As a result, the cultural concepts and presentations by which we know “meat” rely on fantasy, rather than reality. Charlie the Tuna begs to be caught and eaten; an animated hot dog desires nothing more than to be an Oscar Meyer wiener. When lamb chops are discontinued from the menu of hotels because Shari Lewis and “Lamb Chop” are visiting, the unreality of these associations become clear. Or when a newspaper’s headline announces that reindeer-meat sausages have received USDA approval for interstate shipping by proclaiming “On Dasher, on Dancer, on toast”—the unreality is promoted. After all, Dasher, Dancer and Lamb Chop represent fantasies, not flesh-and-blood animals.
This fantasy is encouraged by flesh promoters. “My chickens live in a house that’s just chicken heaven,” according to Frank Perdue—all 25,000 of them in each darkened “house.” The 1985 “Beef Gives Strength” promotional campaign was pulled when the New York State attorney general’s office called it “deceptive.”20 One hundred and fifty years ago, Henry David Thoreau exposed the belief that flesh gave strength as he walked alongside a man plowing a field with an ox. Despite the fact that he relied on the strength of a vegetarian animal, the farmer protested that he needed flesh for strength.
The Sexual Politics of Meat
Perpetuating the fantasy minimizes awareness, appealing instead directly to the appetite: “Somehow, nothing satisfies like beef.”21 And the appetite being appealed to is constructed as man’s. Masculinity appears to require both satisfaction and beef. In a New York Times story about the opening of a new men’s store, we learn: “In keeping with the masculine spirit of the evening, the hors d’oeuvres were beefy. Roast beef on toast. Chunk chicken in pastry shells. Salmon and saucisson. None of that asparagus and cucumber fluff here.”22 A chain of French restaurants in the Dallas-Fort Worth area added rotisserie (dead) chicken “to satisfy the hunger of male patrons for something meaty.”23
When an advertisement claims that “meat” is “real food for real people” the implications are obvious. We want to be included; we want to be real people; and so we are absorbed into the dominant viewpoint. To resist the eating of animals causes one to be excluded from the culturally constructed “we,” and to announce one’s difference. If I do not see “meat” as a real food, than I am not a real person. The subtext here is, “If I am not real, I am not a man.” Inevitably, cultural images of “meat” appeal to human male-identified appetitive desires. Thus, Gretchen Polhemus was hired by the Nebraska Beef Board because her presence “adds a unique and attractive element that embodies ‘The New Beauty of Beef.’ ”24 The association between attractive human female bodies and delectable, attractive flesh appeals to the appetitive desires as they have been constructed in the dominant culture in which we interpret images from a stance of male identification and human-centeredness. Thus, animals who are available for corpse eating are represented in one menu as doing the cancan. In such an image, as with Figure 1, bi-pedal animals become neither man nor beast, but are rendered as consumable feminine entertainment.
Or consider a kitchen tool called the “Turkey Hooker.” (See Figure 6.) Designed to be used to move a cooked turkey corpse from the cooking pan to the serving plate, it hooks into the gaping hole that was once the neck. Accompanying an image that shows the “turkey hooker” in use, is a fantasy image of a turkey in high-heeled shoes, one wing placed seductively, invitingly, behind her head, hints of breasts showing. In large print, we are told: “an easy pick up from pan to platter.”25 In late 1993, a Fort Worth restaurant promised its patrons a “Hillary dinner”: two big thighs, two small breasts, and a left wing. Charging that a Harvard private club, Pi Eta, promoted violence against women in its literature, two hundred students picketed it in 1984 (the same year that Harvard University cut its ties with men’s clubs). Prompting the protest was a letter that had been sent to club members that referred to women as “pigs” and “promised those club members who attended the club’s parties ‘a bevy of slobbering bovines fresh for the slaughter.’ ”26
An article about “How to Kill a Chicken” describes the look of dead chickens after their blood stops flowing, and they are scalded so that someone can remove their feathers:
skinny, absurdly skinny, a characteristic withheld from the patrons of supermarkets, where the chickens are sold sans feet, their necks jammed inside the body cavity and their scrawny carcasses squeezed into spurious plumpness by tight fitting paper tubs tightened even further by tough plastic wrappers. Miller’s back room employs no such cosmetics, and for the [dead] chicken lover the result is an appalling and funny overdose of truth, sort of like a centerfold feature showing the Playmate of the Month undergoing a gynecological exam.27
Figure 6 Turkey hooker.
“Vanitas: Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorectic” by Jana Sterbak was displayed on a mannequin in a Montreal gallery in the early 1990s. It would remain undisturbed until the fifty pounds of salted flank steak decomposed, then anothe r $260 worth of fresh flesh would be added.28
In the construction of these images, the consumer is presumed to be a human male who consumes both images of female beauty and large hunks of dead animals. Many ironies are contained within this camouflage of reality by fantasy: the fat-laden flesh portrayed by an anorectic female body (as on the cover of the original edition of Neither Man nor Beast [see the Frontispiece]); the butchered, fragmented, bleeding flesh of dead animals presented as beautiful; male animal flesh (such as beef) paraded as female flesh; the equation of prostitution and corpse eating;
the pornographic imaging of animals and women. We should not be surprised that Meat is the name of a sex club in Manhattan.
When “meat” is claimed as “real food for real people” the message is that vegetarians are unreal people, “they” but not “we,” “sissies” or “fruits” but not “he-men” or Iron Johns.
The Trojan Horse of the Nutrition Community
The coercive nature of a “meat”-advocating culture is further evidenced by the traditional nutritional approach to corpse eating. The framing of the question of eating dead animals as a question of nutrition regularizes corpse eating. Although it is one of many discourses available, the concept of the Four Basic Food Groups—“the Trojan Horse of the nutrition community”29 —has been the nutritional discourse assigned to us for debating the eating of animals.
Until 1956, there was no idea of the “Basic Four Food Groups” (milk, “meat,” vegetable-fruit, and bread-cereal). Before that, flesh and dairy industries spent millions of dollars in advertisements that advised us to “eat more meat” and “drink more milk.” The “Basic Seven” had been introduced during World War II; this had supplanted the “Twelve Food Groups” used as a guideline during the 1930s. According to the American Meat Institute, the years from 1938 to 1956 saw a declining rate of corpse consumption. While the introduction of the four basic food groups is often cast as an important nutritional device created to aid people, it is clear that the dairy and flesh industries were alarmed by the instability of their market. Working closely with the government United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), they reduced the number of food groups while allotting greater space to their specific products.
The four basic food groups are a literal representation of how a question of production and promotion becomes a nutritional consideration. The reason for the four basic food groups, we are told, is to insure that we are getting our recommended daily amounts of protein, calcium, vitamins, and iron. The Basic Four Food poster that inculcated generations from 1956 until recently indicated that flesh and dairy products were an excellent source of these items. It made this claim because it measured these products from a producer’s point of view (nutrients per weight ratio) rather than a consumer’s point of view (nutrients per calories ratio). Examining this choice of measurement, it appears curiously unhelpful to consumers—“people do not eat until a certain weight of food has been consumed but rather until Caloric requirements are satisfied”30 —while extremely favorable for produce
rs: foods high in fat like flesh fare better when measured by weight rather than calorie. Turkey flesh can be claimed to be 96 percent fat free when measured by weight, although 28.6 percent of the calorie content is fat.
Although there is no recommended daily allowance for weight in the diet, foods are interpreted according to weight in these charts to hide a consumer’s concern—concern about fat and calories. “Fat is lighter (specific gravity .913-.945) than water, the chief constituent of fruits and vegetables, so fatty foods will show up well in a nutrient/weight sort; but since fat is high in Calories these foods do poorly in a nutrient/Calorie sort.”31 As a result, “if foods are sorted and preferenced by nutrient/Calorie rather than nutrient/weight ratios, animal foods lose their clout and the whole ‘Basic Four’ concept evaporates.” It evaporates because excessive intake of protein and fat, fostered by the traditional basic four food groups, poses a greater health risk than the obtaining of calcium, protein, and iron from vegetables, grains, and fruits. The typical Western corpse indulger’s diet is high in animal fat and protein, while lacking in fiber. This diet is associated with increased risk of cancer, heart disease, obesity, diabetes, and osteoporosis.32 In fact, some vegetable foods protect against diseases such as atherosclerosis and cancer, while high-fat foods increase risk for these diseases.
In April 1991 the Physician’s Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) introduced a new four-food groups of whole grains, vegetables, legumes, fruits. This proposal from a group that might generally be marginalized by the dominant discourse garnered quite a bit of media attention.33 But soon its radical evisceration of a flesh diet seemed unimportant, because—perhaps to confuse matters—lower-echelon USDA staff members unveiled a new representation of the four basic food groups.34 No longer contained within a wheel that imparted 50 percent of its space to dairy and “meat,” the four basic food groups were to be illustrated through a New Age pyramid, with flesh and dairy products toward the apex, though now inhabiting less space. This diminishment in space, even though counteracted by the placement of flesh and dairy in hierarchically superior locations, was not acceptable to the beef and dairy industries. In encapsulating their space, the pyramid appeared to shrink their nutritional importance as well. Protesting this to the USDA—the pyramid was “confusing,” it “stigmatized” their products, both by the reduction of size, and by their placement next to that of fats and sweets—the flesh and dairy industries succeeded in having the new image withdrawn. As one newspaper reported, “Industry Beefs, USDA cowed.”35
Just as the traditional nutritional measurement of flesh by weight instead of calories ignored its serious health implications, so constructing the argument about eating animals in solely nutritional terms—no matter what the shape—ignores the context for the nutritional debate. The
dead animal industry and the dairy industry together are the second largest industry in the United States. Through the USDA’s four basic food groups we have government sponsorship of an animal-based food diet. Instead of being seen as industry-sponsored propaganda, it can be viewed neutrally as government-sponsored education, lifting cultural promotion to an even greater coercive dimension. The four food groups might be called not the Queen’s English, but the government’s English.
After a series of consumer surveys, costing $855,000, showed that the pyramid was not confusing, it survived and was reintroduced to the public in 1992. However, while realigning them from circle to pyramid, it does not destabilize the concept of the four basic food groups. In fact, it continues to reinforce the idea that dairy products—what I call feminized protein36 —are essential to a diet. When analyzed as an industry rather than a food product, the dairy and egg industry cannot be so
easily separated from corpse production: it supplies veal calves, chickens for soup and stock, exhausted cows for burgers and other meat. Remember, too, that milk is produced in surplus in the United States, and having a government image and concept that assures a market for its product is a great boon. PCRM responded by destabilizing the pyramid, and proposing in its place a trapezoid which lopped off the top triangle with its recommendations for consuming meat, eggs, dairy, and oils.
During the 1993 E. coli scare, in which at least two children died as a result of undercooked meat, and many more became sick, the focus of debate was not “why do we continue to eat dead bodies?” but “how should dead bodies be cooked so that we do not die from them?” Vegetarians around the country listened with ears that heard repeated evidence for the need to abandon the eating of flesh. Corpse eaters listened with anxiety for assurance that they could continue to eat flesh. Not surprisingly, the dominant culture determined the focus of the debate, all kept respectfully within the confines of government English. New labels to appear on all dead flesh will warn of the need to cook dead bodies completely before consuming them. If the labels were in vegetarian “French” they might say:
Warning: This is a dead body, recently executed. The decaying process has already begun. You do not need to eat dead animals to stay healthy. Reduce your risk of getting six out of ten diseases that cripple and kill Americans: Boycott this product and choose vegetarianism.
If the words favored for insulting others are any sign, the animals whom humans consume do not figure grandly in any hierarchy of value: you cow, eating like a pig, chicken-brained, chicken-hearted, turkey, and so forth. Feminist Karen Davis, founder of United Poultry Concerns, suggests that “in coming days we may marvel at the strange phenomenon of constituting ourselves by the intimate act of eating beings we despise.”37 But can the dominant discourse allow for such marveling, such introspection, when it comes to eating animals?
In a sense, vegetarians are no more biased than corpse eaters about their choice of food; the former, however, do not benefit as do the latter from having their biases actually approved of by the dominant culture through the coercive effects of a government-sponsored corpse diet. As a result, in this culture, it requires less energy, less knowledge, less concern, less awareness, to continue eating animals than to stop. Yet it may be that the unexamined meal is not worth eating.
Chapter 2
The Arrogant Eye and Animal Experimentation
What distinguishes man from woman is his access to representation, to cultural symbolization, the power of naming, in which he uses women, along with all the other silent animals, as symbols, as objects for representation.
—Susanne Kappeler
Animal defenders address the attitudes of a patriarchal culture toward the other animals; the people whose conduct they discuss are people who are constituting themselves as subjects in a culture suffused with human male cultural symbolization. Feminist critiques of science and of representation illuminate the issue of animal experimentation. Animal experimentation is part of a patriarchal culture in which science, like masculinity is “tough, rigorous, rational, impersonal, competitive, and unemotional.”1
John Berger first argued in “Why Look at Animals?” that we have transformed animals into spectacles, and so restricted our interactions with animals that they have disappeared from our lives as independent beings, diminished to representations of human fantasies regarding what is exotic, wild, or sentimental. In “Why Look at Women?” Susanne Kappeler shows how in this respect women are interchangeable with the other animals. Her insights into the way in which the dominant subjectivity in patriarchal culture—men’s—is constructed through objectifying others provide a framework for exploring the feminist implications of the oppression of other animals. In particular, the rituals associated with the vivisection of the other animals and animal experimentation reveal a fundamental way in which twentieth-century patriarchal culture looks at animals. Within patriarchal culture, constituting oneself as a subject involves having an object who is looked at. By its reliance on the object status of the other animals, nonhuman animal experimentation provides one means for achieving subjectivity as it is constructed within a racist patriarchy.
Problem 1: The Arrogant Eye:
The Human Male Gaze
In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/[human] male and passive/[human] female. The determining [human] male gaze projects its phantasy onto the [human] female figure which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness.
—Laura Mulvey2
The history of representation is the history of the [human] male gender representing itself to itself—the power of naming is men’s. Representation is not so much the means of representing an object through imitation (matching contents) as a means of self-representation through authorship: the expression of subjectivity. Culture, as we know it, is patriarchy’s self-image.
—Susanne Kappeler3
In patriarchal culture, gaze is an essential aspect of subjectivity—the act of looking is an aspect of being self-identified, active, assertive, knowing who one is. We are a visually oriented species, but the ways in which we look are socially constructed. One is not assertive in the dominant culture, which so values assertiveness, without being assertive over; one knows who one is by defining oneself against others. “Subjectivity as envisaged in patriarchal culture is attainable but through oppression and objectification: subject status equals supremacy over an other, not intersubjectivity. Only then does it produce the feeling of pleasure, the feeling of life. How can the subject be sure that he is high if no one is low, how can he know he is free if no one is bound?” writes Kappeler.4 This formula allows for no reciprocity, no “intersubjectivity” as Kappeler calls it. Being a subject requires an object; while our species is capable of a great range of behavior, the cultural relationship paradigmatic in the West is one of subject to object. This paradigmatic relationship is typified by what can be called the human male gaze, arising as it does within a patriarchal culture, and exemplified as it is by the way men look at women. In this paradigmatic gaze, it is what the object does for the gazer and what the gazer does with the object that is important; the object’s own intrinsic subjectivity is irrelevant in this relationship.
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