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The New Visibility of Slaughter in Popular Gastronomy 2 The New Visibility of Slaughter in Popular Gastronomy A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in Cultural Studies in the University of Canterbury by Jovian Parry University of Canterbury 2010 TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ..........................................................................2 ABSTRACT................................................................................................3 INTRODUCTION......................................................................................4 CHAPTER ONE: MYTH.........................................................................10 “We mustn't be sentimental” .................................................................13 Policing the divide ................................................................................17 “You have to face reality after a while”..................................................19 “I think I was more stressed than the sheep!”.........................................23 Sacrifice and redemption.......................................................................26 Myth, language and moral relevancy .....................................................32 Conclusion............................................................................................36 CHAPTER TWO: TASTE.......................................................................40 Double commodity fetishism.................................................................43 The anatomy of meat.............................................................................47 The cultural capital of offal ...................................................................50 Distinction and transgression.................................................................56 The soul mixed in with the flesh............................................................63 “Happy animals make the tastiest meat” ................................................67 Conclusion............................................................................................69 CHAPTER THREE: GENDER ...............................................................73 The feminization of farmed animals in cooking shows...........................74 Womanish pity, childish sentiment ........................................................77 The machismo of slaughter....................................................................79 Meat and masculinities..........................................................................83 Dominance and empowerment ..............................................................85 Conclusion............................................................................................91 CHAPTER FOUR: NATURE..................................................................93 Rural nostalgia and New Carnivorism....................................................94 Slaughter as a secular epiphany ...........................................................101 Nature, human nature, and meat ..........................................................107 Conclusion..........................................................................................115 CHAPTER FIVE: BACKLASH ............................................................117 Backlash theory ..................................................................................119 The New Carnivore backlash...............................................................122 The convolutions of backlash ..............................................................128 ‘Ethical meat’ and the redundancy of vegetarianism.............................132 Puritanism, dogmatism, and abstinence................................................136 Unfashionable, outdated and just plain rude.........................................140 Conclusion..........................................................................................143 CONCLUSION.......................................................................................146 REFERENCES.......................................................................................152 The New Visibility of Slaughter in Popular Gastronomy 2 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to sincerely thank Drs. Annie Potts and Philip Armstrong for all their assistance, encouragement, and guidance in the preparation of this manuscript. I would also like to thank Jonathan O’Brien for his tireless proofreading efforts. The New Visibility of Slaughter in Popular Gastronomy 3 ABSTRACT Animal slaughter has recently become highly visible in popular food media. This thesis interrogates the myths, assumptions and ideologies underlying this so-called New Carnivore movement, through critical analysis of a range of popular gastronomic texts. Socially-constructed ideas about ‘reality’, ‘sentimentality’, ‘sacrifice’, and ‘redemption’ are intimately implicated in the process of animal slaughter, as are the notions of ‘good taste’ and social distinction. The domination of animals, demonstrated through the slaughter, butchery, and consumption of nonhuman bodies, is held to be an integral component in the performance of gender, as well as a means of reconnecting, via a kind of secular epiphany, with ‘Nature’ at its most authentic. As a hostile backlash against the social progress made by the animal advocacy and vegetarian movements, New Carnivorism denigrates vegetarianism and veganism as outdated, unfashionable, unnatural, puritanical and rude. Although these texts’ potential to inspire farmed animal welfare reform should not be ignored, New Carnivorism ultimately serves to naturalize, justify and promote the continued consumption of meat, and the continued exploitation of nonhuman animals, in Western societies. The New Visibility of Slaughter in Popular Gastronomy 4 INTRODUCTION I met my meat, looked it in the eye, patted it on the head, even kissed it on the nose now and then. - Catherine Friend, The compassionate carnivore (2008, p. 9) In the first decade of the new millennium, animal slaughter no longer seems a taboo topic for meat eating urbanites; indeed, in contemporary food media, killing animals is positively en vogue. Celebrity chefs slit chickens’ throats in front of live studio audiences (Lazenby & Van Someren, 2008), journalists pen eloquent treatises on how to embrace slaughter as a loving and respectful act (Pollan, 2006a), and gastronomes wax lyrical about the superior flavour of meat with a back-story (Bourette, 2008). According to the editors of the recently launched “journal of meat culture” Meatpaper, we are now in the midst of “a full-blown fleischgeist” – an era characterized by “a growing cultural trend of meat consciousness”, of which the new visibility of slaughter is central (Wizansky & Standen, 2007: no pagination). Dubbed the “New Carnivore” movement by media commentators (Hanes, 2008; Soller, 2009), these loosely connected “gastro- philosophical treatises” (Bourette, 2008, p. 36) strive to present animals’ becoming meat as a humane, benevolent, and wholly ‘natural’ process. In doing so, they soothe the anxiety that came to characterise the discourse surrounding meat production in the nineteen-eighties and -nineties, when spiralling food scares, well-publicized health risks and increasing popular awareness of the environmental and ethical problems associated with industrial animal agriculture all combined to undermine the traditional prestige of animal flesh in Western societies (Fiddes, 1991). The New Visibility of Slaughter in Popular Gastronomy 5 The New Carnivore movement also responds to the popular criticism that urban meat eaters are fundamentally disconnected from the realities of meat production, and wilfully ignorant of the death necessary to produce the meat on their plates. This idea – that modern industrial agriculture has created a fundamental disconnection between humans and the ‘natural’ world – is a recurring trope in recent gastronomy (Strong, 2006, p. 38). In New Zealand back-to-the-land reality TV show Off the radar (Andrews, 2007, 2008), for example, the protagonist raises and slaughters several animals in order to remedy what he diagnoses as a societal-wide “essential disconnect” between the production and consumption of meat (Radar & Andrews, 2007b). In the magazine article “Killing a lamb called dinner” (1999), Kimberly French similarly laments that modern Western consumers are “cut off from the process of where are food comes from” (p. 6), particularly meat. In popular book The shameless carnivore, Scott Gold (2008) argues that Western consumers “have all become children of the supermarket”, with pieces of animal flesh “presented to us in beautiful packaging that has been cleverly and calculatedly designed by experts in marketing and food packaging to be as appealing as possible”, thus “sever[ing] all connections with [meat’s] animal history” (p. 267). Similarly, in her gastro-memoir Meat: A love story Susan Bourette (2008) contends that modern methods of meat production and presentation have erased all traces of the animal from the final product: “I doubt there are many among us who have ever laid eyes on meat that hasn’t already been cleaved into individual portions and shrink-wrapped,” she declares. “For some it may even come as a shock: Meat comes from animals!” (p. 4). This was certainly the case for Catherine Friend, author of the award-winning The compassionate carnivore (2008): “Meat came from Styrofoam trays covered in cellophane, all traces of skin and blood and guts removed, so I could
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