INHERIT THE WORLD, DEVOUR THE EARTH Representations of Western Meat Production and Consumption in Contemporary Fiction A Thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in English in the University of Canterbury. By Kirsty Helen Dunn College of Arts University of Canterbury 2015 TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS……………………………………………………………………………………………1 ABSTRACT………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..2 INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………………………………………………….4 CHAPTER ONE: Can I Take Your Order? Deconstructing and Destabilising the Species Hierarchy......................................................25 Speak No Evil: The Privileged Word and the Denial of Animal Subjectivity……………..30 Dictating Fate: The Power of Discourse………………………………………………………………...52 Humanimals: Zoomorphic Imagery and Metamorphoses as Agents of Disruption…..65 CHAPTER TWO: Animal Meat Machines and the Means to their End: Biotechnology, Factory Farming, and Industrialized Slaughter……………………………78 Genetic Modification and Cloning: Biotechnologies of the Dystopian Future…………..84 Factory “Farming”………………………………………………………………………………………………..97 The Slaughterhouse: Distance versus Entanglement……………………………………………106 CHAPTER THREE: The Ultimate Me(a)taphor: Cannibalism and the Consumable “Other”……………...120 Table Manners: Assessing the Boundaries of Civilization and Humanity………………127 Eating Each Other: Cannibalism and the Exertion of Power…………………………………136 CONCLUSION………………………………………………………………………………………………………...147 REFERENCES………………………………………………………………………………………………………...151 Inherit the World, Devour the Earth 1 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I could not have completed this thesis without the support, expertise, and understanding provided to me by my supervisors, Associate Professor Annie Potts and Associate Professor Philip Armstrong. I feel incredibly fortunate and grateful to have completed this research under their guidance. I would also like to thank my whanau – Brian, Shona, Sam, and Kate, Annette and Graeme White, and friends and fellow researchers Erin Harrington, Donelle Gadenne, Sorcia Forgan, and Jessica Langbridge for their encouragement and advice. Thanks also to Grandma Dunn and her inspirational “Winners Wall”, and to Ernest for the much needed cuddles and entertainment. I am also grateful to the University of Canterbury for providing me with a scholarship to undertake this project. Finally, to my partner Sam: thank you for your patience and enthusiasm, and for encouraging me every step of the way. You are the best. Ngā mihi nui kia koutou. Inherit the World, Devour the Earth 2 ABSTRACT A quick survey of reality television offerings, news articles, and advertisements are enough to show the ubiquity of meat on the screens and in the diets, homes, and psyches of many Western consumers. However, the animals that are reared, slaughtered, and packaged into meat products, and the industrialized processes that they undergo in order to transform them from animal subjects to consumable objects, are, for the most part, missing from these types of media fodder. In this thesis, I contend that these absent animals, the processes they encounter, and the discourses used in order to perpetuate Western meat production and consumption can be found in three contemporary novels: Meat (Joseph D’Lacey 2008), Cloud Atlas (David Mitchell 2004), and Under the Skin (Michel Faber 2000). As multi-faceted cultural texts, fictional narratives allow for the exploration of the ambivalent and, at times, contradictory relationship between humans and animals, and the many issues that arise as a result of the majority’s choice to consume certain animal species. Fictional works provide readers and audiences with a critical distance, or a means by which the usually invisible can be rendered visible and they thereby provide an avenue for reflection on aspects of daily life that have become entrenched and, consequently, remain unseen and rarely challenged. The continuing prominence of meat in Western diets and the discourses harnessed to reinforce the status quo; our relationship to the nonhuman animals from which this meat derives; the issues surrounding its production on the paddock, in the laboratory, and behind closed doors in the factory farm and slaughterhouse; the effect of meat consumption on interpersonal relationships, human and “animal” health and the environment, and the metaphorical Inherit the World, Devour the Earth 3 and symbolic value of meat might be hard to find in mainstream advertisements, prime-time news bulletins, and reality television, but they are not excluded from the fictional narrative arena. Through their various representations of the human-animal divide, biotechnologies, factory farming and slaughterhouse processes, and their portrayals of anthropophagy, the novels I have selected are a provocative means of bringing to light the speciesist ideologies and discourses that perpetuate industrialized Western meat production and consumption. I contend that these fictional representations can be read as subversive challenges to the meat-centric status quo, and are more informative and interrogative than the smorgasbord of “reality” television and advertisements that prompted my research. Inherit the World, Devour the Earth 4 - Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1981 [1865], p.28). Inherit the World, Devour the Earth 5 INTRODUCTION The very domesticity of flesh eating is what makes it interesting. It is almost invisible in its power, but unthought anthropocentrism is more significant and more powerful than any dominion that has to be constantly defended, and it is for this reason that meat is important. - Erica Fudge, “Saying Nothing Concerning the Same: On Dominion, Purity, and Meat in Early Modern England” (2004, p.70) A simple trick from the backyard astronomer: if you are having trouble seeing something, look slightly away from it. The most light-sensitive parts of our eyes (those that we need to see dim objects) are on the edges of the region we normally use for focussing. - Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals (2009, p.29) A selection of recent broadcasts on New Zealand television screens: A bearded man stands at a barbecue while a voiceover pitches the tastiness of New Zealand grown and processed pork; a MasterChef competitor deems chicken to be a “ladies” meat, whilst a vegetarian contestant is ridiculed for her tearful response at having to decapitate a duck; three New Zealand sportswomen dubbed the “Iron Maidens” promote the benefits of regular red meat consumption; famed chef Jamie Oliver enthusiastically demonstrates the recipe for a vegetarian “happy cow” burger; a group of people with Inherit the World, Devour the Earth 6 the surname “Chicken” attest to the tastiness of McDonald’s chicken-meat products; a “true blue kiwi” farmer is juxtaposed against fine dining Europeans in an advertisement for “home-grown” lamb, and various news articles depict container-loads of New Zealand meat awaiting customs clearance in China, the European “tainted” horse meat saga, and updates regarding the race to produce in vitro meat in order to win PETA’s million dollar award. 1 Whilst the examples above might constitute a relatively small sample of the visual feast presented to consumers on a daily basis, one thing is, nevertheless, made abundantly clear: meat is ubiquitous in the diets, households, screens, and psyches of the Western majority. It can be easy to dismiss these representations as trivial pieces of the patchwork fabric of daily television programming, or as background sound amidst the white noise emanating from the various screens that tend to dominate our lives. So pervasive are these images in our environment, it is simply taken for granted that the production and consumption of meat is both “normal” and “natural”. However, these (and other) naturalized elements of “daily life” are also “ideologically imbued proclamations of regnant views on human nature and the social order” (Finkelstein 211) and it is for this reason that they should be considered closely. So-called “normal” or “everyday” behaviours and beliefs “must be questioned” writes anthropologist Nick Fiddes in his landmark text Meat: A Natural Symbol, “since what seems natural fact to us [...] is exposed as mere cultural orthodoxy when set against the range of beliefs and practices of other societies and in history...” (1). 1 In 2008, PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) offered a one million dollar reward to the first person(s) able to grow commercially viable, laboratory grown chicken meat by 2012. (Bartholet, Jeffrey “Inside the Meat Lab” Scientific American 30:6 (2011): p.68) Inherit the World, Devour the Earth 7 Scapp and Seitz in Eating Culture contend that the act of eating anything is particularly significant, due to its embodiment of “dramatic philosophical conundrums” and “the puzzling divisions and linkages between culture and nature as well as those between appearance and reality” (1). Others have also noted that for many Western citizens, the consumption of food has been more than simply a means of gaining physical sustenance and nutrition for some time now. A large proportion of Westerners “devote more time, money and attention to food than is needed to stay alive, or even to stay healthy and active” (Telfer 24). We also have a “strong impulse to do what others around us are doing” (Foer 31) when it comes to food; or, as Fiddes writes, when we eat “we feed not only our appetite but our desire to belong” (34). Therefore, both our eating practices