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Meet should be an occasional luxury, not something we have three times a day to hide the crappy quality of our other food.
one thing that is difficult in dealing with this type of excessive consumer behaviour (heavy meat consumption, SUVs, vulgarisation of air travel, etc) is that in remonstrating with excess we run into deep resistance -- because excess is a signifier of wealth and power and therefore people like excessive behaviours. excess is inherently desirable and fun. so of course it's uphill work critiquing excess, even civilisation-threatening excess, because the critic is automatically stuck with being Anti-Fun.
excessive behaviours that are autopathic as well, are also excellent display mechanisms for youthful rebelliousness and masculine bravado, or (oh boy) both combined (thus the flippant celebration of hard liquor, cigarettes and red meat -- high risk, "daredevil," autopathic habits). so we end up struggling with all kinds of desires and motivations, issues of ranking and self-image and competitiveness, that have nothing to do with actual food or the enjoyment of food.
for many people "cutting back on meat" is a signifier of poverty (or wartime rationing which they swore they would never have to endure again). eating lots of meat every day gives a feeling of wealth, security, "good times," happiness, which all the facts and figures in the world don't make much of a dent in... even if the meat is lousy, tasteless, water-injected, doped with hormones, what have you, it still tickles ancient receptors in the Western wheat/beef cultural mindset. and eating grotesque amounts of meat, now as in mediaeval times, is a signifier of both wealth and "hearty macho appetite", so we run into self-concepts of manliness and (inevitably) deep gender terror (vegetarians are sissies, real men eat meat and potatoes and hate vegetables, "who do you think you are, my mother," and so on).
all these gender and ranking associations make it very difficult to have rational discussions about the practicality and sustainability of different dietary choices. in a way red meat consumption is (socially) a bit like rape or sexual harassment (prior, of course, to the incredibly enlightened times in which we now, ahem, are presumed to live); critiquing it causes defensiveness, embarrassment, and uneasy jocularity, followed by anger and accusations of spoilsportism or puritanism if the criticism becomes too loud or serious.
I do occasionally eat salmon, but it's usually line caught and local. The difference between theory and practise in practise ...
But what I do think we're seeing here is a bit of the friction that exists between the two wings of the modern left.
My own political sympathies hark back to the old pre-1968 industrialist social-democrat movement; you know, infrastructure, jobs and housing, and meat in every pot, and a big dollop of scepticism towards New-Agey emotionalism.
For this wing it's all about lifting the working classes into the affluent middle class, so they can turn right around and vote conservative ;) And if some virgin forest has to go to make that happen, tough cookies! Bitsofnews.com Giving you the latest bits.
it's all about lifting the working classes into the affluent middle class, so they can turn right around and vote conservative
strangely enough it was not a random rhetorical flourish, but anecdotal, based in personal experience... my life is long enough that I can remember when male professors routinely made rape jokes as part of lectures, when female employees were considered "troublemakers" if they reported sexual harassment or filed grievances, etc. I can remember what it was like trying to engage in dialogue with men who sincerely believed there was absolutely no such thing as rape or that if there was, it was the woman's fault and/or funny. [unless of course it was their own wife or daughter, in which case hanging was too good for the jerk, etc.]
so I remember the flavour and mood of those conversations, the "aww where's your sense of humour honey" and other "witty" comebacks and dismissals that covered up for, I think, a real sense of threat and disturbance at having deeply-rooted social norms challenged. and there are certain similarities with conversations I had slightly later in life, in restaurants or at parties, with meat-eating friends. sometimes they would engage in similar joshing and shuffling and sometimes anger or defensiveness if (when asked why I wasn't eating the meat dish) I would recite some of the statistics on meat production -- in the same earnestly informative way I would recite the stats on rape or domestic abuse (or fossil fuel depletion for that matter).
some information is not welcome, and perhaps we all have the same socially-acceptable mechanisms for deflecting or warding off unwelcome information, information that by tickling our conscience suggests to us that we should act or be or buy or consume differently from our comfortable habits. any "inconvenient fact" that tickles the conscience perhaps produces the social equivalent of a scratch or a sneeze, a quick irritated reflex to make the itch go away... The difference between theory and practise in practise ...
It underlines what I said in another comment, that this is a subject matter that for some borders on the religious, making anyone who differs, somehow immoral.
I truly hope I'm misunderstanding you here. Bitsofnews.com Giving you the latest bits.
what is interesting is that AGR personally, or his generation (I don't know his age so cannot say) or his educational or political demographic or whatever, has clearly internalised the idea that rape is very, very, terribly, seriously Bad -- and that therefore it is insane (or at least wildly over the top) to compare something so awful to the (relatively trivial) lifestyle question of eating meat or not. but what I was trying to convey was the experience of discussion with older men, from a different time and generational mindset, who found it quite ridiculous to think of rape as a very, very seriously Bad Thing -- to them it was a trivial or unimportant thing, some would even doubt that it was possible or ever happened at all ("did you ever try to thread a moving needle, har har har") ... and they were very resistant to being told that it was a Bad Thing and should be taken seriously. anyway, enough on that, it appears to be a red herring to a bull or some similarly dangerous mixed metaphor. let's stick to bikes and cars, it's an easier parallel.
the bluster and joking and "lighten up" and har-de-har response seemed to me very consistent regardless of the issue, and that seemed kind of interesting to me. I have had conversations with habitual car drivers who ask me why I ride a bike; and if I say it is "for my health" or "to save money" they are puzzled but accepting. but if I say it is because I don't like the private automobile transport model, if I mention the numbers of people killed each year by motorist inattention or incompetence, then about half the time I'll get a har-de-har response about painting the score on the car fender or getting extra points for hitting a blind nun on a crosswalk, that kind of thing. which I would call a defence mechanism against having the conscience tickled by unwanted information. when we say we do X because it seems immoral to do Y, then how can people who do Y avoid the feeling that some moral criticism has been laid at their door? and hence the defensiveness, as no one likes to be morally upbraided or preached at and (even implicitly) told to reform.
and yet how can agitators for social justice agitate, if not by saying that doing Y is harmful in some way and that X is a better alternative?
yes, the bike riding analogy really is far better. one could argue similarly that vegetarianism is purely a personal decision for better health or weight loss, which is "harmless" and doesn't arouse much reaction -- other than perhaps a warning about the health risks of not eating meat :-) but most vegans and vegetarians have motives that are both altruistic/political and personal. even a not-so-pure incidental meat consumer like me could argue that in fact, excessive meat consumption is a human rights issue and a very seriously Bad Thing, with capitals and boldface and sound effects; because of deforestation, because of the diversion of staple grains and pulses into meat animal fodder when billions of humans go unfed every day; because of drawdown of that most essential resource, fresh water; because of manure lagoons and the associated pollution; because of antibiotic misuse and the associated increased risk of pandemics and resistant bacteria... and so on and so on. even if we were to skip the animal-rights argument that "Meat is Murder" because we kill animals to get it, a human-rights argument could be (and I think has been) put forth in this thread that argues for the immorality of excessive meat consumption because of the illness or want it inflicts on contemporary peasants and our collective posterity.
thus there is inevitably a moralistic overtone to the critique of meat consumption, and I think this is why it can, if presented seriously, arouse similar resistance and deflection mechanisms to those that have accompanied previous reform or human rights efforts. it is different in that it is at present a secessionist movement -- a withdrawal from a perceived harmful norm, like teetotalism, rather than the imposition of a proscriptive norm, like Prohibition or bans on smoking in public places. but as with all the social-reform efforts I mention -- and this applies from Abolitionism on up -- an argument is being made that a state of affairs that seems perfectly normal and natural and right to a majority of people, is in fact not good for the polity on pragmatic grounds, and may be immoral on Kantian grounds as well. [now, please, just because I mentioned Abolitionism as another instance of social norm-challenging and uphill reform or justice work, don't be thinking I just said "eating meat is the same thing as owning slaves" :-)]
the cultural changes that sparked my interest (the same defensive/protective-of-status-quo response applying to different issues in different decades) are fascinating too in that they suggest the flexibility of culture as well as its tenacity. it is possible that by the time I am near death, the immorality of meat eating may have become as necessary a social constraint for the West as it is in densely populated, overgrazed and deforested Asian bioregions no longer capable of sustaining the wheat/beef habit. in a generation or so, depending on peak oil and climate outcomes, habitual meat-eating might be considered quaint -- or even disgusting -- reckless, or antisocial...? or it might become an even stronger, enviable marker of class and caste when fewer people can afford the habit; in which case movies about the gilded elite might focus lovingly on plates of roast beef in the way that they now lens-caress the eye candy of expensive cars, designer clothing and fancy entertainment centres in spacious view apartments and trophy homes :-) teenagers might hang out after the movie muttering, "Wow man, did you see the size of that charbroiled steak? I'd do just about anything to eat one of those, dood."
when you've lived long enough to see conventional social norms alter visibly, it's always fascinating to watch debates over what could be major departures in future social norms -- like the high-meat diet that currently seems so normal, and the low-meat or veggie alternative that still seems rather eccentric or "preachy" to most. The difference between theory and practise in practise ...
Which, of course, it once was. Roast meats served in the medieval hall. Louis XIV dining in public view, making himself ill on meat dish after meat dish after meat dish.
Hmmmm...
As for the role meat consumption plays regarding gender, you are right that it is a symbol of masculinity. I've seen it with my own eyes. But I think it is a symbolic ritual not meant to express masculine bravado in order to oppress women, but a sad longing for the animal inside them that they have killed in order to become civilized human beings. I think women experience a lot of things, menstruation, childbirth, that gives us that feeling of still being part of nature, of being wild somehow, of the ... gore. I think it is harder for men to find a safe way to tap into that part of their psyche. Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. -Voltaire
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