It is no longer news that the intensification of animal agriculture since the beginning of the twentieth century is a major contributor to our current moment of mass extinctions and climate crisis. The United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization’s landmark 2006 report “Livestock’s Long Shadow” points out that “the livestock sector is a major stressor on many ecosystems and on the planet as whole”, adding that animal agriculture “is one of the largest sources of greenhouse gases and one of the leading causal factors in the loss of biodiversity”. 1 These claims reached a wider audience in the second decade of the twenty-first century through their inclusion in the popular activist documentary Cowspiracy, which linked an environmentalist critique of the ecological impacts of animal agriculture to an explicitly vegan polemic against animal slaughter: “Each day, a person who eats a vegan diet saves 1100 gallons of water, 45 lb of grain, 30 sq ft of forested land, 20 lbs CO2 equivalent, and one animal’s life”. 2 Animal agriculture, and the meat economy in particular, has long been a site of representational, moral, and political contestation, but this recent highlighting of its environmental costs has added a sense of acute urgency to debates surrounding the future of meat production.
In this collection, we explore the value of literary-critical perspectives as a complement to the more familiar ethical and political analyses of what Annie Potts calls “meat culture”. 3 Our central premise is that the practices of our contemporary meat regime are shaped and reproduced as much by cultural and imaginative factors as by political contestation and moral reasoning. These cultural and imaginative factors are part of what Melanie Joy describes as “the invisible belief system [of] carnism ” (original emphasis) through which meat-eating is made to appear as “a given, the ‘natural’ thing to do, the way things always have been and always will be”. 4 Joy’s diagnosis is resonant of Nick Fiddes’ earlier identification of meat as a “natural symbol” that articulates “a principle of power over nature” and forms “an omnipresent thread” through Western culture. For Fiddes, this “is not an invisible thread, but we usually do not see it”. 5 Meat in both these influential accounts is simultaneously ubiquitous and obscured. In an era of gradually intensifying ecological consciousness, meat remains somewhat underdetermined; its consumption is tied to myths and developed through histories that are at best insufficiently interrogated. Consequently, literary and broader cultural studies are necessary in order to continue to unravel meat’s complexities, to examine its affective, aesthetic, and ideological components, and to imaginatively attend to the animal lives and deaths on which the meat industry is constructed. As such, developing the work of Fiddes, Joy and others, the volume centres on various versions of what we might call “meat critique”; the essays collected here all seek to unpack and to challenge dominant narratives of meat-eating and conceptions of animals as resources (albeit in different ways).
In order to better understand meat’s role in the current crisis, and the place of literary representation from 1900 to the present in responding to our contemporary meat culture, we begin by offering a brief historical overview of meat culture as it has developed in the last century in the affluent capitalist democracies of Europe and North America. Our analysis largely focuses on this particular geographic context because it is in these countries that the characteristic form of modern (intensive, industrialised) meat culture first took shape, though some of our chapters engage with the global dissemination of Euro-American animal agriculture. Clearly, there is significant work to be done to thoroughly engage with the literary representation of meat cultures’ development in national and regional contexts outside of the West and in earlier periods, but that work has not been attempted here. The history of meat cultures leads us towards a survey of some of the ethical and representational questions that emerge from taking meat seriously as both an index of socio-cultural change and a scene of violence. In turn, this survey allows us to articulate the ways in which the volume aims to contribute to work in animal studies and the more recent and more sharply delineated field of vegan studies.
The history of meat production from 1900 to the present closely maps on to broader processes of modernisation, with technological developments stimulating a twofold process of intensification: first of all an intensification of speed, as farmers and slaughterhouse workers reared, killed, and processed animals for the market at an ever-increasing pace; and secondly an astonishing scaling up of animal agribusiness, with more and more corpses produced each year to satisfy the modern consumer market’s growing appetite for animal flesh . Already by 1900, the productive forces that had been set in motion by the industrialisation of animal slaughter had achieved such levels of efficiency and velocity as to become valued as aesthetic spectacles, as Dominic A. Pacyga points out:
At the turn of the twentieth century, a reported five hundred thousand people visited [Chicago’s] Union Stock Yard annually. To modern sensibilities, to take a tour of the stockyard and the packing plants—even to bring small children to the hog kill—might seem repulsive, but through most of its history the Union Stockyard and the adjacent plants were major tourist attractions. Fascination with the new drew these visitors. 6
This “fascination with the new” perfectly captures the surprising connections between the animal body and modernity. It is not that the meat industry passively reflected modernity’s general impetus towards intensification and acceleration; it is rather the case that the techniques that would allow modern industrial production to increase its output were in fact devised in the slaughter business. Carol J. Adams is one of many writers who have noted the Chicago stockyard’s signal role in inspiring new methods of industrial production, principally through its influence on Henry Ford, who borrowed the stockyard’s strategies of spatial and temporal organisation for his own automobile factories: “Although Ford reversed the outcome of the process of slaughtering in that a product is created rather than fragmented on the assembly line, he contributed at the same time to the larger fragmentation of the individual’s work and productivity”. 7 The animal body, then, is the surface on which capitalist modernity first perfected many of its characteristic techniques of alienation and rationalised violence. The slaughterhouse’s strange conjugation of animal and working-class bodies shaped Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906), an exposé of the Chicago stockyards in which the author “blends the fate of human workers with that of meat animals” (and which is considered by Ted Geier in this volume in relation to Franz Kafka’s fiction). 8
For authors living through the great political and military crises of the first half of the century, these crises seemed similarly to invoke this easy slippage between industrial assembly and disassembly, lively body and inert corpse. As Vicki Tromanhauser’s chapter in this collection shows, the experience of the trenches in the First World War showed how the same techniques of modernity that had been elaborated in the slaughterhouse could be readily turned against human combatants. One of the effects of the war on the cultural imagination was a renewed awareness of how readily industrial technologies could shorten the distance between human and nonhuman animal life. The Vickers machine gun and its contemporary the captive bolt pistol both testified to modernity’s adeptness for slaughter, and as Tromanhauser shows, the many wounds produced by new military technologies forced an ...