Comment: Reflections on Meat-Eaters, Vegetarians, and Vampires

ABSTRACT

In his comment on the special issue, Consumer and Consumed, the author notes that while much anthropological reflection has been devoted to the cultural rules and functional systems surrounding meat-eating, the ethnography of meat-eating has been sadly neglected. This ethnography is needed in order to reveal the complex negotiations that go into the actual daily practices of vegetarianism and the ways in which these are shaped by factors including household dynamics, issues of risk, trust and blame, emotions, taste, attitudes towards modernity, and by questions of engagement and distance between humans and animals. The comment concludes by highlighting the relationship between meat-eating and cannibalism, suggesting that the fascination in contemporary Euro-American popular culture with flesh-eating and blood-sucking represents a societal preoccupation with the ethical/moral implications of contemporary eating practices.

KEYWORDS:

• Meat-eating
• vegetarianism
• cannibalism
• human-animal relations
• food and ethics

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Suspicions and reported cases of horse meat were soon being reported in British schools and supermarkets. For a summary of the ‘scandal’ see http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/feb/15/horsemeat-scandal-the-essential-guide?INTCMP=SRCH.

2. An exception is Willets (1997).

3. See the film Maharajah Burger (1998).

4. The fact that cattle are intermediaries on industrial dairy farms makes something unexpected, like the escape of six cows from their confinement into the streets of Omaha, where they were eventually shot and killed by police, such a categorically challenging incident (see Pachirat 2011: 1–3).

5. Here my analysis dovetails with Drummond's (1995) suggestive discussion of the popularity of the movie Jaws as a kind of submerged backlash to the ecological movement of the 1960s and 1970s, in a nutshell, if we have to care about animals and the environment, we also want to revel in a tale of justified killing of animals.

6. Sagan's book certainly contains many problematic evolutionary assumptions. However, I don't think this negates the persuasiveness of his evidence for the essentially ambivalent nature of cannibalism – both exo- and endo- – an ambivalence he traces to the ever-present mixture of aggression and affection surrounding the actual or symbolic act of eating others.

7. A concept drawn from Hegel.

8. Stanescu writes: ‘To respect the opacity of the other is not a refusal of relation, but rather grounds the relation as a guarantor of irreducible difference’ (2012: 46). My colleague Peter Wogan and I have addressed the question of ‘knowing the animal other’ as it is portrayed in the movie Jaws, and as an analogy for the dangers of anthropological attempts to know the human or cultural other (2009).

9. Though the cast of the tremendously popular ‘Walking Dead’ series apparently has been turning to vegetarianism, and very little meat is served on set. As a report in The Daily Mail noted ‘“After watching Walkers realistically look as though they are consuming bloody human flesh or seeing heads and other body parts sliced off, no one was touching the red meat or even chicken,” they said’ (Davison 2014).

10. A line from the first Twilight movie.

11. The quotes are from Saris (n.d.) who makes a complex argument that zombies represent a projection of our fears of our out-of-control addictions and consumer appetites.

12. See Sutton (1997); see also Siskind (1974: 90) in which in her description of the reluctant hunters of the Sharanahua of the Peruvian Amazon, Siskind notes the claim ‘We hunt because our women and children cry for meat’.