Our relationship with meat and animal death has profoundly changed just in the last 50 years. Both the animal and the meat are the Other now, strangers to us, nameless, voiceless, faceless. Consider this: The phrase “human meat” is one that instantly brings up revulsion. It is almost tautological. For humans, we exclusively talk about flesh. Human meat is only a phrase a cannibal would use, or a Comedian. Meat is for eating exclusively, and human are not be eaten by anyone. Not other humans certainly, but also not predators. In the 21st century almost no human being feels like prey anymore. We no longer even think of ourselves as animals, nor as prey, nor as part of any other food chain. We consume everything. We’ve built our own chain, we produceand reproduce it. There is no wildlife that is threatening city-dewlling humans, infact it is us who have succesfully colonized the wildlife into the cities, as we constalty grow and incorporate every bit of unclaimed territory with houses, roads, malls, chain restaurants, parking spaces etc.: Foxes roaming around Berlin, Raccoons living off of trash. Safe for the ocasional poisonous spider and snake, or a roaming mountain lion, animals have been essentially neutered in their status as predators. The few animals that do pose a significant threat to humans are not predators in any way, they’re Mosquitos, TseTse Flies, infected bites from Rats and Dogs, Tapeworms and foodborne parasites. Wild cats are only relevant insofar as they kill lifestock, hogs only as they damage farms. Big game hunters taking down tigers in India that threaten villages seems like a vignette in history, a long past, at least for us in the first world, with industrialized meat production and neatly plastic encased, perfectly unnatural chicken breats. The supermarket has done a brilliant psychological trick: The animals flesh is so far removed from anything resembling nature, it doesn’t remind us at all of the animals death. While in some butcheries you might find something resembling a carcass, or at least a head, a whole leg, a heart, an entire chicken then perhaps you’ll be reminded of what you’re actually taking home, in the supermarket it’s merely one product among thousands. One might find a goat head lying in the display of a halal butchery unpleasant, even distateful, because it reminds us that with our purchase we are the authors of the death, the slaughtering. I for my part think it’s good to be remembered. In the supermarket, removed from its body, the chicken breasts has lost all of its worth and its dignity. It is so worthless, in fact, that people, even this very author, occasionally buy meat and end up throwing it away unused. It’s not about eating meat, it never was. It’s about buying meat. Whether you eat it or not is absolutely irrelevant. Your purchase is what fuels the industry, is what keeps breeding and slaughtering going.
My grandpa used to buy pigs heads on sale to turn a Mark and make use of the whole animal. He turned his head at wasting food, both in a good and a bad way. There was probably no part of an animals that wasn’t food to him. On the other hand, he went so far as to scrape off mold in order not to throw anything away. Not all food habits of old are good and healthy, but some really should come back. When small scale animal husbandry was still commonplace in Europe farmers would have quite the intimate relationship with their animals. One czech refugee in Germany told me that an acquaintance of hers was crushed having to leave his animals behind, others she had heart off were driven to suicide. Slaughter was not something distant, but something that was witnessed actively or passively by everyone. People were conscious, many probably even sad, when an animal was killed. For those people, at least I reckon, it would’ve been unthinkable to throw away any meat, same for feathers, furs, or anything really, left by the animal that they often lived with.
There is a light that goes out every time you get a prepackaged chicken breast. It really does matter. The chicken in the factory does not have a name. It doesn’t even get looked at, noticed. It doesn’t exist as an individual, as an animal, as a being even, it’s a small-scale meat production unit in an automated genocide machinery fulfilling it’s growth quota, providing health reports, being measured in any and every way and suffering inconceivably in a purgatory of constant death and rebirth. There’s a reason they’re kept behind doors, often cut off even from cities and villages, not because of PETA photographers, but because of the incredible stench of misery and death, because we cannot both actively think about industrial scale meat production and tolerating it in good will. We have to absolutely be in denial every time we shop. Otherwise we’d be pathological, we’d be the sadist, because our actions are directly enabling all of this suffering for entirely selfish reasons. We have to think of the animal neither as predator, nor as livestock, but only in three categories.
First, the animal in the global zoo. Wildlife, especially threatened wildlife, only exists because we take active measurements to preserve them. That is a good thing, but it speaks volumes about the state of our world: Everything belongs to us, every inch, iota, every animal, every plant. There is no wildlife. Poachers are driven off, land is measured, lines are drawn in the sand, animals are micropchipped and tracked, their mating practices and their stock monitored, they’re protected by invisible walls, natural reserves, Naturschutzgebiet, laws put in place. It’s not their land. They’re tolerated, observed, shown off. In short, they’re part of the global zoo. It is only on our behalf that they may even exist. Of course were it not for those laws and efforts, I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that they’d be erased in the blink of an eye, or like our friends the fox and the raccoon, driven to live among humans, no longer wildlife but pests. That is what we call them.
Second, the animal as a pet. While that might be a stretch, people in the past sometimes used to do both: hold animals as pets yet still eat them when they get old. If not the farmers themselves, then their wives or kids. Surely that wasn’t mostly the case, but there is no doubt that most small scale farmers did feel some affection towards their animals. For us today the thought of eating a pet is not just horrible, it’s utterly absurd. Not only do we not have any food insecurity in the “first world”, but we think of animals as family members now. The family dog does not consist of meat, he consists of flesh. He is the opposite of a pest, he is appreciated and loved. The fact that buying pets, especially specifically bred ones, is still an entirely selfish act fueling a huge industry that also creates suffering is something that rarely comes to mind when people consider a pet. Similiar as to eating meat, we do know for a fact that helping an animal from the shelter is the more moral thing to do, but thanks to the pet store or professional breeders our purchase is entirely removed of any suffering that might have gone on, nevermind the thousands of snake babies that had to die so some oil prince could buy a boa with a very unique pattern.
Third, the animal as meat. In the industrial, packaged form meat is no longer considered in any way to be an animal. It’s ludacris from someone not to be able to tell apart a Chicken and a Pig, but telling the difference between cut chicken breast and cut pork loin, beef or pork mince, readily-pulled crab meat and surimi, halibut or tilapia filet, is a whole different ordeal. The point is that meat is just a product as any other, like a chocolate bar, a piece of bread, a beer. There is no apparent suffering nor identity attached to it. Often we are not even told where the animals live, or in what conditions. It is of course in best interest to have the consumer think as little as possible. Meat is no longer the flesh of a living being, it’s a commodity as any other. With every tiny progression, a semblance of resemblance is torn away. First, the animal is sold readily plucked, organs removed. Next, it is sold not in its original form, but seperated into ready parts, pre-cut. Then, it is stripped of everything undesirable: bones, veins, fat, tissue. We arrive at the chicken breast, a mere blob, a hideous disfigurement, a mass of proteins and fat, anything but an animal. And of course, it won’t stop there. Supermarkets now readily provide you with pre-cut, pre-spiced, pre-cooked, pre-packaged chicken breats strips (TM) so you don’t even have to engage the actual raw meat. It’s not merely to take time away from consumers with a busy schedule, it is to take the animal out of the meat.
We are human, and we are made of flesh and bones. We pump blood, and we bleed when we hurt ourselves. The factory farmed animal is no longer made out of flesh. Its purpose, its parents and its inheritors are the meat industry. They’re not born, they’re calculated, allocated, their consciousness is a temporary byproduct of their body, not the other way around. And their body is the meat factory, the pretri dish. A million Kaspar Hauser starved not just of free movement, reproductive freedom, humane conditions, but even from experience itself, of the sun and the stars, of wind, of the seasons, of real engagement of conflict, of any form of development, besides producing meat. Their only experience being that of constant torture at the hands of their parents., the producers that have both given and simultaneously taken their lives. Though I try to do my best with my consumption, lately I’ve been disgusting with myself for eating, preparing, shopping meat. I suppose that is a good thing, because outrage is the only sane answer. They’re trying to take that away from us, and we should cherish it.
SCATTERED THOTS 