THE BIOPOLITICS of BEEF CONSUMPTION Gwendolyn G. Blue a Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the University
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View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Carolina Digital Repository CONSUMING FLESH: THE BIOPOLITICS OF BEEF CONSUMPTION Gwendolyn G. Blue A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Communication Studies. Chapel Hill 2006 Approved by Advisor: Professor Lawrence Grossberg Reader: Professor Della Pollock Reader: Professor Robert Cox Reader: Professor Arturo Escobar Reader: Professor John Pickles 2006 Gwendolyn G. Blue ii ABSTRACT Gwendolyn G. Blue CONSUMING FLESH: THE BIOPOLITICS OF BEEF CONSUMPTION (Under the direction of Lawrence Grossberg) This dissertation explores contemporary cultural politics via the optic of beef consumption. Drawing from the work of Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Bruno Latour and Jacques Derrida, I examine the discursive conditions that both normalize and pathologize the consumption of animal flesh in terms of what resonates as natural, good or ethical consumption, what is considered marginal or fringe, and what is regarded as unethical, unnatural or unhealthy. My interest is how discourses surrounding the health and ethics of flesh consumption articulate with broader regulat ory regimes. I focus on beef because of its centrality in North American diets. Beef has recently become the target of health and environmental concerns, in part due to the emergence of vegetarianism as well as animal rights organizations that are calling contemporary agricultural and gastronomic practices into question. Beef is also a salient trade and political issue with recent outbreaks of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (mad cow disease), a fatal disease that can cross the species divide from cattle to humans via flesh consumption. I propose that underlying the contemporary politics of beef consumption are deeper struggles over the nature of the divide separating humans from animals as well as culture from nature. These boundaries are continuously co nstructed, maintained and challenged by our beliefs about and accepted practices of flesh consumption (who or what we deem acceptable to eat). They are bound up in the ways in which we categorize eating practices (herbivores, carnivores, vegetarians) and how we respond when these categories are iii transgressed. To conclude, I explore alternative ways of conceiving an ethics of flesh consumption, one that takes into account our often troubled relations with animal bodies. Following the work of Jacques Derrida, I propose that such an ethics be framed in terms hospitality and conviviality: we never eat entirely on our own because we are inherently in relation with other beings and situated within particular environments, both material and symbolic. This acknowledges and respects the boundaries imposed by the particularities, contingencies and contradictions so intimately bound up with our need to consume other bodies as well as other bodies that need to consume. iv DEDICATION In memory of my father Dale Layton Blue (1944 – 2004) v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This dissertation would not have been possible without the help, support and input of several individuals. I owe a debt of gratitude, in particular, to my advisor Lawrence Grossberg whose patience and guidance helped me work through many phases of incoherence as my ideas unfolded. I am also grateful to my committee members and their generous intellectual support. To my many teachers along the way: Barbara Herrnstein Smith for introducing me to the pleasures of co nstructivist science studies; Robert Cox and Arturo Escobar for showing me that it is possible to sustain a commitment to culture, politics and nature; Della Pollock for reminding me, continuously, of the importance of embodiment and play; John Pickles for helping me tackle Derrida’s work; and Lawrence Grossberg who has taught me the very important lesson that ideas matter – for politics, for culture and for good living. I am fortunate to have a supportive network of friends who helped me through this process. To Michelle Cohen for her critical insights, generous support and intellectual elegance. To Sam Mordka for teaching me the importance of good food and hospitality. To Eric Karchmer who patiently read through many drafts of this work, and provided valuable feedback. To Greg Seigel for many insightful suggestions and conversations. To April Henry, Stefanie Hofer, Sara Daily, Kim Korinek, and Fawn Pattison who all showed me how to gracefully weave intellectual pursuits with social activism. And, to my yoga community, for teaching me the importance of balance, centering and unconditional support. vi A special thanks also goes to my family who have given me the invaluable gift of appreciation for agriculture, rural life and, of course, food. I am eternal ly grateful to the support and kindness of my uncles Neil and Francis Blue. Finally, to my mother Clara Yagos who is consistently a role model, support system and friend. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter I INTRODUCTION AND PRELIMINARY CONCERNS ................................1 Fle sh consumption as an optic into cultural power ......................................4 Articulating beef consumption .....................................................................8 The politics of beef .......................................................................................18 The biopolitics of flesh consumption ...........................................................25 Cultural studies, post humanism and the question of the animal .................26 Dissertation outline.......................................................................................34 II THE FLESH OF THE NATION ......................................................................37 The harmonization of safety and trade .........................................................41 The agricultural sector and lobby groups.....................................................53 The genesis of Alberta beef ..........................................................................57 III THE CATEGORIZATION OF SPECIES VIA FLESH CONSUMPTION .....78 The vegetarian, the herbivore and the carnivore ..........................................86 The anthropological machine and carnophallogocentrism ...........................96 IV THE PERILS OF UN/NATURAL CONSUMPTION .....................................104 An epidemic of signification ........................................................................108 Mad cows and cannibals: a brief history ......................................................112 Unnatural eating practices ............................................................................119 Cannibalism as a state of exception .............................................................123 viii V ANIMAL RIGHT S: MORALIZING FLESH CONSUMPTION .....................135 Industrial agriculture and the ethical treatment of animals ..........................136 Meat is murder: criminalizing animal slaughter ...........................................144 Flesh consumption and class politics ...........................................................149 Agroterrorism, animal rights and ‘homeland’ security ................................157 VI BIEN MANGER: AN ETHICS OF CONSUMING FLESH ...........................162 Ethics and undecideability ............................................................................165 Conclusion....................................................................................................170 REFERENCES ......................................................................................................... 178 ix CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION AND PRELIMINARY CONCERNS This dissertation uses beef consumption as an optic or lens into contemporary cultural politics. It stems from two intriguing events. The first was my experience of becoming a vegetarian in the early 1990s. Although I returned to eating animal flesh, I have wondered why I framed my refusal to eat meat in terms of an identity category. Being vegetarian meant I not only changed my eating practices, I also transformed my identity. The second event was the emergence in the mid 1990s of a gruesome yet curiously mundane monster that surfaced within the public imaginary: the cannibal cow. Although it had never been encountered before, it immediately began circulating in a range of discourses, from television talk shows, to prizewinning journalism, to esteemed scientific journals. Almost overnight, the cannibal cow changed the face of global food politics and contemporary animal husbandry practices and, in its wake, left people horrified, bewildered and concerned about the contemporary state of our modern food system. The cannibal cow first appeared in 1996 after the British government announced that mad cow disease (bovine spongiform encephalopathy or BSE) could potentially spread to humans via the consumption of beef. This announcement turned a domestic agricultural issue into an international public health concern as British beef was exported to a number of countries. As the name suggests, spongiform encephalopathies literally eat away at the neurological tissues of animals. If humans contract the disease, it is almost always fatal. According to current understanding, cows contract BSE by eating meat or tissues from infected cattle or sheep. Humans who eat infected beef can develop a comparable disease, known as new variant Creutzfeld -Jacob Disease (vCJD).