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. 115 6 T H E M E AT W E D O N ’ T E AT Th e di s c ou r s e s of obe s i t y a n d local foods examined in the previous two chapters reveal a series of anxieties over individual and national sovereignty stemming from the economic, technological, and political transformations of globalization. In particular, the debates reveal concerns about a powerlessness of individuals to control the shape of their lives and challenges to the institution of national sovereignty that ideally provides a level political representation and self-determination. Both offer routes to the kind of empowerment that is supposedly threatened by vast concentrations of wealth, and both, crucially, invoke a nostalgic version of lived space as a prerequisite for this kind of power. In this chapter, we turn to developments that upset yet another foundational concept of liberal politics: that of the human species. To examine this challenge, this chapter explores one of the most culturally and morally loaded practices surrounding the discourse of species: eating meat. Americans spend an estimated $142 billion per year on meat.1 Our relationship to this meat is clearly burdened with issues of culture and wealth, morality and civilization, as well as such sticky political issues as the meaning of rights and the ethics of owning living things. While it is probably beef (rather than apple pie) that is the quintessential American food, and while the rancher rivals the cowboy as the archetypical figure of American cultural identity, the meat industry has grown ever more controversial over the past few decades. Today, it is not uncommon to hear ethically motivated vegetarians describing the rearing and killing of billions of animals annually for food as “a crime of stupefying proportions ,”2 while the deforestation, water pollution, and methane emissions of industrial meat production have become increasingly prominent environmental concerns. Since meat consumption typically increases along 116 . T H E M E A T W E D O N ’ T E A T with wealth and industrialization, concerns about meat production can only be expected to rise along with the development of Asia and Africa.3 Beef, of course, is not the same as meat. Americans have established a relatively stable taxonomy describing which meats are appropriate to eat (cow, yes; horse, no; pig, yes; dog, no), and though this taxonomy of course varies across cultures, the mere idea of eating meat from human bodies has long evoked revulsion and been used as a symbol of absolute barbarism. While vegetarian theorists like Peter Singer generate controversy by suggesting a moral equivalence of eating cows or chickens and eating severely disabled humans,4 Americans remain obsessed with cannibalism—real (Jeffrey Dahmer), fictional (Hannibal Lecter), and allegorical (flesh-eating zombies and blood-drinking vampires saturating popular culture at the opening of the twenty-first century). While the near-universal prohibition against eating human flesh seems fairly unidimensional, the permissive and the restrictive discourses surrounding different kinds of meat each trade in a notion of “the human” that has come under increasing fire in recent years from various angles. From scientific discoveries about species and speciation, to biotechnological innovations like genetic engineering and medical enhancement, to “posthumanist” philosophy challenging narratives of both humanity and humanism, the lines separating the species have been revealed as more porous than previously thought. In this chapter, I argue that this crossing or blurring of species boundaries animates and complicates the debates about meat, rendering Americans confused and anxious about the assumptions and hierarchies that separate permissible from intolerable forms of meat. I show how some of the recent thinking about meat in academic and popular discourse demonstrates a pervasive anxiety about the status of humanity in contemporary politics. The distinction of humans from nonhumans proves essential to the architects of modern liberalism; it is central in the works of Descartes and Locke, and it is implied in the dominant approaches to property acquisition and human rights. Contemporary debates about cannibalism and vegetarianism, like earlier discussed debates about obesity and locality, evidence a crisis in the terms of liberal politics and, as in the cases of blurred national borders and a presumed erosion of individual responsibility, the borders establishing this order have been aggressively policed. As a result, and like the last chapter, I argue that this particular food discourse undermines the very categories we use to conceptualize politics and so increasingly turns to ethical—rather than political—claims. [3.133.79...

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