and meanings, and competencies and skills (Shove et al. 2012; Reckwitz 2002). Rules and ‘teleoaffective’ structures, the latter understood as “orientations toward ends and how things matter” (Schatzki 1997: 302) or “emotion and motivational knowledge” (Reckwitz 2002: 249), are also commonly included. Practices emerge and are recognised as entities through their repeated performance in generally cohesive ways, or, to invert Warde’s phrasing, ‘a practice presupposes a performance’ (2005: 134). Many practices may share one or more elements, or be temporally and/or spatially shaped to greater and lesser degrees by other practices. For example, roads are an element of driving, cycling, walking, and other forms of transport, with many shared meanings, competencies, and teleoaffectivities. Roads are also part of planning practices, shaped by population changes, development, and increased car ownership. ‘Meat’ can be part of practices of shopping, cooking (e.g. roasting, stewing, BBQ-ing), eating, religious and historical celebration (e.g. Christmas, Easter, Eid al-Adah,⁴ Gadhimai,⁵ Thanksgiving,⁶ Australia Day),⁷ commensality, and overseas travel, again with many overlapping meanings, competencies, and teleoaffectivities. The availability of ‘meat’ relies on practices associated with animal agriculture, trading, and markets. Such groups of practices are commonly referred to as a bundle or complex of practices with varying dimensions of co-dependency (Shove et al. 2012). Any one practice, and its constituent elements, is therefore constantly b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• Part I. Background
• Part II
• Part III
• Part IV
• Part V. Conclusion
• Back Matter