I’ve been accused of anthropomorphizing animals back when I was vegan–though I maintain I never gave human qualities to any animals as I was far more interested in beastilizing. What is it that makes it so difficult to recognize animals as beings with emotions and intelligences of their own. Is it simply the fact that “serious” people do not deal in emotions?

The irony being that one of the effects of such serious discourse has been the decentering of humans within human discourse. If you or I believe in science then we have no ground to make animals into little instinctual automatons, after all we are animals too, and we certainly don’t enjoy envisioning ourselves as biological wind-up toys.

Even though when we drop the hubris we’re just one out of many varieties of sacks of geologic soup on this big clump of stardust.

P.S. Hopefully I’ll be writing something soon.

I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those that haunted Edgar Allen Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me…When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me.

Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man

I.

Most of the discussion of carnism carry Melanie Joy’s assertion that carnism is an invisible belief structure–that is that most carnists do not even know that carnism exists, or that they are proponents. The linchpin being that they do not realize that they have a choice.
I disagree with this thesis: carnism is not invisible, but subterranean. It resides beneath (Joy’s oft used preposition for describing the location) the surface of our actions, neither subconsciously or consciously, but foundationally.

Every carnist, in the capitalist center(s), knows that animal consumption is a choice. In fact, trained as we are as consumers, we have come to view everything as a choice at least between this or that. Every trip to the restaurant, every trip to the grocery store is presented as an exercise in our own autonomy and freedom of choice. (What may be invisible, or at least obscured, are the structural limitations which give the illusion of vastness of choice).

What the vegans who employ the term carnism are doing is not a simple enlightening. It is an unearthing; a far more tumultuous and violent process. It disrupts as it reveals, and it reveals nothing that was not already known: animal consumption is as much a choice as everything else.

II.

None would deny that they choose to eat meat. That choice is not invisible. What is obscured, for most, are the animals whose flesh become meat. And their invisibility resides not within the post-domestic reality of obfuscation (the hiding of abattoirs and “farms,” the night shippings, the glossy packaging, redistribution of idyllic farm imagery, &c), but like Ellison’s Invisible Man, the systemic structure (for the invisible man, racism, for invisible beasts, speciesism) causes others not to see them as they are.

This invisibility is even harder to cast away when the average carnist-consumer deals only with the product. Just as we can wear clothes made by underpaid invisible Bangladeshi hands so too is it easy to consume a burger made from an invisible steer. We know that he was a cow, but he is as much a specter as the Griggstown Cow.

III.

What the vegan use of carnism, as a term, unearths, is not the invisible or unknown, but a set of consumer choices under a post-domestic, capitalist, and speciesist system that supplies a product from invisible sources. What makes this unearthing tumultuous for the carnist is not the non-revelation that one makes a choice, but the appearance of a specter.

…[R]ight there beneath the lamplight in the deserted street, holding him in the collar with one hand, and opening the knife with my teeth—when it occurred to me that the man had not seen me, actually; that he, as far as he knew, was in the midst of a walking nightmare.

Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man

IV.

No, the utterance of carnism does not function as a magic word, an open sesame to the conscience of the carnist. Instead it is the one who unearths, who, just as she did before the discovery of the word carnism, serves as a medium for the ghost. Carnism-awareness advocacy, such as CAAN, is just a negative of consumption-based vegetarian advocacy.

In order to eat the flesh or excretions of a once-living being, we need to disconnect, psychologically and emotionally, from the truth of our experience. We need to “numb” our authentic thoughts and emotions, to block our awareness (i.e., we must think that we’re eating “meat,” rather than a dead animal) and our empathy for the animal who became our food – and awareness and empathy are integral to our sense of self.

There are a lot of assumptions about the phenomenological experience of flesh-eating. That is one way to eat meat. Another way is to actually relish the experience, to enjoy eating animal parts or excretions. Just as tantric texts call for the ecstatic consumption, and rejoining with death and excrement and the chaotic nature of the universe. But, I guess some of us prefer numb and ordered plates.

He starts by pointing out with:

I just learned the word carnist. It means me. Giving special names to nearly universal attributes is a tactic used by people seeking to undercut the “normal” status of a particular lifestyle; transgender people, to take a similar, not-unrelated example, call straight folk “cisgendered.”

Which is not exactly spot-on, because he ignores the powerful political and semiotic force of such words (as well as incorrectly equalizes straightness with cis-ness), but hey, Time used the word cisgendered even if in scare quotes.

He then goes on to say that he gets the points made by vegans, but that they are unanswerable. Which is untrue.

The piece then goes on to basically become a platform for Whole Foods, and wishy-washy welfarist poo-poo.

Then ends with:

I’m not under the illusion that these piecemeal efforts are especially effective, or that they require much sacrifice on my part. They’re not, and they don’t. But as with the amount of meat at a meal, something is better than nothing. Even a carnist can see that.

I’m not even sure anymore why I took the time for this cursory analysis on a decidedly boring carnist, but hey, its not everyday you see a self-proclaimed one.

Let us return to Aristotle, and choose an alternate avenue:

and Hesiod is right when he says, “First house and wife and an ox for the plough,” for the ox is the poor man’s slave.

An examination of the house is where I plan to lead us now. Aristotle does not mean just a building with walls and windows, and the implications we’ve inherited for oikos are greater still. From oikos we gain both economics and ecology, that is the structures that dictate our environment. So perhaps alterations in the environment itself, a new sort of oikos, can give some relief to the ox.

There have been a number of environments where the local conditions made the cattle valuable enough for their labor that their consumption became more rare. In many of these places a culture of dairy consumption developed where the wealthy could afford to consume their capital.* But these dairy cultures would develop complex systems where female animals (heifers, ewes, yak-heifers, etc) gained a third level of labor extraction, and the males tangentially, through their reproductive labor. It is not here, under yet more layers of exploited labor, that we will find the path of liberation.

If I may make such a leap, I’d like to look eastward, for it is here where alterations in the oikos allowed the development of a completely sort of dietary animal. And why not look towards another civilization? Octavio Paz, in Conjunctions and Disjunctions, leads us to look at history in terms of not just East and West, but also the potential for Indo-European and Sino-Asian (for the Indo-European systems inherited, as Georges Dumézil calls it a” tripartite ideology,” and Paz claims that the Chinese, along with Meso-America, developed a quadripartite system).

For our own purposes this division is useful not for the mytho-philological level, but rather for the material separation in that China, unlike Indo-European or Afro-Semitic civilizations, did not develop dairy cultures.

What China did develop was a soybean culture, and from this culture an object that has made it around the world and into supermarkets in far-flung corners, this object is of course tofu. The exact origin of tofu is uncertain, except that it probably arose sometime during the Han dynasty. The originator is popularly seen as Liu An, King of Hui-nan, who legend says also created soy milk for his ailing mother who missed the taste of soybean. Lore has it that Liu An through his alchemy discovered tofu. Contemporary sinologist also say that the Chinese may have learned of the means of creating tofu through contact with alien civilizations such as the Indians or Mongolians.

Regardless it is not the invention of tofu, but the oikos that allowed it to flourish, that we should examine. For tofu did flourish before Buddhism, with its disagreement with flesh-eating, arrived en force.

The oikos of China is intriguing in that by 1CE, the middle of the Han dynasties, there was an official population of nearly 60 million. That is depending on the estimates China contained 1/3 to almost 1/5 of the world’s population, and with a strong need to feed, at least the majority, of its subjects.** During this time the empire engaged in impressive irrigation projects and established the most impressive trade route of the ancient world. Without an industrial mode of production it would indeed be difficult to provide the daily protein requirements for 60 million in a good year, attach the uncertainty of nature (floods, droughts, etc) it is no surprise that the soybean rose to prominence (Liu An in his Taoist work, the Huai-nan Tzu, even describes the “meat shop owner’s bean soup” a soup made from soybeans for a man too poor to eat the flesh he sells).

Within the oikos of China technology made the flesh of the ox, if not unnecessary, then a luxury. Protein needs could be acquired without sacrificing the labor value of the ox. And these technological advances spread east and south evolving with local customs: the soy tempeh of Indonesia, which probably came from a fusion of tofu making and the process for tempe bangkrek made from coconut flesh (which according to B.J. Wood in Microbiology and Fermented Foods Vol. 2 has a high propensity for becoming toxic)***; to hpu of Mynamar made from chickpeas or split yellow peas; and the use of the byproduct of tofu production in Japan and Korea as okara.

It is the technological adaptations to specific oikoi that the master must make that allows for the ox to become free. For Han (and beyond) China it took the pressures of high population and a lack of an industrial system for resource-efficient flesh production.

It is truly unfortunate for the ox that we, in the center of the capitalist world, at the very moment we developed a plough with no need for an ox developed an equally sophisticated machine in the abattoir.

But we have not always had the wide selection of soy products in our grocery stores. The West has known about tofu since at least the 16th Century and American government documents mentioning it were common enough in the last two decades of the 19th. Can this sudden increase be attributed only to the development of antiseptic packaging? or is there something else besides the plough and the oikos? Can the oikos of China explain the spread of the soy culture to the rest of Eastern and Southeastern Asia or the development of seitan? Why can we buy veggie burgers at Burger King?

But mostly is the ox caught in a catch-22? So far we have looked at two bindings of the ox: it’s liberation from labor to be made meat, and its liberation from meat because the oikos demands its labor. So to where can we find the ox’s liberation.

* Cattle itself being derived from M.L. capitale, “property.” And these connections being common in the Indo-European world (pecuniary tracing back to PIE, peku, “cattle, flock.” Or the Welsh tlws, “jewel” cognate with Irish tlus “cattle.” Or the Old English feoh, “cattle, money.” etc, etc).

**The UN in 1999 placed the estimate at 300m worldwide, others have placed the estimate as low as 170m.

***10-20% estimate

****Images taken from a 19th Century US Federal Bureau of Commerce Consular Report displaying methods of tofu production.

*Also, I am a complete amateur sinologist, and I’d love information and/or corrections by anyone more read than I in the material history of China.*

So where do we look for the liberation of the ox?

The answer was already provided by Hesiod as quoted by Aristotle:

First house and wife and an ox for the plough[.]

That is we must look towards the plough. It is through the plough that the ox’s labor is extracted. For the ox to be freed, the plough shall be transformed for the master’s benefit. Aristotle points us towards this in his Politics: 

And so, in the arrangement of the family, a slave is a living possession, and property a number of such instruments; and the servant is himself an instrument which takes precedence of all other instruments. For if every instrument could accomplish its own work, obeying or anticipating the will of others, like the statues of Daedalus, or the tripods of Hephaestus, which, says the poet, ”of their own accord entered the assembly of the Gods;” if, in like manner, the shuttle would weave and the plectrum touch the lyre without a hand to guide them, chief workmen would not want servants, nor masters slaves.

Aristotle points us towards the future. When the instruments of production become efficient enough, ultimately to become instruments of action themselves, that is when the slave becomes free. The ox, in the master’s pursuit of ease of life, must detract productivity from the plough itself.

And is this not the way things appear when we look at history. No longer in the Global North (or the West, or however one would like to define it) do we find oxen ploughing the fields when tractors can can perform the same labor at a lower cost, nor do we find horses driving carriages (with the exception of romanticized carriage rides, a productivity that cannot be replaced by technology).

And so the ox is freed from the plough by the tractor, and the horse by the Model T. But oxen are not truly liberated–they have merely become steer. The instrument of action is reduced not only to an instrument of production (like a plough, or a hammer), but becomes the material that is worked. The body made product, the flesh made meat. And still the ox is trapped by the master.

Answer: Duh.

Question: Can one be a speciesist vegan?

Answer: Yep.

Question: Can one be an anti-speciesist carnist?

Answer:…

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From the Carnism Awareness & Action Network

Carnism is the invisible belief system, or ideology, that conditions people to eat (certain) animals. Carnism is essentially the opposite of vegetarianism or veganism[.]

So carnism is an ideology of the {propriety, acceptability, chillness} of consuming animals (and their products); just as vegetarianism (or veganism) is an ideology of the {impropriety, unacceptability, uncoolness} of consuming animals (and their products).

But we know that not all vegetarians or vegans are anti-speciesist. In fact there is not one veganism or one vegetarianism, but a plethora of veganism and vegetarianisms. Likewise, there is not only one carnism, but a multitude.

And out of this multitude there is the potential for anti-speciesist carnisms, if in fact carnism is only an ideology that allows for the possibility of animal consumption.

[F]or better or worse, we are all participants in the system [carnism]. Our choice is not whether we participate, but how we participate.

Out of these two relationships between man and woman, master and slave, the first thing to arise is the family, and Hesiod is right when he says, “First house and wife and an ox for the plough,” for the ox is the poor man’s slave.

That is the animal is the first possession, the first “instrument of action, the first slave.”

So then how does the ox liberate itself from bondage? If the ox is truly lacking in  intellect there is no hope for a Hegelian liberation. For how could the ox come to know itself as having the true power of freedom through production and connection with its work.

And the master cannot free the ox for ou’s very being (civility, material) is dependent on the ox.

And if the master cannot free the ox, and the ox cannot free itself, who shall be the liberator?