Pink Slime and Rationality

As I've been reading about the response and counter-response to pink slime (Erik Marcus has been linking to a lot of the good stuff), it strikes me that the meat industry and its defenders don't get people's objections to the stuff. It doesn't matter how emphatically they tell people it is safe. It doesn't matter how many times they say it is just beef. Those are rational arguments, but the negative reaction to pink slime isn't based primarily on reason. It's not all about what people think but about what they feel. People are grossed out. People are disturbed by the imagery. People are being reminded of messy processes that bring them their meat (processes that are mostly hidden, ignored, or deflected in people's daily consumption of it--in other words, people aren't generally required to rationally face the specific, concrete reality of how meat comes to their tables).

And now defenders of meat want to use reason to assuage people about how they eat meat? How people eat meat has virtually nothing to do with reason: it has to do with tradition, culture, sentimentality, emotion, and desire, but not reason (I'm not even talking about arguments defending eating: I'm talking about how people eat which meat they do: turkey at Thanksgiving, pigs but not dogs, ground beef at all). Now the meat industry wants to turn in outraged perplexity to reasoned arguments? Now they are angered that people are responding to meat in ways that aren't entirely responsive to rational thought?

"War has a way of making all kinds of killings possible."

Jon Lee Anderson in "Massacre in Kandahar" in The New Yorker.

Suffering We Can Recognize

At Lawyers, Guns and Money, Erik Loomis posts this image and writes:

"This image from Life Magazine disturbs me. I guess because it looks like the shot is set up like giving a dying solider a last drink of water."

My first thought was perplexity: does Loomis really need to "guess" why this image "disturbs" him (might it be because an animal is quite obviously suffering)? This led me to the sincere speculation that Loomis was being ironic: he can't really have to guess why the image is disturbing, right? But on further thought, I realize that Loomis is onto something: this image is disturbing precisely because it creates a connection between the turtle and a human.

Most people are not remotely disturbed by the idea of a living animal being killed to be eaten. It is commonplace. Most people are not, I suspect, disturbed at seeing images of the animals that will ultimately be killed to be eaten. Do you get disturbed merely by looking at images of farm animals? But in this image, the turtle is in a pose that can be recognized as human: a prone, dying creature opening a mouth wide to receive some desperate succor for its sufferings. That this turtle can remind one of a human means that this turtle can make one empathize.

That may be the source of the disturbing feeling this image evokes. A creature is suffering, but we are made to actually see its suffering, because the pose has made its suffering relatable to a human viewer.

Animals are capable of suffering, even if we choose not to see it. And when we do choose to see it, or are forced to, we may be less inclined to have them end up in our soup.

What war does.

Glenn Greenwald's "The fruits of liberation" at Salon.

Nonviolence at work

There is something moving about watching these people slink away as the crowds shout "Shame on you!" Violence can make your opponents feel just in thwarting you (including thwarting with violence): nonviolence can shame them.

Many Men and Vegetables

Herman Cain, via Mary Elizabeth Williams at Salon:

"...'A manly man don’t want [pizza] piled high with vegetables!' [...] Cain then explained that a real man would dismiss any pizza contaminated with vegetables as 'a sissy pizza.'"

This is pretty typical gender policing: "manly" men are supposed to want to eat meat, and it is inappropriately feminine ("sissy") for a man to want vegetables, and for that he should be shamed. One can only speculate how Mr. Cain will react to discovering that pizza is, in fact, itself a vegetable. I hope he doesn't doubt his manhood as much as he evidently doubts mine.

On being a vegetarian guest

Ecorazzi notes that Anthony Bourdain uses the argument that vegetarians/vegans are bad because they are bad guests. Bourdain himself:

“They make for bad travelers and bad guests. [...] you’re unwilling to try things that people take so personally and are so proud of and so generous with, I don’t understand that, and I think it’s rude. You’re at Grandma’s house, you eat what Grandma serves you.”

It's a bit annoying that one even needs to refute the "You're bad if you don't betray your morals for the sake of a host's feelings" argument (after all, shouldn't "hosts" be at least as concerned about their "guests"?). Certainly one could come up with absurd hypothetical examples of behavior no guest would be expected to engage in out of politeness. But it seems that food comes with a whole different set of rules when it comes to discussion of both ethics and hospitality. Food is intimately tied up in hospitality, and behavior around food is central to a host-guest relationship. There are all sorts of social customs, even rules, about it. But we don't have to invent outrageous hypotheticals to show how silly this line of argument still is. In fact, we can turn to another central behavior of hospitality, of the expected relationship between hosts and guests: conversation.

Talking is a regular part of hospitality. Hosts and guests chat, sometimes engaging in small talk, sometimes discussing current events, sometimes catching up on each others' lives, sometimes even just trying to amuse each other. That's common and expected, and there's a certain expectation of politeness surrounding the conversation.

But let us say that you are a guest, and your host begins telling racist jokes. Would it be rude not to laugh? Would it be rude to tell the host that you don't like racist jokes? Furthermore, should you care if it is rude? Would you say "Well, I'm at Grandma's house, so I have to talk about what Grandma decides we'll talk about?" Maybe an otherwise hospitable host telling racist jokes makes for an awkward, uncomfortable moment. Maybe it will be a strain one way or another no matter how you decide to handle it. But would you really say that one is "rude," a "bad guest" if he or she didn't want to engage in racism? And would you really put the burden of rudeness on the guest for this situation?

Of course not. But this is the sort of logic that happens around eating animals, because people often have such wildly different ideas of what it means, or whether it matters at all, to be eating animals. Because food is necessary, everyday, social, and personal, we have whole different rules of logic about it. And for some who focus a great deal of attention on the eating of food but who have no regard for an animal as a creature deserving of ethical treatment, it will of course be a greater sin to offend a host (even if you politely decline!) than to eat an animal for your own pleasure. But those same people wouldn't expect their logic about food to be applied to similar situations.