‘The Omnivore’s Deception’: John Sanbonmatsu thinks you’re lying to yourself about food
We often hear questions of animal rights or the meat economy reduced to ‘sustainability’ discourse, which is already the wrong starting point. No one wants to confront the fundamental issue, which is, first, a relation of domination. We see ourselves as the superior being who has a right, really a political right, to subordinate, exploit, and kill every other species. And secondly, and relatedly, the mass violence that is the underpinning of the thing. People who are otherwise nice, decent people are on board with a system of essentially universal genocide. Now that’s an analogy. We don’t have a word for what we do to nonhuman animals, but that is basically what we’re doing.
CURRENT AFFAIRS: John Sanbonmatsu is a professor of philosophy at Worcester Polytechnic Institute and the author of ‘The Omnivore’s Deception: What We Get Wrong about Meat, Animals, and Ourselves’. The book is a response to Michael Pollan’s 2006 bestseller The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and as the title suggests, Sanbonmatsu thinks writers like Pollan are dead wrong about the ethics of food. He maintains that killing and eating animals is entirely indefensible, no matter how “humane” the process supposedly is. He joined Current Affairs editor-in-chief Nathan J. Robinson to explain why…
Nathan J. Robinson: I think what you’re doing in here is so necessary but so difficult for people, because you are confronting many people’s deepest intuitions and their excuses, and you’re telling them, “No, actually, I’m sorry, but your excuses won’t fly.” Let’s start here with where you start in the book. You start with a quote in your introduction:“I tried vegetarianism once, not for the animals, for the environment.” Why did you choose that particular quote — something you’ve heard from people — to begin your story with?
John Sanbonmatsu: Well, we often hear questions of animal rights or the meat economy reduced to “sustainability” discourse, which is already the wrong starting point for what I describe in the book as a radical evil. And I literally have heard people say this for years, where people say, “Well, I tried vegetarianism once for environmental reasons.” And in fact, in the last five years or so, the press has been gleeful over the fact that many former vegetarians have been supposedly giving up their commitment to that now that they can have so-called “clean” meat, or animal products from supposedly sustainable sources. Now, that itself is simply a lie. There’s no way to provide a billion human beings with animal products without destroying the means of life on this planet. But no one wants to confront the fundamental issue, in my view, which is, first, a relation of domination. We see ourselves as the superior being who has a right, really a political right, to subordinate, exploit, and kill every other species. And secondly, and relatedly, the mass violence that is the underpinning of the thing. People who are otherwise nice, decent people are on board with a system of essentially universal genocide. Now that’s an analogy. We don’t have a word for what we do to nonhuman animals, but that is basically what we’re doing….
Robinson: But it’s peculiar, though, isn’t it? You’ve made a very strong charge there, that the ordinary, average person is on board with an indefensible system of mass killing that is a gross act of immorality, by which you mean our treatment of nonhuman animals…
Sanbonmatsu: The thing is, there’s no difference, ethically speaking, between a cow, chicken, or pig and a cat or dog or a horse, or these other animals that we feel we have a special connection with, so it’s very bizarre. And I really think that this is the foundation of our identity as human beings, this irrational, contradictory way of treating the non-human other. And the last thing I’ll just say is, and I’m thinking about this more and more, I think that the animal system and the way we relate to other beings in this way vitiates any claim that we might have to be moral beings. Because there are thousands of years of moral philosophy, going back to Aristotle and even before, but if you take this issue seriously, as I think we all have to, then you’ve got to wonder what it means to be a moral person in a context of radical evil, in which everybody participates in it…
Robinson: I often find, and you might have found too, that when you speak to people who eat meat, they say, “Well, obviously I agree that it’s wrong. I do it, but I’m with you intellectually. I do not need you to convince me that it is right to be a vegetarian or vegan. I understand it. I’m not that comfortable with it, but you know…” And what you’re saying here is, well, I’m sorry, but that’s not permissible.
Sanbonmatsu: Yes. I have to say, I had this interview about my book a couple of months ago with someone, and we went through this thing for an hour and so forth, talking about the book. And then he said at the end — he got personal — “You should know that I’m not going to change my diet. So what’s your final message? What can I do to help to eat more humanely?” I said, nothing, you can’t do anything — that’s the issue. You can’t mealy-mouth your way out of it. But people just — again, I feel like this issue is not like any other issue. Because they’re authorized by the mob. NATHAN J. ROBINSON
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