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Chapter 2

EATING AND BEING EATEN

September 2017Alicante, Spain

Ideas that have been swimming around my mind for some time — less a school than an anarchic assembly of finned creatures — are starting to sway to the rhythm of my peculiar temporary office space. The location is a rather rustic sailboat, moored in a Mediterranean marina, bobbing up and down, rocking me and filling my ears with the assorted sounds of flapping sails, lapping water and, most insistent and persistent, the scrape of the hull against the wooden dock. Between rushes of rapid jotting on my laptop I become aware of the movement and soundtrack outside, amplified at times by flashes of heat from inside and outside my body.

This morning a different kind of bodily sensation disrupted and then coloured my thinking: during my dawn dip in the sea I was stung by a jellyfish. It was quick as lightening — brief confusion followed by the shock of realisation, then panic as I kicked the innocent offender away and swam quickly back to shore. The calf and knee of my left leg swelled rapidly under the hot red stripes left by the tentacles I had managed to tear away. After a do-it-yourself treatment — dosing the injured leg in vinegar, followed by a hot shower — the sting subdued to a dull ache as I continued to write. The body of this particular animal — whom I had glanced but briefly, a faint swirl of cloud dispersing underwater — stayed with me.

Later, walking to lunch under the scorching sun, I reflected on my irritation with this small beast of the sea. After all, it was I who had trespassed in her home. Though I had escaped with minor pain and discomfort, I didn’t know what had become of her. Do jellyfish have a sex? Do they live after they sting? A quick tour through Google taught me that most jellyfish are male or female and sting to defend themselves and catch their prey, so do not normally die after striking out. I seem to have come off lightly — no tentacles stuck in my flesh. Yet as the swelling died down I felt blessed to carry a light trace on my skin of this encounter with a real-life medusa.

Being prey and being predators

My brush with the jellyfish in the warm waters of the Mediterranean brought to mind a tale of a much more dramatic — and infinitely more dangerous — underwater encounter with a predator. In a brief narrative written in the mid 1990s, the late ecofeminist philosopher Val Plumwood recounts the story of her near-death experience with a saltwater crocodile during a solo canoe trip in Australia’s Kakadu National Park.¹ Plumwood’s description of how she escaped — just — three consecutive crocodile death rolls is also an account of how, while she fought for her life, her sense of self was shattered. This is no heroic tale of human survival in the face of the unpredictable brutality of “nature,” no reaffirmation of what it means to be human in the face of adversity. Instead, Plumwood’s crocodile tale is a humble reflection on herself as prey. It is also the occasion for asking about how we as people categorise different species, deciding what counts as food and what does not — questions with important ethical and political implications for vegans, vegetarians and omnivores alike.

An experienced canoeist and bush traveller, Plumwood had ventured out alone into the lagoon on a wet day in search of an Aboriginal rock art site. As the rains got heavier she and her canoe were pulled out of the backwaters into the main river channel that the camp ranger had warned her to stay away from: ‘“The current’s too swift, and if you get into trouble, there are the crocodiles. Lots of them along the river!”’ As she looked cautiously towards the banks — “Edges are one of the crocodile’s favourite food-capturing places” — Plumwood realised the seriousness of her situation: “As a solitary specimen of a major prey species of the saltwater crocodile, I was standing in one of the most dangerous places on earth.” Guiding the canoe steadily and carefully to avoid the shore, Plumwood saw with alarm that what she had thought was a stick ahead of her was actually a crocodile lurking at the surface of the water. In retrospect, Plumwood imbues her story with an element of fate: “Although I was paddling to miss the crocodile, our paths were strangely convergent.” Before she could change tack, the crocodile began to strike at her small vessel. “For the first time,” Plumwood writes, “it came to me fully that I was prey.” Just as she was steering the canoe to shore to get out onto dry land “the crocodile rushed up alongside the canoe, and its beautiful, flecked golden eyes looked straight into mine.” In the next instant the animal had Plumwood in a tight grip, dragging her underwater.

Plumwood attempts, with hindsight, to make meaning of her thoughts during the three death rolls that followed:

In its final, frantic attempts to protect itself from the knowledge that threatens the narrative framework, the mind can instantaneously fabricate terminal doubt of extravagant proportions: This is not really happening. This is a nightmare from which I will soon awake. This desperate delusion split apart as I hit the water. In that flash, I glimpsed the world for the first time “from the outside,” as a world no longer my own, an unrecognizable bleak landscape composed of raw necessity, indifferent to my life or death.

Against the odds Plumwood remained conscious through these short bursts of terror (“The crocodile’s breathing and heart metabolism are not suited to prolonged struggle,” she explains, “so the roll is an intense burst of power designed to overcome the victim’s resistance quickly”) and managed to come back for air after each roll. Following the third, she scrambled her mangled body up the shore, away from the river and crocodile. But she was far from her trailer and had sustained serious wounds. In the goriest segment of the story, but also one of the most telling, Plumwood stops to inspect the extent of her physical injuries: “The left thigh hung open, with bits of fat, tendon, and muscle showing, and a sick, numb feeling suffused my entire body.” In this moment of relief mixed with fear and pain, Plumwood sees part of her own body as raw meat.

Yet the experience of being torn physically and existentially proved to Plumwood that she was something more than meat:

As my own narrative and the larger story were ripped apart, I glimpsed a shockingly indifferent world in which I had no more significance than any other edible being. The thought, “This can’t be happening to me, I’m a human being. I am more than just food!” was one component of my terminal incredulity. It was a shocking reduction, from a complex human being to a mere piece of meat. Reflection has persuaded me that not just humans but any creature can make the same claim to be more than just food.

Plumwood does not call her story “Being meat,” though that would have been a catchier title. The point of her account is precisely that “being prey” — potentially food for another being — is not the same as “being meat” — being nothing more than food. The realisation that one can be meat and also be a complex being led Plumwood to conclude that other beings — including the ones that people typically eat — can be our food and more than our food. The act of violence is not in predation itself, but in treating other creatures as mere meat.

In order to put her traumatic experience into words, Plumwood had to overcome the pressures and powers of dominant narratives about animal attacks on people. Although “[f]ew of those who have experienced the crocodile’s death roll have lived to describe it,” Plumwood was determined not to play the heroine. When the camp ranger finally found her and she began the long journey to hospital, Plumwood overheard the rescuers’ boastful plans to return to the river and hunt down the crocodile. She resisted this plan forcefully: “I was the intruder,” she writes, “and no good purpose could be served by random revenge.” Having survived the attack, Plumwood faced a threat of a different kind — “the cultural drive to represent it in terms of the masculinist monster myth: the master narrative.”

The imposition of the master narrative occurred in several ways: in the exaggeration of the crocodile’s size, in portraying the encounter as a heroic wrestling match, and especially in its sexualization. The events seemed to provide irresistible material for the pornographic imagination, which encouraged male identification with the crocodile and interpretation of the attack as sadistic rape.

There are echoes in this quotation of Carol J. Adams’s thesis in The Sexual Politics of Meat.² But Plumwood rejects what she sees as the reproduction, in Adams’s work, of the dualistic thinking that characterises the master narrative. In the American ecofeminist tradition of Adams and others, Plumwood claims, all hunting is condemned as predatory, violent, masculinist and morally corrupt, set in opposition to a supposedly more ethically and environmentally sustainable female gathering culture. Hunting and gathering thus correspond to a preexisting assumed male/female dualism. This model ignores forms of hunting that may not be based on the instrumentalisation of animals, and idealises and universalises women’s gathering activities, overlooking evidence of female hunters, for example in some Indigenous societies.³ Drawing on examples from Australian Aboriginal culture, Plumwood is careful neither to associate hunting exclusively with men nor to demonise it or predation.⁴ Her point is that in the mainstream Australian media the crocodile attack could be readily assimilated into a patriarchal plot that anthropomorphised the crocodile as a sexual hunter and reduced her, Plumwood, to a victim devoid of agency.

While challenging the masculinist adventure tale foisted upon her by the Australian press, Plumwood reminds the reader — and herself — of her arrogance at venturing into crocodile waters without seeking the advice of “the indigenous Gagadgu owners of Kakadu.” Plumwood’s rendering of her own tale, like much of her philosophical writing, is indebted to the teachings of Aboriginal Australians. From them she learned the value of stories as collective, transgenerational meaning-making, as well as a holistic way of thinking about death that “sees animals, plants, and humans sharing a common life force.”⁵ She contrasts this worldview with Western anthropocentrism and individualism, and “Being Prey” presents a forceful challenge to those traditions. As the philosopher Matthew Calarco writes, the importance of Plumwood’s tale lies in her “effort to think not simply her death as such, but her willingness to accept her indistinction from the world around her, the loss of her human propriety.”⁶ For Calarco, “Being Prey” is a radically anti-anthropocentric account of what it means to be human, one that makes room for being animal and being food for others.

Val Plumwood’s contextual vegetarianism

Plumwood’s reflection on the shattering experience of being prey provided one basis for her particular kind of ecofeminism. At the heart of this lies a critique of dualistic thinking, the Western philosophical tradition that divides the world into a series of hierarchal binary oppositions: reason/nature, man/woman, human/animal, human/nature, European/Other and so on.⁷ Plumwood identifies what she calls “ontological” vegetarianism or veganism — which categorises some beings as food and others as not food — as an extension of, rather than a challenge to, such dualisms.⁸ Her critique of ontological veganism focuses on two areas of thought: utilitarian and rights philosophies, on one hand, and American cultural ecofemimism, on the other. Plumwood argues that utilitarian and rights theories are extensionalist, that is, they extend moral consideration — and with it the status of not food — to those animals most similar to human beings. While human omnivores draw the line between what is food and what is not at the boundary between humans and all other beings, including other animals, Plumwood accuses thinkers like Peter Singer and Tom Regan of moving the distinction further along the chain, replacing the human/animal dualism with a another binary opposition: sentient/non-sentient, or those deserving rights and moral consideration/those not. Some animals are thus afforded moral status while the majority of the other-than-human world is excluded from the moral community. The unstated assumption in utlitarianism and rights theory is that human beings can never be food. In contrast to what she understands as this anthropocentric position, Plumwood proposes what she calls “ecological animalism,” defined as “re-envisaging ourselves as ecologically embodied beings akin to rather than superior to other animals.”⁹

Plumwood also detects ontological veganism in the work of Carol Adams and some other American ecofeminists. Plumwood is one of the few thinkers to highlight the problem with Adams’s comparison between violence against women and animals.¹⁰ Plumwood challenges the parallel that Adams draws between the reduction of farm animals to meat and the reduction of women to sex objects. In both cases, Adams mistakenly conflates use with instrumentalisation. Just as it is possible to imagine non-exploitative sexual relations, Plumwood insists, it is possible to imagine animals being used by human beings in a way that is not purely exploitative. Against a veganism based upon the premise that all use of animals for food or human benefit is exploitative and instrumentalist, Plumwood argues that it may be possible for people to use animals without reducing them to mere instruments for our own ends.¹¹

When we human beings take ourselves out of the food chain, refusing to be food for other creatures (including as rotting corpses), we take from other living beings — including plants — without giving back.¹² Plumwood does not object to human beings eating plants, though her critique of ontological veganism anticipates recent critiques of moral vegetarianism based on scientific evidence of plant sentience.¹³ Nor did she espouse the eating of meat. Her experience of being potential prey for the crocodile confirmed her vegetarianism. However, Plumwood argues that it is wrong to privilege animals above other forms of life and to prioritise animal advocacy over other forms of political commitment. She stresses the inseparability of the struggle against anthropocentrism and campaigns to end the exploitation of people, calling upon animal rights activists to form political alliances with workers’ movements, radical health movements, environmental organisations, small farmers and movements against neoliberalism. According to Plumwood, proponents of ontological veganism put too much emphasis on the actions of the individual activist, forestalling the kinds of alliances necessary for the construction of an effective ecological ethics. Her contextualised ethics of eating, in contrast, targets “the most extreme examples of distortion and instrumentalisation of animal lives — the intensive farming practices that treat animals as no more than living meat or egg production units.”¹⁴

Plumwood contrasts the unethical reduction of factory farmed animals to “no more than living meat” with her own moment of revelation, following the near-death experience with the crocodile:

We are edible, but we are also much more than edible. Respectful, ecological eating must recognize both of these things. I was a vegetarian at the time of my encounter with the crocodile, and remain one today. This is not because I think predation itself is demonic and impure, but because I object to the reduction of animal lives in factory farming systems that treat them as living meat.¹⁵

If people can become meat to other predators while retaining the complexity of our humanity (being more than food), as a predatory species we humans must recognise that all living entities that can be eaten — people, other animals, plants — are both potential food and always more than that.

Plumwood provides a sophisticated critique of both the utilitarian and rights traditions, and of American cultural ecofeminism. She also offers an attractive alternative in the form of contextual veganism or ecological animalism. Her argument against a universalist moral veganism echoes in some ways the work of Deane Curtin.¹⁶ Her advocacy of an embodied ecological animalism and her emphasis on the need for coalition building among animal rights and other activists has echoes in some of the new writing on veganism in the twenty-first century. Unlike some critics of veganism, who provide a cursory reading of the canonical works of utilitarianism, rights theory and ecofeminism, Plumwood engages in depth with the work of Singer, Regan and Adams. But by calling for animal activists and vegans to form broader coalitions with environmental, workers and food justice movements she implies that these coalitions were not in place at the time she was writing, around the turn of the millennium. If she had investigated the anti-capitalist activist groups around the globe in those years she would likely have come across more than a few vegans putting that coalition work into practice.

Because she claims that there is a difference between making other animals prey and treating them as nothing more than meat, Plumwood argues that vegans should “prioritise action on factory farming over less abusive forms of farming.”¹⁷ For all their differences, in this she and Singer are on the same page.¹⁸ Plumwood is convinced that it is in “flesh factories” that animals experience total instrumentalisation.¹⁹ Her contextual vegetarianism opposes any attempt to impose Western veganism on cultures with less exploitative human-animal relations. This is an important anti-imperialist and anti-anthropocentric argument. But by associating non-instrumentalising animal relations with Indigenous cultures Plumwood fails adequately to address the question of whether it would be possible to implement less abusive farming systems in the context of the contemporary West. I look in more detail at this questions in the next chapter. There are other simplifications in Plumwood’s distinction between ontological and contextual vegetarianism/veganism. For example, while her claim that the animal rights movements in the West suffers from an “over individualized and culturally hegemonic vanguard focus on veganism” has some merit, she presents at times a familiar caricature of all vegans as people obsessed with personal purity, self denial and “unhealthy elements of self righteousness and holier-than-thouism.”²⁰ In what is otherwise a nuanced argument, Plumwood falls for a series of clichés about veganism that are more commonly found in mainstream media.²¹ She gives little space for practices of veganism grounded in collective movements for change.

According to Cora Diamond, one of the main ways in which people learn how to be human is through eating other animals — ‘WE eat THEM’.²² Veganism challenges this dominant definition of humanity by disrupting the action of us eating them. Val Plumwood provides us with a potentially more egalitarian formulation — WE eat THEM and THEY eat US. Like Diamond, Plumwood challenges what she understands as overly simplistic or rationalised defences of vegetarianism based upon self-confident understandings of the categories “animal” and “human.” Neither philosopher argues against the animal rights position in order to delegitimise vegetarianism. On the contrary, like Diamond, Plumwood homes in on what she perceives as the weaknesses in some philosophical defences of vegetarianism as part of a project for developing an ethical practice of eating.

In the end, Plumwood may protest a bit too much. She recognises that contextual vegetarianism is available — culturally and practically — to many living in the West and strongly implies that it is the best ethical option for most.²³ Although I find her philosophical critique of ontological veganism laudable, it is her reflection on being prey that provides the most original contribution to the project of constructing an ethical contextual veganism.

Eating sex

Elspeth Probyn is another feminist writer interested in the relationship between eating and being eaten, albeit from a perspective markedly different from that of Val Plumwood. Over the past few decades Probyn has developed a corpus of writing on bodies, sex and food that is, from the perspective of this vegan reader, both enticing and infuriating. Notwithstanding her avowedly non-vegan starting point, and her celebration, even eroticisation, of an omnivore diet, Probyn’s ponderings are provocative in ways that prove, perhaps in spite of her own best intentions, useful for thinking about the sexual politics of veganism.

In Carnal Appetites: FoodSexIdentities (2000), Probyn offers some novel takes on the old axiom “we are what we eat.” By following the not-always-predictable paths that stretch out from the points where food and sex meet, Probyn suggests that we can open ourselves up to new ways of thinking about identities. Food, Probyn points out in refreshingly vivid imagery, travels through us. Envisioning the ingestion, digestion and excretion of food draws the mind to the other functions of the organs involved in eating. The cavity that gobbles up nourishment, for instance, is the same one that spits out words. The “mouth machine” thus “brings together the physical fact of what goes in, and the symbolic production of what comes out: meanings, statements, ideas.”²⁴ But some of the arguments dished up in Carnal Appetites stick in the throat. In particular, Probyn’s take on vegetarianism is so reductive as to make any good vegan turn up her nose in disgust. As Chloë Taylor writes: “Probyn quickly dismisses ethical vegetarianism as a rule-bound dogmatism that strictly dictates what everyone should and should not eat.”²⁵

Probyn is at pains to acknowledge that not all vegetarians are moralising zealots who naively divide the world into good vegetarians and bad carnivores. But her hasty dismissal of two iconic vegetarian texts — Carol J. Adams’s The Sexual Politics of Meat and Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation — reflects a deep suspicion of ethical plant-based diets. According to Probyn, vegetarians like Adams and Singer inhabit a “stark moral universe in which the individual measures him or herself against a set of strict guidelines. Succinctly, what this produces is a moral subject, not necessarily an ethical person.”²⁶ I have my disagreements with both Adams and Singer, but this neat synopsis does not do their respective work justice. For all its shortcomings, The Sexual Politics of Meat grapples with some of the challenges of being a vegetarian in human-centred political movements, including feminism. As for Singer, whether we regard Animal Liberation as presenting a “stark moral universe” depends largely on how we read it. Originally published in 1975, the book grew out of a preoccupation with the place of animals in the history of Western philosophy, and more specifically the mass maltreatment of animals in science and agriculture in much of North America and Europe in the twentieth century. To apply the arguments of Animal Liberation uncritically outside that context is to propose that the system at the heart of the problem is the one most adept to solve it. But read within its context, Singer’s book provides an important critique of industrial farming and animal experimentation, and proposes a number of practical suggestions for what people can do to challenge these. Far from laying down an inflexible set of rules, Animal Liberation takes the reader through the different steps of adopting a vegetarian diet, even including some sample recipes. Singer considered vegans “the living demonstrations of the practicality and nutritional soundness of a diet that is totally free from exploitation of other animals.” But he added that “in our present speciesist world, it is not easy to keep so strictly to what is morally right.”²⁷

Probyn’s treatment of the work of Singer and Adams, and her references to alternative accounts of how to live as vegetarian or vegan, are short and sour compared to her exploration of what she considers more complex and ethically and aesthetically attractive approaches to food. She draws a sharp contrast between the supposedly queer celebration of food culture epitomised by the 1990s British TV chefs the Two Fat Ladies — with their “excess and extravagance” and avid anti-vegetarianism — on one hand, and what she interprets as the condescending, do-gooder earnestness of vegetarian food justice activists on the other.²⁸ Carnal Appetites thus replaces the “stark moral universe” of vegetarianism with an equally stark world in which hearty carnivorous consumption constructs complex human subjects while restrained plant eating creates simple selves.

The repeated association of plant-based diets with simplicity, restraint and moralising is similar in some ways to Plumwood’s reductive representation of “ontological” vegetarianism, and echoes claims in more popular portrayals of veganism.²⁹ These representations raise an important question: why is the proposal to encourage a plant-based diet sometimes dismissed as facile, unrealistic or even ethnocentric, while other ways of eating and doing politics ostensibly are not? The remainder of this chapter swims around these questions, as I follow Probyn’s line in new directions. In her most recent work she immerses herself and her reader in the world of ocean life and the ways it runs through human lives. Although often overlooked in analyses of rearing and eating animals, fish and other marine creatures offer important insights into the challenges of ethical, sustainable eating in the early twenty-first century.

Fishy tales

December 2014London

Last night, another disastrous date. Even after I said I would have dinner beforehand (avoiding the awkward “What can I eat?” moment as manifestly unsexy), my internet date insisted on going to a sushi joint. She sat across from me like some selfish god, stabbing at the pink and black corpses flayed and displayed before her, banging on, between chomps, about one life drama after another. I felt like I was being force fed someone else’s minor traumas. I sipped my beer and tried to close my ears. Anger rose like bile in my throat, hotter than the ball of green fire globbed on the plate that marked a border between us.

These words were written as a kind of purging, a visceral reaction to an encounter that left me feeling physically and emotionally out of sorts. I don’t want to paint a picture of a sensitive vegan who cannot stomach dead fish in her presence; I have learned to plug my nose and hold my tongue (as many, many vegan and vegetarian friends did with me for years). My diary entry was a way of disgorging a memory of an encounter with an obnoxious human whose bad dinner table behaviour I cannot separate from my visual memory of the pieces of salmon and tuna being pierced in rhythm to the monologue, munched and swallowed between rants. Let’s set aside the rather obvious question of why someone would be so rude and unattractive on a first date (on any date for that matter). On the level of romance, I put this ugly experience down to an episode in what I subsequently dubbed my “year of dating disastrously,” a period in which I had a go at online hook-ups and assorted rendezvous, most of which ended sourful and sexless, and involved fraught moments over food — specifically fish food. The bad sushi date with a cute but verbally objectionable butch dyke forced me to swallow a chunk of my own pride and acknowledge a kernel of truth in Carol Adam’s argument that flesh-eating sometimes goes hand-in-hand with macho posturing. The fact that this was a bravado performance of carnivorous female masculinity adds a queer dimension to Adams’s argument, in spite of its best radical feminist intentions.