Download The animal on our plate: an anthropological perspective on meat

The animal on our plate: an anthropological perspective on meat eating
Abstract
Meat-eating and vegetarianism stand at the opposite and many are the reasons and
implications behind the choice, or non-choice, of our diet. What is the symbolism behind
such a common act? This essay will have as a starting point Adams' theory of the 'absent
referent' and will evaluate its applicability to Western society. The mode of production and
consumption of meat implies an objectification of the animals which are to become our
food. The discussion will touch moral, ethical and symbolic issues of meat consumption
and animal domination. Is it possible to have a morally acceptable meat to eat? Is
vegetarianism the best alternative choice?
Keywords: meat-eating, absent referent, meat consumption, animal domination, moral
eating.
Carol J. Adams is an American author, who was defined by Rebecca Myers-Spiers
as the “queen of feminist-vegetarian critical theory”: Adams dedicated herself to working
with victims of domestic violence and challenging the meat-eating society she lives in
(1999: 6). Adams developed the theory of the 'absent referent' through a number of articles
and books, arguing that the way society objectifies food animals is similar to the way it
objectifies women, therefore feminist women need to make the connection of their
oppression to that of animals, and take action becoming vegetarians (ibid.). This essay will
evaluate Adams' theory of the 'absent referent' first illustrating what she means with the
term and how it applies to her society. In the subsequent discussion, I will analyse possible
cultural limitations to her theory, the mode of production and consumption of meat in
American society and moral issues linked to those, finally I will discuss if it is morally
acceptable to produce meat by ethical hunting.
Adams is especially interested in analysing the human-animal relationship with
regards to the activity of meat-eating. She argues that when we eat meat, animals become
absent: they are made absent through their death to be transformed into the food we call
meat. She defines this concept as the absent referent:
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Animals in name and body are made absent as animals for meat to exist. If animals are
alive they cannot be meat. Thus a dead body replaces the live animal and animals become
absent referents. Without animals there would be no meat eating, yet they are absent from
the act of eating meat because they have been transformed into food. (1991: 136)
Animals are made absent in three ways: the first one is literally through their death
as just described by Adams' words. The physical absence is also accentuated by butchery
and the modern meat market: the animal is dismembered in a way that its parts are no
longer recognizable as the body parts of an animal, but are transformed into an edible
substance. This is also connected to the modern division of labour and urbanization, since
the life of the farmed animals and the process by which they become meat is hidden from
the view of people living in the city (Knight, in progress: 1). Furthermore, there is a
definitional absence through language, as cow becomes beef, pig becomes pork, and all
animals become meat. Knight cites Robbins explaining how changing the names of the
animals permits us to further remove the animal presence from our food allowing us to
forget about their spirit (ibid.: 6). Adams explores the use of the 'it' pronoun when talking
about animals or their meat: 'it' not only refers to both objects or living beings whose
gender is irrelevant or unknown, but also “erases the living, breathing nature of the
animals and reifies their object status” (Adams 2010: 93). Finally, the metaphorical
absence as animals become metaphors for human experience such as the abuse suffered
by women; Adams reports the example of women saying they felt like “a piece of meat”
when they were experiencing sexual abuse (ibid.: 66).
Adams' theory of the absent referent is an etic interpretation of meat-eating that
uncovers the patriarchal symbolism and the dynamic of domination of human animals over
nonhuman animals, as well as that of domination of men over women. The emic
perception of meat, instead, sees it as a rich source of nutrition, often linked with wealth
and hospitality, and it is perceived as linked with cultural forms: 'Meat is a cultural construct
made to seem natural and inevitable' (Adams 1991: 135). In Adams view, what we do to
animals, kill them to feed on them, has been culturally negated as animals are ontologised
as food, letting people lose all consideration of their role in meat-eating (ibid.: 137). But
Adams' theory and analysis only refers to Western society, in particular the urban
American one, exposing a possible limit of its generic application to customs of meat2
eating around the world.
Igor de Garine (2005) helps us understand better the human habit of meat-eating
comparing different societies around the world and the symbolism attached to it. His first
point is that humans are omnivores. He underlines how meat is rarely a staple food, while
more frequently it is consumed on special occasions only, which are, therefore, charged
with symbolism. He also compares definitions of meat: for instance, while in Africa the term
'meat' includes all parts of the animal – flesh, blood, offal, fat –, in the Western world the
term is applied only to the flesh as that is considered the most nutrient part. In addition, he
compares the consumption of meat in Western societies for 'gastronomic delectation',
while in traditional societies the consumption of meat usually happens during social or
ritual occasions, which emphasizes its symbolic value (2005: 43). His comments reinforce
Adams' general view that meat-eating is a cultural constructed habit that expresses human
domination on the natural world; on the other hand he also underlines Adams' theory's
cultural and geographical limits in relation to language. Furthermore, it is of note that in
non-Western societies one of the reasons for eating meat is to incorporate the animal's
properties (ibid.: 41), therefore I argue that the animal is far from absent or forgotten,
instead its presence, spirit and qualities become central to the meaning of the act of eating
its meat.
Returning to Western societies, a number of authors have analysed meat
consumption. Pollan's premise is that humans are omnivorous animals, part of the food
chain as any other animal: the omnivore's dilemma humans have to face is to decide what
is safe to eat when you can potentially eat anything. He then interprets culinary traditions
and taboos as a way to mediate the dilemma and accuses Americans of lacking a
dominant culinary culture, a fact that renders them vulnerable to the seduction of
marketing (2006: 296-99). Pollan makes it look like the main culprit is the meat industry
and its marketing strategies. It is the industry that makes the animal an absent referent:
farms and slaughterhouses are located in isolated areas, where the conditions in which
farm animals live and are killed, are not visible to the public. The capitalist economy
transforms animals into 'meat-machines' causing them intense suffering: “The industrial
animal factory offers a nightmarish glimpse of what capitalism is capable of in the absence
of any moral or regulatory constraint whatsoever” (ibid.: 318). It appears to be in the
interest of the industry to keep the consumer as removed as possible from the cruelty of
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meat production, in the fear that people would eat less - or no - meat if they knew where it
comes from.
It seems to me that Pollan stands quite in the same position of Adams, when talking
about animals as absent referents on our tables, and how human domination over them is
brought to the extreme when live animals are already considered objects: absent when
they are still alive. He uncovers yet another dynamic of domination, the one of the
capitalist economy over the consumer, a consumer that is unaware of what is going on in
reality, a consumer that is intentionally kept in the dark by marketing strategies devised by
the dominant capitalist hegemony in the purest Gramscian terms.
The result is a schizophrenia in the American relationship with animals: on one side
stand the pets that receive Christmas presents, on the other stand the forgotten bacon-tobe pigs. Pollan reasons that the only way to tolerate this situation is to completely remove
the animal from the meat (ibid.: 306). The moral dissonance is impossible to deny: so how
do we justify killing and eating animals if our diet can adapt to alternatives? The choice is
between looking away or become vegetarian (ibid.: 312). The evolution of modern ethics,
as described by Singer, implies to elevate non-human animals to the plane of persons. He
argues that we have to grant non-human animals the same rights and respect we grant
ourselves. He states that it is morally wrong to make animals suffer even if their selfawareness is different from our own; he compares the self-awareness of animals with that
of children and mentally disabled people to make the point that animals do not need to
have a perception of themselves similar to our own to be worthy of respect (2006: 247).
Pallotta aims to prove that human empathy with animals is innate, as children often
show resistance to eating meat when they make the connection with the live animal: the
utilitarian attitude towards animals is acquired during the process of socialization that
develops during childhood (2008: 162). Children experience a social pressure from
parents who believe that meat is a necessary nutrient, with the result that the first impulse
of becoming vegetarian remains latent during their childhood, as reported by Pallotta's
informants (ibid.: 155). Pallotta's articles further underline the existing conflict in humananimal relationships citing Plous: 'American children are taught to both love and consume
animals, “conflict ... is avoided in part by de-emphasizing consumed animals as objects of
affection”' (ibid.: 163), they are in fact reduced to absent referents, as Adams explains. His
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view further underlines how the relationship with animals is culturally constructed,
supporting Adams, and gives factual evidence to Singer's philosophy that humans innately
consider animals to be standing on the same moral plane as themselves.
Other authors have replied that there are other possible ways of producing meat
that are morally acceptable, and attempted to contrast the absent referent theory. Cahoon
(2009) tried to demonstrate that hunters are morally superior to any other meat-eater and
even to vegetarians. He argues that modern American hunters follow strict ethical rules on
how to hunt and underlines how successful hunts are numerically very few: 'only 25 per
cent of American deer hunters succeed in taking a deer in a given year' (ibid.: 74). He
further explains that a death by hunt is far less painful than a life and death in a
slaughterhouse, and that hunted animals at least have the opportunity to live their lives in
the wild, sparing them the stress and pain of a farm life (ibid.: 75-76). He contrasts hunting
with farming, arguing that 'agriculture kills animals' (italic original, ibid.: 79) by destroying
natural habitat, by using machinery that kills small animals living on the fields, and by
using pesticides. Therefore, he states that a vegetarian diet kills even more animals than a
carnivore diet (ibid.: 80). It appears from his account that, morally, ethical hunters are
superior to vegetarians because they take responsibility for their actions: 'in those cases
where ethical hunts kills fewer animals for the same nutrition than do farming and
vegetarianism, eating hunted meat would be not only morally justified but morally
preferred' (ibid.: 82). Furthermore, he points out that hunters face the animal they are
about to kill and take full responsibility for its death and butchery, therefore the animal is
far from being absent, it is rather present when the hunter realize they have taken a life
and treat the animal with respect trying to avoid any superfluous suffering. The same
feeling of responsibility for taking lives are shared in the hunters community as it is also
described by Cerulli (2012), a vegetarian turned hunter, that realized that his vegetarian
diet of homegrown vegetables was killing animals nonetheless, and chose to hunt to
improve his diet and health.
To conclude, I think Cahoone has definitely a point when he says that agriculture
cause collateral deaths of animals which are not considered by Adams' analysis, and when
he argues that animals killed and eaten by hunters are a present referent during the whole
process of hunting, killing, butchering and eating. But he fails to face Adams’ main
discourse: human-animal domination over nonhuman-animals dismissing it with the
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comment: 'Eating is a necessity' (2009: 82). Adams' fight against meat-consumption is a
metaphorical fight against oppression. In her discourse, meat-eating is a symbolic act, as
is vegetarianism: she takes the side of the oppressed, animals and women, and rebels
against a society that have become used to the objectification of individuals, both human
or nonhuman. It is in these terms that we need to interpret her theory, humans and animals
share the same moral plane while meat is the objectification of animals, in this sense the
theory can be applied to all Western meat-eating, without distinction as to how the meat is
produced, because no matter how 'ethical' the production is, it always implies an
objectification and an absent referent.
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Bibliography
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