Knock Knock

I am a feminist carnist.  Call it denial or stubbornness, but for the time I am no vegetarian. But in an attempt to strip my psychological disassociation with the reality of eating meat, I will first speak frankly about what eating “meat” means; it means that I eat animals; that I consume living beings; that i loaded the gun that shot animal dignity.  I am not holding the knife that castrates pigs; a poor migrant worker probably is.  But I consume them once they’re dead, which makes me a coward and totally emotionless, right? I have been sobered by the Earthlings alarm once before in my life, though I do not recall the triggering event.  (All that repression and denial, no doubt.)  At one point in my life, I even decided to forgo eating meat, if for all of one year. My father reminds me that it had something to do with not wanting to eat things with faces. In the last ten years, I must have forgotten that meat once had a face.  Or that humans killing humans was perhaps a more urgent call to action. 

I eat animals.  No room for sugar-coating. (Fin, I was almost 
going to show the before and after--live and dead--too.)
http://www.japannewbie.com/2006/08/20/fish-head-dinner/

But just to clarify, “Carnism is the belief system in which eating certain animals is considered ethical and appropriate.” (368)  I think self-proclaiming vegetarianism is just as much rooted in denial.  Just because one person makes a conscious choice not to eat animals, doesn’t at all change the reality of their slaughter.  I would much rather risk hypocrisy in organizing for animal rights while still mindfully eating meat, then call myself a vegetarian and doze off into a self-righteousness that I think is worse than carnism.   

Is Joy's call to awaken our compassionate selves
limited to our view of animals?  What if
in twenty years, we find that potatoes are
sentient beings as well?
We rip them out of the soil and boil them.
Vegetation cruelty?
http://www.toy-tma.com/vintage-toys/mr-potato-head-retrospective/

While I generally support Melanie Joy's attempt to awaken our conscience and exit the matrix, there is something odd about the way Melanie Joy constructs her argument around this definition of carnism.  For one, she often draws the parallel between eating meat and the dichotomy of either being ignorant or apathetic.  Perhaps she is missing the nuanced reality of carnism, which allows for people to be against the harvesting and cruelty of slaughter while advocating for a humane meat-packaging industry. And perhaps we can further question the status quo.  I have to disagree with Melanie Joy’s human-animal dichotomous narrative.  My uncle is a devout vegetarian.  Moreover, he believes that onions, turnips, and carrots (things that have roots in the soil, that were once living) are also beings we kill.  We have evolved to begin to embrace vegetarianism as a viable alternative to eating meat, but I wonder if out skeptical minds can go one step further.  Makes “certain beings” more ok to ingest than others (ie. a potato over a cow)?  Joy includes an excerpt from an interview that likely reflects her own thinking on vegetarianism: ‘Cooking a potato isn’t quite as bad, I think…It’s that certain connection that [the meat] is a piece of something, not just something that you got out of the ground.’ (385)  The point she was trying to make was that eating meat is counterintuitive for humans who are compassionate and who “feel for other sentient beings.” (369)  But perhaps consider, what constitutes a sentient being?  If we take her mention of social constructions of feminism as a parallel to the constructions of vegetarianism as against killing sentient beings, then perhaps we should consider what exactly constitutes acceptability in terms of the food chain?

I am obviously not a proponent of the cruel and unusual killing of the animals, though this does not mean that I oppose eating animals and plants for nourishment on the principle of diet.  I say this because I will not judge someone, for instance, who raises chicken, pigs, and cows on a farm for the purpose of providing milk, eggs, cheese, and meat.  (Turtle, I hear you, but raising a chicken and eating in mindfully and respectfully at a curry dinner seems a lot more humane to me than purchasing a fried up chicken from HEB.)This to me, is a mindful, connected, and relatively symbiotic relationship between human and animal, carnist and meat. We can find a balance with the animal/vegetative world, as other mammals have done in their environments.  We have abused our privileged position in our ecosystem.  Subsistence hunting for the purpose of feeding oneself was driven to a emotionless and utterly disconnected degree with animals today. 


“Carnism” is rooted in our essence on so many levels; and it finds expression in our societies in the form of violence against even our human brethren.  In an overwhelming moment, I crudely affirm that “this is some deep shit” we are exhuming.  For one, our social constructions of ethics affirm that humans are not to subject other humans to “cruel and unusual punishment.”  If we are not able to practice this ideology on other human beings (as evident in a continuous history of torture, genocide, and capital punishment), it doesn’t frankly surprise me that we have little compassion for our four-legged (or winged) fellow earthlings.  The simple act of self-proclaiming vegetarianism, to me, seems like it only masks the fundamental problem that enables humans to detach themselves from their sense of empathy.