This imagined dystopian world is not as shocking as some think. The way in which society blinds itself to human suffering reflects the way ours can be blind to the realities of animal killing.
ELIZABETH SULIS KIM: Imagine a world where a virus rendered other animals inedible. Then, with people still craving the taste of meat, human cannibalism became normalised. This is the dystopian world in which Argentinian author Agustina Bazterrica’s new novel Tender is the Flesh takes place. The novel has been described as “hideous”, “disturbing” and “depraved”, shocking readers with its gruesome descriptions of the meat production line… This is a world where animals are a rarity – and where humans are exploited like animals instead, from being tested on without anaesthetic in laboratories to being hunted and killed for sport.
It is a provocative premise, and yet having grown up as a vegetarian in a carnivorous world, I found Bazterrica’s dystopian world utterly horrifying, but not quite as shocking as some might. After all, the way in which her imagined society blinds itself to human suffering reflects the way ours can be blind to the realities of animal killing. There’s the same normalisation of eating flesh; the same euphemisms around what is being consumed (to the consumer, they’re always sausages and burgers, not chunks of dead pig and cow); the same exploiting of each other, whatever the species involved…
At a time when veganism is booming, transitioning from being a radical lifestyle choice to one accepted, even embraced by the mainstream, art may have a significant role in changing cultural attitudes to what we choose to eat long-term. Bazterrica herself stopped eating meat in 2014 after watching Earthlings, a 2005 documentary which shows the various ways humans exploit other animals, from the slaughter of livestock for food to the euthanasia of household pets.
“Years later, I was walking through a butcher’s shop in Buenos Aires when I had a revelation. I saw the corpses. I thought, here in Argentina we eat cows and pigs and chickens but in India, they don’t eat the cow because it’s sacred. In China, once a year they have a festival where they kill dogs and eat them. So I thought: ‘the meat that we eat is cultural – we could eat each other'”… So could Bazterrica’s novel have a real effect in converting its readers to veganism or vegetarianism? People certainly tell her that it has put them off meat for life…
Bazterrica is not the only artist of late to reconfigure humans’ meat consumption as pure horror. In 2017, in the BBC mockumentary Carnage: Swallowing the Past, the comedian and writer Simon Amstell made an unforgettable case for how we might one day look back at our carnivorous ways with revulsion. Amstell, like Bazterrica, went vegan after watching Earthlings – and the documentary was also his direct inspiration for making Carnage… Carnage succeeds in being as entertaining as it is powerful. It is set in 2067, an imagined utopian future where the UK is fully vegan. Through a mixture of horrifying real footage of animal farming and fictional dramatic scenes, it shows how humanity gets to this point via a moral reckoning…
Of course, the extent to which fiction is playing, or will play, a part in this shift is not obviously measurable. Documentaries and non-fiction can have a more immediately tangible impact perhaps. A few years ago, I remember seeing signs outside a number of London coffee shops in which the proprietors said they could no longer justify offering cow’s milk (and would now be offering a plant-based alternative) after having watched Cowspiracy, a 2014 film from Oscar-winning star Joaquin Phoenix, which explored the environmental impact of animal agriculture…
Interestingly the documentary Earthlings also drew from poetry, art and literature that controversially compares the treatment of animals with the suffering of victims of racism and sexism. Near the beginning of Earthlings, the narrator quotes directly from Enemies, a novel by the late Nobel Prize winning author, and prominent vegetarian and animal rights advocate, Isaac Bashevis Singer, who grew up in Poland and fled the horrors of the Holocaust… But fiction can have its own influence, changing hearts and minds in a way that may be less direct but can be just as powerful. SOURCE…
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