Paula Arcari - Making Sense of ‘Food’ Animals: A Critical Exploration of the Persistence of ‘Meat’

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I want to begin by openly owning the assumptions and values I bring to this research and declaring it to be an attempt at a moral science, a critical enquiry into the everyday conditions of domination for the purposes of altering them (Seidman 1998: 329). With this declaration, I am acknowledging that my theoretical and methodological choices are themselves rhetoricencoding certain assumptions and values about the social world (Agger 1991: 114). Accounting for myself in this way, making explicit my a priori knowledge, beliefs, and biases, is an attempt at reflexive research as described by Cutcliffe (2003). This reflexivity is not a post-analysis addition to the book, but was part of the entire research process, as will become apparent. Hence, while included here as a point of reference for the reader, a constant awareness of my own personal and contextual orientation has informed every phase of this research, allowing me to ponder the ways in which who [I am] may both assist and hinder the process of co-constructing meanings (Berger 2014: 221).

Meat does not occupy a prominent position in my personal foodscape. I am vegan for all the reasons associated with veganism as an intersectional and therefore necessarily political movement and not simply a diet. These reasons include the materialisation of animal bodies, the aggregation and de-personalisation of living beings, the othering and oppression of animals based on species, their use as a human resource, the intersection of issues of race and gender in our (mis-)use of animals, and many others (Adams 2010 [1990]; Cudworth 2011; Fiddes 1991; Harper 2011; Nibert 2013). My position is best summed up by the main character in Emma Geens 2016 novel, The Many Selves of Katherine North , who observes, other subjectivities arent a consumer item. Their habitats arent playgrounds (190).

I do not consider meat to be an essential or even necessary part of the human diet. Whole cultures have existed for generations without it. However, many, and indeed the majority of people, do consider it both essential and necessary. Putting aside arguments relating to the (un)availability of alternatives, which pertain to broader mechanisms of distribution and access rather than necessity, my personal view is that a plant-based diet is a viable proposition for the global population. Given the breadth of scholarly work covering animal rights, critical animal studies, veganism, and notions of the next (nonhuman) social contract (Gabardi 2017), literary explorations that challenge the edibility of nonhuman animals (e.g. Vint 2010; Atwood 1998, 2004), and filmic endeavours that draw attention to our current treatment of animals (e.g. Noah 2014; Okja 2017; Carnage 2017), I am certainly not isolated in this view.

A critical approach to animal studies is gaining traction across multiple social science and humanities disciplines including history, geography, anthropology, literature, the creative arts, cultural studies, sociology, development studies, political science, law, criminology, environmental sciences, and many more. These approaches, and the thinking they reflect, antecede the non-, post- and more-than-human turns across the social sciences, which broadly (cl)aim to decentre humans and also, in some cases, to fundamentally reshape human relations with living nonhuman others. They also go further in their de-centring by extending it across all domains of social life, challenging the most spurious conceptions of human-animal entanglements, including, but not limited to, those where animals are used for food, entertainment, education, sport, service, research, and fashion. Such human-animal relations are characterised, above all, by commodity and exchange values that are fundamentally human-centric.