In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

12 Dining on Fido: Death, Identity, and the Aesthetic Dilemma of Eating Animals Glenn Kuehn My goal in this chapter is to present an old dilemma in a new context. While concerns about eating animals are not new by any means, the traditional concerns are overwhelmingly ethical in nature. I have very few strictly ethical concerns about eating animals, but I do have strong aesthetic concerns. Two of the categories in which they lie are identity and death. Identity in art is also nothing new. From the cave of Lascaux to Plato and Aristotle to contemporary mimetic arts, accuracy in resemblance is integral to many art genres. Likewise, death is a topic richly treated through a long history of still-life artistic representations .1 However, when we get to the topic of aesthetic pleasure and combine it with the daily question of eating, these two traditional aesthetically important issues make it hard for us to simply sit down and eat without discomfort . We do not appreciate identifying with what we eat and we do not want to think about death when we eat it. Dining on Fido is unimaginable for many people. However, this “horrifying” act is most commonly placed solely in an ethical context. That is, it is wrong, morally wrong, to eat a dog or cat or anything that can be seen as a pet. I do not deny that the ethical concerns are relevant, but I intend to show that the ethical is here driven by the aesthetic. Clearly, in the work of John Dewey, ethical and aesthetic issues are not strictly separable; and by examining the topic of eating I show that it is primarily our aesthetic and artistic impulses that keep us from putting Fido on a rotisserie—that is, such an act is distasteful before it is immoral . The Glory of the Supermarket The glory of going to Kroger, Schnucks, Winn-Dixie, the Wal-Mart Superstore, Whole Foods, or any other grocer to buy our food is that it is all laid out for us in a very organized, consistent, and (despite its deliberate organization ) disengaged manner. We pick out our foods at the supermarket as we pick out virtually any other consumer item, and we’re even given opportunities to taste them as samples, trying them on to see if they suit us. There is an interesting irony, however, in the manner in which food items are presented to us, and this manner is an aesthetic relationship to our potential diet. Vegetables are supposed to look like what they are when we buy them. Bell peppers, though varying in color (green, red, orange, yellow, or purple), should look like a bell pepper—shiny, roundish, not wrinkly. Potatoes need to look like potatoes; kiwis need to look like kiwis; avocados should be dark green (like an emerald); cantaloupes should be round and possess a surface that looks as if an artist has carved a million tiny grooves in it—and like a snow®ake no two are alike—and it should smell like the musty earth which gave it life. We hold it in our hands, tap it to hear the dense resonance, and say, “This is a good cantaloupe .” We do not do this with the items in those areas of the grocery store where animal ®esh is procured. We go to the butcher’s section and pick up “ground chuck,”which is wrapped in a 5-pound log and has a “Kroger”label on it. There is nothing to suggest that this was once a cow. We do the same with lamb, veal, and pork. We go to the butcher’s section and choose a pack of chicken pieces, but their presentation (and the fact that the parts perhaps came from eight different chickens) suggests no connection to an actual chicken (there is no head; it has no feathers or feet; the smell has been removed); its identity as an assemblage of poultry parts is lost in the presentation, and we easily put it in our cart. Nearby we also see a display of seafood—salmon, mackerel, cat¤sh, and the shrimp that have been deveined, deheaded, and often presteamed—“cleaned” and laid out as food for the taking. Unlike the vegetables, the meats are presented in a manner that is as far removed from their original states as possible: the meat does not look like what it was when it was living. There is another option in the seafood section: the...

Share