‘Mea Culpa’: Confessions of a former carnivore
What I find criminal about our food system is not so much that it brings so many innocent creatures into this world only to condemn them to suffer and die for our pleasure, but that it so ruthlessly commodifies the process, turning 'anima', like clockwork, into a waste product — life itself rendered a kind of refuse. As much as I’m disturbed by all the mistreatment and slaughter, I remain even more horrified by a collective madness that now imperils our own species and so many others, lunacy of which I’ve come to regard animal agriculture as only the most salient manifestation.
AARON GELL: One recent afternoon, four black-clad figures, all sporting the same maniacal visage, stood back-to-back in silence on a pedestrian plaza in downtown Jersey City, video flat-screens slung across their chests. Strolling couples, commuters, delivery cyclists, and families paused to check out the show, and one felt a grim poignance watching their expressions fall in real time as the images on the screens, hazy in the glare of the June sun, gradually came into focus: baby chicks tumbling live into industrial grinders; pigs writhing and gasping for breath in CO2 gas chambers; steer bellowing in stunned agony after receiving a bolt to the head.
What might first appear an instance of street theater was instead a carefully designed intervention — known as a Cube of Truth — staged by the activist group Anonymous for the Voiceless. The video clips were from the documentary Dominion. Made up of hidden-camera and drone footage captured by animal rights organizers, the 2018 feature has won a slew of awards and been streamed more than five million times on YouTube. I urge anyone willing to contend with the less pleasant aspects of our food system to give it a look, but this is not light entertainment. The Internet Movie Database classifies it as “documentary/horror,” and the film’s website offers self-care resources for traumatized viewers.
Displaying clips of what some might consider a snuff film to unwitting passersby is undoubtedly a bare-knuckled strategy. But for AV’s devoted volunteers, such measures are the only way to counteract an elaborate apparatus of erasure — crafted over decades, inculcated by parents and teachers, financed by industry, subsidized by government, and underpinned by legislation — designed to sever the connection between the food on our plates and the industrialized mass violence that put it there.
There’s good reason for this obfuscation. Few of us want to see innocent creatures suffer and die, and we prefer to know as little about it as possible… For members of AV, shattering our complacency is just the first step. Then comes what the group calls “outreach,” engaging onlookers in conversation about how their choices as consumers perpetuate practices they view as abhorrent…
“Anima” is Latin for the life force, the spirit, the vital principle. The word also connotes wind or breath, a paradoxical essence at once invisible and replete with ineffable substance. It’s the root of animation, animism, and of course animal. This divine gift is what must be cast aside, through what can only be described as violence, in order to turn a cow into smashburgers, a sow into strips of bacon, a chicken into “tendies.”
While the statistics are staggering — the system churns through 150,000 animals every minute — these big numbers can make it hard to comprehend what is, to my mind, a more disturbing reality: Each “broiler hen,” each catfish, every single lamb, is an individual. While their inner lives surely differ from ours, they’re probably not as remote as we like to think. There’s a reason, after all, that people spend $136.8 billion annually on their pets and populate our feeds with videos of their antics. Not only do animals have unique personalities, readily apparent when we bother to look, they have desires, fears, and yearnings just as we do— less complicated perhaps but no less worthy of respect and decency…
What I find criminal about our food system is not so much that it brings so many innocent creatures into this world only to condemn them to suffer and die for our pleasure, but that it so ruthlessly commodifies the process, turning anima, like clockwork, into a waste product — life itself rendered a kind of refuse… as much as I’m disturbed by all the mistreatment and slaughter, and feel grateful to have finally stepped away from the overladen sideboard, I remain even more horrified by a collective madness that now imperils our own species and so many others, lunacy of which I’ve come to regard animal agriculture as only the most salient manifestation…
Perhaps we resist this truth because we feel powerless to do anything about it, and as individuals, for the most part, we are. That said, the reason we’re omnivores in the first place is that our distant ancestors were forced to survive on a wide variety of foods, and then learned to use fire to make others more palatable. It’s only thanks to their dietary flexibility that we’re here at all to ponder our gustatory “dilemmas.” Altering our diet once more is something we actually can do—not only mitigating the ruination of the world that sustains our existence, but reimagining our relationship to that world and to the living creatures, human and nonhuman alike, with whom we’re privileged to share it. SOURCE…
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