Does knowing where your food comes from suddenly render those choices ethical? Consider the logic here, that is, that we must perform and/or witness firsthand rituals of violence and killing — rather than show mercy and restraint — for people to understand why violence and killing is bad. Why, I wonder, is this not true in the case of atrocities and violations committed against human beings? Can we not look at grainy video footage of past atrocities and from this see the horror and suffering and appropriately conclude that such acts are utterly depraved? Do we actually need a live demonstration of animals crying out and thrashing in agony as their necks are slit to convince people of the reality of their suffering? And to carry this idea to its logical conclusion, how many animals would need to be sacrificed to educate a desensitized human population into recognizing just how awful slaughter is? Would it not in fact become a “factory” model in order to reach enough of our population and isn’t that factory mentality precisely what the so called locavore, sustainable food movement so strongly claims to oppose? As Professor John Sanbonmatsu writes, “In terms of ‘humane meat,’ as I said, the entire discourse reinvigorates speciesism as a mode of domination, by providing ideological cover for the underlying principle of domination and violence, which it utterly fails to examine. In this sense, the sustainable meat and locavore movements can be seen as a rearguard action by the intelligentsia and Western middle class to secure their right to appropriate the bodies of other beings, in the face of the animal rights critique.”
Posted on: Thu, 18 Dec 2014 17:31:02 +0000
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