Some thoughts on Death by Veganism, Legitimacy, and the War on Women

I’ve been working on some material about the reported connection between eating disorders and vegetarianism, and I ended up in a place I wasn’t expecting, focusing, for a few pages, on the media’s linking of several cases of infant mortality to veganism.  I’ve read some of the commentary about these cases in the past, but I hadn’t really realized until now the ways that much of the criticism has focused on the role that the supposed nutritional inadequacy of the mothers’ breast milk plays in these cases, which got me thinking – as much has lately – about external attempts to control female bodies, particularly when it comes to their status or potential status as maternal bodies, and about questions of legitimacy, in this case, in terms of diet.

           

Consider the nature of the media discourse about veganism more closely: Matthew Cole and Karen Morgan, in their 2011 study “Vegaphobia: Derogatory Discourse of Veganism and the Reproduction of Speciesism in UK National Newspapers,” used the LexisNexis database to search the terms “vegan,” “vegans,” and “veganism” in all UK newspapers for the 2007 calendar year in order to analyze the Foucauldian concept of discourse[i] – whether positive, neutral, or negative – with regard to the topic of veganism.  Of the 397 articles that they examined, only 22 (5.5 percent) were positive; 80 (20.2 percent) were neutral, and 295 (a whopping 74.3 percent) were negative (138).  Of the articles that treated veganism negatively, the authors characterized the negative discourse by placing it in one of six categories.  These are, in order of frequency of occurrence, ridiculing veganism, characterizing veganism as asceticism, describing veganism as difficult or impossible to sustain, describing veganism as a fad, characterizing vegans as oversensitive, and characterizing vegans as hostile (139).  

...but the news media doesn't.

According to Cole and Morgan,

empirical sociological studies of vegans are rare . . . .  When they are present as research participants, they are usually treated as a subset of vegetarians and their veganism tends to be viewed as a form of dietary asceticism involving exceptional efforts of self-transformation.  (135)

What such studies tend to overlook, therefore, is the importance of animal rights for vegans, an area of research that remains largely unexplored.  If it is, according to Cole and Morgan, “plausible to assert that on the basis of existing evidence, veganism is understood by most vegans . . . as an aspect of anti-speciesist practice” (135), then cultural discourse that conflates veganism and vegetarianism (on the one hand) or that views veganism as simply a more severe form of vegetarian dietary restriction (on the other) disregards the primary motivation for veganism – animal rights and animal liberation – as it focuses instead on a rhetoric of dietary restriction, denial, and privation.  And while this study was conducted in the UK, the discourse about veganism is similar, if not more negative, in the US.

           

Perhaps nowhere can the linkage between discussions of veganism and issues of privation be seen as clearly as in “Death by Veganism,” Nina Planck’s 2007 editorial in the New York Times that discusses Crown Shakur, who died at six weeks of age after “his vegan parents . . . fed him mainly soy milk and apple juice” (Planck).  As a result of their son’s death, the parents were convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison.  Planck, who, according to the article, was once a vegan herself, is the author of Real Food: What to Eat and Why; her web page claims Planck is an advocate of “traditional foods. She will liberate you to eat red meat, butter, raw milk, and lard.” For Planck, a “vegan pregnancy was irresponsible” (“Death by Veganism”), and she asserts that in her study of indigenous cultures, “there are no vegan societies for a simple reason: a vegan diet is not adequate in the long term” (“Death by Veganism”).  In her outrage at parents who would deny their child animal-based food, she makes inaccurate claims,[ii] particularly that vitamin B12 is “found only in animal foods,”[iii] and equates veganism with faddism, noting that “food is more important than fashion.”  As an aside, if you want to read what I consider an informed response, go here.

Not at all fashionable.

 

In addition to the case of Crown Shakur and the outrage against veganism that it sparked, since 2001, worldwide there have been four other cases of infant mortality that have been depicted in the news media as having resulted, in some form or other, from veganism: in addition to one other case in the United States in 2005, there was a 2008 case in France, a 2001 case in the UK, and a 2002 case in New Zealand.  The news stories all focus on the vegan status of the parents – and in at least two cases, on the inadequate nature of the breast milk of the negligent vegan mothers – as well as on the diets that they fed their children prior to death. 

A March 30, 2011 headline in the Mail Online reads “French Vegan Couple Whose Baby Died of Vitamin Deficiency after being fed Solely on Breast Milk Face Jail for Child Neglect.”  The couple, Sergine and Joel Le Moaligou, are described as “militant vegans” in the article.  In an article about the case in New Zealand, the author notes “Roby and Deborah Moorhead are vegans. . . . Mrs. Moorhead’s breast milk was deficient in B12 and inadequate for Caleb’s nutritional needs.”  In addition to their radical diet, the Moorheads are also characterized as “radical Christians,” and supposed extreme religious beliefs are likewise linked to veganism and the 2005 death of Woyah Andressohn of Miami: “it has also been reported the family's diet may have been connected to their religion, known as ‘Hebrew Israelite’ which promotes raw food and natural eating.”

OK, so a disclaimer, which I would hope is unnecessary, but I’ll add nonetheless: to critique the presentation of these cases is in no way to undermine or downplay the seriousness of the circumstances that led to the death of these children.  It is, however, an attempt to look at these cases in a broader context and to examine the sensationalizing rhetoric that depicts veganism as a menacing danger inflicted by negligent, uninformed parents – primarily mothers – on their children.  For some perspective: according to the Centers for Disease Control’s infant mortality statistics for 2008, “the U.S. infant mortality rate was 6.61 infant deaths per 1,000 live births.”  Further,

The leading cause of infant death in the United States in 2008 was congenital malformations, deformations and chromosomal abnormalities . . . accounting for 20 percent of all infant deaths. Disorders relating to short gestation and low birth weight, not elsewhere classified (low birth weight) was second, accounting for 17 percent of all infant deaths, followed by sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) accounting for 8 percent of infant deaths. The fourth and fifth leading causes in 2008 were newborn affected by maternal complications of pregnancy (maternal complications) (6 percent), and Accidents (unintentional injuries) (5 percent). Together the five leading causes accounted for 57 percent of all infant deaths in the US in 2008.

According to statistics complied in 2011 by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, “nationally estimated 1,560 children died from abuse and neglect in 2010. This translates to a rate of 2.07 children per 100,000 children in the general population and an average of four children dying every day from abuse or neglect," and according to the World Health Organization, world wide, “every year, there are an estimated 31,000 homicide deaths in children under 15.”  Finally, “this number underestimates the true extent of the problem, as a significant proportion of deaths due to child maltreatment are incorrectly attributed to falls, burns, drowning and other causes."  If we take the 31,000 figure as the yearly average of world wide child death attributable to abuse, neglect, and murder, then the singular “death by veganism” incidents that occurred in 2002, 2005, and 2008 constitute .0032 percent of that number for those years.  In 2001, when death by veganism spiked to a whopping twin instances, the percentage is .0065.

Regardless of these statistics, however, these cases and the media’s focus on the supposed vegan diet fed to these children by their parents generated overwhelming condemnation of the parents in these cases and of veganism in general as an unnatural and unhealthy lifestyle[iv] -- and it generated an abundance of articles condemning vegan mothers for breast feeding.  It is not my intention to prove or disprove the role that veganism played in the deaths of these children, nor do I want to expound on the extant data in support of a vegan diet as more health supportive than an omnivorous diet; my sense is that these cases are tragic and were caused by some combination of legitimate neglect and misinformation. 

My sense is that these children suffered horribly.  And my sense is that their parents have suffered horribly as well.  But what seems significant with regard to these particular cases is both the focus on the diets of the parents as “radical” (and, at least in some cases, the link between radical diet and radical religious beliefs), the role that that diet played in the way that these cases were investigated, reported, and punished, and the fact that the content of the mothers’ breast milk – in two of the cases – was of central importance.  Given the statistics above, and given the miniscule number of vegans in the global population at large, children of carnivorous and omnivorous parents die of malnutrition and neglect far more often than children of vegan parents, but the diet of the parents almost never makes headlines,[v] unless that diet deviates from what is considered the standard.[vi] 

Of the French death by veganism case, Mike Adams on NaturalNews.com chastises the “vegan police,” claiming that “if the ambulance had shown up and found a dead baby in a family whose cupboards were stuffed full of junk food and fast food -- sugary cereals, McDonald's food wrappers, frozen pizza, ice cream and donuts -- that would not have seemed suspicious at all.”  Adams’s position, while extreme (he goes so far as telling parents to lie about their veganism in order to protect their children), highlights the way that veganism is treated as anathema to appropriate parenting.  Adams addresses the breast milk issue as well:

be prepared to fight the State for your right to raise your baby on breast milk. The State . . . believes you're supposed to be feeding your baby processed "junk" infant formula made by powerful corporations. That infant formula, of course, contains . . . soy proteins extracted with the toxic solvent hexane. Even the DHA in many infant formula products is essentially "synthetic."

If you think a vegan woman's breast milk is dangerous, here's some more info about infant formula.

In a cultural moment in the United States marked by a childhood obesity epidemic, the product of a high calorie and high fat diet combined with limited exercise, there has been only one case where a parent has been charged with neglect for the morbid obesity of her child.  In 2009, Jerri Althea Gray was charged with neglecting her 14-year-old son, a child who, at that time, weighed 555 pounds.  Sherri F. Colb writes “the arrest of [the child’s] mother and his removal from her custody raise an important question. . . : Might it be child neglect simply to feed our children the Standard American Diet?”  It’s a significant question – and one to ponder – when the “Standard American Diet” consists of 35% fat.  Check out this New York Times feature that tracks the devolution of the Standard American Diet…which, of course, is S.A.D. 

And in our present political moment, we find ourselves in the midst of a media frenzy with regard to the Republican Party’s so-called war on women, a platform characterized by legislation aimed at limiting women’s access to both birth control and abortion and fueled by rhetoric that seeks to establish such entities as “legitimate” and “forcible” rape.[vii]  Simultaneously, we are experiencing a proliferation of popular cultural narratives that champion women’s ability to be bawdy and funny, to be sexual, and to be in control of their sexuality.[viii]  Given where we are, perhaps it’s time to consider how much of our cultural discourse represents veganism as a form of extreme and dangerous dietary control – and as an illegitimate choice that runs counter to the “standard American diet” – and how such representation factors into this broader political and social discussion. 

---

[i] Their paper addresses Foucault’s concept of discourses, “recognizing them as ‘structured ways of knowing’ which become ‘institutionalized practices’” (136).

[ii] For a summation of these points, see John A. McDougall’s letter of response: http://www.drmcdougall.com/response_to_ny_times.htm

[iii] B12 is produced by bacteria, not by animals, but animal foods are the best source of B12.  However, it occurs naturally in nutritional yeast as well, and can be found in numerous vegan supplements. 

[iv] A google search on August 31, 2012 for “vegan baby death” pulls over four million hits.

[v] See my later discussion of Jerri Gray for the exception.

[vii] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/21/us/politics/rep-todd-akin-legitimate-rape-statement-and-reaction.html:

On August 19, 2012, KTVI-TV posted to its Web site an interview with Todd Akin, Republican representative for Missouri’s second congressional district, in which he was asked whether he believes abortion is justified in cases of rape.  He replied that rape does not result in pregnancy:“It seems to be, first of all, from what I understand from doctors, it’s really rare. If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut the whole thing down.”

[viii] I’m thinking, for example, of films like Bridesmaids (2011) and the HBO series Girls, which premiered in April of 2012.

Work Cited

Cole, Matthew and Karan Morgan.  “Vegaphobia: Derogatory Discourses of Veganism and the Reproduction of Speciesism in UK National Newspapers.”  British Journal of Sociology 62.1 (2011): 135-153. Print.

The Chik-fil-A LGBT Boycott Debate from a Vegan Perspective

“Anything we could do to the animals we could do to each other: we practiced on them first.” – Surfacing, Margaret Atwood

“[M]y vegetarianism is a great protest. And I dream that there may be a whole religion based on protest … against everything which is not just: about the fact that there is so much sickness, so much death, so much cruelty. My vegetarianism is my religion, and it's part of my protest against the conduct of the world.” –
Isaac Bashevis Singer

***

I remember Chik-fil-A from my childhood.  I loved those sandwiches – the buttered bread and the pickles.  Who knew that pickles tasted so good with chicken?  Those Chik-fil-A folks knew.  I remember my mother taking my sister and me to Chik-fil-A when we were out shopping, buying groceries or clothes to go back to school.  I remember her saying how she respected Chik-fil-A founder S. Truett Cathy’s business stance never to be open on Sundays. 

I remember Chik-fil-A later, after I’d long since stopped eating animals, when it started its most successful advertizing campaign, the one with the cows begging for their lives, turning against their fellow creatures and urging us all to “eat mor chikin.”  And I remember my mother telling me then that she’d read a really compelling editorial in her local newspaper by a woman who claimed that this ad campaign made her a vegetarian because looking at those cows, anthropomorphized sentient beings who knew that they were going to be turned into corpses and served as food, gave her pause.  One thing that that campaign did, after all, was put an animal face on one kind of animal (the kind that ends up as burgers) that is rendered absent in the transition from animal to meat.  Note that there aren’t any chickens in Chik-fil-A’s ads; we’re only allowed, via the “eat mor chikin” visual to sympathize with the cows, to want to spare them their fate.  To depict chickens might make us attach a face to Chik-fil-A’s product, and such a move might compromise the sale of that product.

Here's a chicken.

It’s a brilliant ad campaign, calculating and divisive, asking that we care about one animal and eat another.  Such a position seems apt in the current calls to boycott Chik-fil-A, a position that requires us to demonstrate our support for one animal (LGBT human beings) by not eating another (chicken – at least chicken that comes from Chik-fil-A). 

You know the story: Dan Cathy, Chik-fil-A’s president, said the following to the Baptist Press:

“I think we are inviting God’s judgment on our nation when we shake our fist at him and say, ‘We know better than you as to what constitutes a marriage . . . .  I pray God’s mercy on our generation that has such a prideful, arrogant attitude to think that we would have the audacity to try to redefine what marriage is all about.”

"We are very much supportive of the family -- the biblical definition of the family unit. We are a family-owned business, a family-led business, and we are married to our first wives. We give God thanks for that."

And then a media shit storm ensued.

OK, so does Cathy have a right to his opinion about marriage?  Sure.  Does he have the right to state that opinion?  Well, sure again, but consider that he stated such an opinion in the context of his business, which muddies the water a bit.  The bigger issue, it seems to me, is whether Chik-fil-A actually discriminates against anyone as opposed to whether or not its president is a bonehead who believes

1.  That there is a god figure existing somewhere in the ether who created marriage, and

2.  That the bible is some divinely inspired text that enforces said god creature’s supposed heterosexist marital norm. 

You decide.  Here's Betty Bowers on the subject.

So on the point of Chik-fil-A and discrimination, I’m not sure.  Chik-fil-A has been sued for discrimination, but any idiot to sue anyone for pretty much any reason, so that’s not really evidence.

What I can tell – and I’m basing my position on a article called “The Cult of Chik-fil-A” in a recent edition of Forbes magazine – is that the company so closely screens who it hires – working to hire people in traditional marriages, for example – that it’s able to avoid litigation later. . . it discriminates before hiring to avoid being accused of discrimination after hiring. And here’s a Huffpo piece with some interesting info about Chik-fil-A and its business practices that casts some light on the issue. 

So boycott or not; it’s really up to you to decide what you want your money to support.  After all, much of what any of us buy is produced by corporations whose ethics we might find even more problematic than Chik-fil-A’s, if we knew what they were.  Perhaps Cathy’s biggest error was simply opening his mouth in the first place.

Valid question.

Several days ago, I posted on Facebook that I would boycott Chik-fil-A over its LGBT stance, if I hadn’t already boycotted it ages ago over its chicken stance, and this whole mess has me thinking about the way oppression works, particularly as the focal point of this human rights argument is a place that serves dead animals.  In nothing that I’ve read about the Chik-fil-A debacle has anyone recognized or said anything about the interconnectedness of kinds of oppression; that is, no one has considered that the oppression of certain groups of a people – in this case, LGBT people – and the oppression of animals might be somehow related, or that one might be foundational to the other. 

Let me back up for a second. 

The ecofeminist position holds that oppressions are linked and that we can’t get past any of them unless we recognize that linkage and stop perpetuating it.  I’ve argued elsewhere that there’s a kind of primary binary opposition at work in such thinking, the binary that allows us to distinguish animal from human, that in othering animals to the extent that we can do things like factory farm them and experiment on them, we are then capable of shifting that thinking in order to dehumanize certain groups of people.  In any binary system of thought, one part of the duality is perceived and treated as inferior.  So if we think of animals as less deserving of rights than humans, when we rhetorically animalize humans – think of Barbara Espinosa calling Obama a monkey – such rhetorical action can lead to such literal actions as, oh, I don’t know, the Nazis killing the Jews with rat poisoning.

As a caveat, I realize that this thinking might in and of itself be hugely flawed, and that such a position could seem to indicate that I think that speciesism, if it is foundational, then becomes the most important ism out there, that it has to be undone first so that the undoing of all other isms can follow.  That’s not how I feel at all.  Nonetheless, my belief is that we’ll continue to perpetuate oppression(s) until we are able to stop compartmentalizing them – and when the universe so conveniently hands me something as blatant as this Chik-fil-A business, I have to start with the animal issue, since no one else seems to be doing it.

In a 2007 article by Jasmin Singer in the online publication SATYA called “Coming Out for Animal Rights: LGBTQ Animal Advocates Make the Connection,” Singer says

There are so many correlations between animal and gay rights—advocacy and activism, mainstream acceptance and prejudice, community and pride, legislation and politics, and, of course, the countless personal stories of coming out as vegan and queer in a world where the majority of people see both as radical and aberrant choices. In a country where mainstream media bats a blind eye at Butterball workers who punch and stomp on live turkeys until their skulls explode, and practically ignore gay hate crimes such as the brutal stabbing of teenager Sakia Gunn, the question should not be, “What is the connection?” but rather, “What is the difference?”

If the brouhaha over Chik-fil-A doesn’t draw such sentiment into sharp relief, then I don’t know what does.  As the cows say, “eat mor tofu!”

Retrograde Humanism, Golf, and Coetzee

How to be good?

I recently spent a week at the National Humanities Center for a summer institute lead by Robert Pippin (philosophy giant at the University of Chicago) on form and politics in the works of J. M. Coetzee.  Ok, so I have to give mad props to the NHC, an entity that I didn’t even realize existed until a colleague placed a flyer for the institute in my mailbox during the fall of last year.  I applied and was accepted, but I wasn’t really sure what I was in for until I got there.  The seminar consisted of 14 scholars, all of whom, as per the NHC’s stipulation, had completed their phds in the past 10 years.  As is not unexpected for any group of people who consider Coetzee’s work in terms of its ethical implications, I was one of several vegetarians in the group – the only vegan, to be precise – and I was the oldest member of the cadre, attending for the first time in my penultimate year of eligibility, which was a strange and enlightening experience for me.

An aside: it’s an increasingly unfriendly world for those of us in the humanities, as was apparent in the job search narratives of the newly minted phds attending the institute.  At one point during the seminar, Robert asked, “how much longer will they let us teach literature and philosophy before they stop us?” and then answered – rightly, I think, “maybe a generation or two longer.”

Yeah, we've all seen this, but it's worth watching it again, if you have any aspirations in this direction.

The deal was awesome: we were paid $1500 to be there, to attend five, three hour seminars over the course of the week, to talk about the work of J. M. Coetzee.  The institute fed us two meals a day, reimbursed us for travel, provided us with office space for the week, and provided us with transportation to and from the Chapel Hill Inn – a place that’s so full of its old south charm as to be offensive in a self-satisfied, not at all ironic sort of way (I rode up on the elevator with an African American family, the father of which looked at me and said, “well, this is like going back in time, isn’t it?”  I said, “yeah, maybe a time we’d rather not go back to”).   

That building in the background is the Inn.  OK, not really.

We covered a lot of material during the week, starting with Waiting for the Barbarians and Life & Times of Michael K and ending with Coetzee’s most recent work Summertime.  On Wednesday, we discussed Disgrace and Elizabeth Costello (specifically the “lessons” that comprise The Lives of Animals), and I found myself, quite to my surprise, on the verge of both constant outbursts of anger and on the verge of tears – tears!! – for most of the discussion.  Here’s why (with apologies to Robert Pippin): I have a deep investment in both of these texts, having written about them extensively,[i] and I realized that day that I clearly have a sense of propriety over them.  Actually, I felt this way about most of the texts that we were covering during the course of the week: that they were somehow mine – mine because they changed my life in ways that are activist and NOT intellectual, and most certainly in ways that have left me stunned and speechless when I see them not changing the lives of others.  By and large, our discussions of these works had situated Coetzee’s literature as philosophy – and that’s an approach that I both appreciate and understand, coming, as it obviously was, from our seminar leader, a philosopher who is not a literary scholar.

But what was bugging me – what had worked its way beneath my skin – was what had started to feel over the course of the week like a systematic dismissal of the ways that certain works of literature perhaps require both an analysis of their engagement with real sociohistorical instances of institutionalized and normalized racism, sexism, and speciesism and – and this one is all me – a defense of our action or inaction in the face of such injustices.  When I say that Disgrace and The Lives of Animals changed my life, I mean that reading these two texts constituted part of a transformative process that I underwent around 2000, when I decided, first, that I would write my dissertation on Coetzee rather than pursue my original goal of the study of women’s literature and, second, that I would become vegan.  To be clear: reading Coetzee didn’t cause me to become vegan, but reading Coetzee did contribute to that decision.

Some brief background on Coetzee, if you don’t know his work and are still reading at this point: most, if not all of Coetzee’s novels end with characters having changed only through their acquisition of negative knowledge, or, perhaps even more problematically, by virtue of their realization that they haven’t changed.  At the end of Waiting for the Barbarians, the Magistrate finds himself on “a road that may lead nowhere” (156); at the end of Life & Times of Michael K, Michael imagines subsisting on teaspoons of water taken from the earth.  Disgrace is Coetzee’s most famous work, a novel that details the life of white South African former literature professor David Lurie’s downfall after his questionably consensual sexual relationship with a female student, his daughter Lucy’s subsequent gang rape by three black men, and David’s “service” in the disposal of the corpses of unwanted euthanized dogs.  The novel ends with David, burned, robbed, and jobless, “giving up” a crippled dog to the needle.

The Lives of Animals, published in 1999 – the same year as Disgrace – is often read as a kind of companion piece to that novel.  Lives is complex in terms of its metanarrative import, consisting of two lectures on animals given by the (fictional) aging Australian novelist Elizabeth Costello at the (fictional) Appleton College.  Coetzee read Lives as his 1997-1998 Princeton Tanner Lectures, and critics have endlessly tried to ascribe Costello’s animal rights position – that the treatment of livestock animals in industrialized societies is synonymous with the treatment of Jews during the Holocaust – to Coetzee.  Whether Costello’s opinions reflect Coetzee’s (and I suspect that they do on some accounts and don’t on others) is of little concern to me.  What is of concern is what we, as readers, teachers, scholars, and, yes, activists, do with the dialogic debates engendered by her opinions.

Within the context of Lives, Costello’s assertion generates outrage among members of her audience at Appleton, as such an assertion, in any context, is apt to do.  At the end of Lives, Costello says to her son John, “I no longer know where I am.  I seem to move around perfectly easily among people, to have perfectly normal relationships with them.  Is it possible, I ask myself, that all of them are participating in a crime of stupefying proportions?  Am I fantasizing it all?  I must be mad!  Yet everyday I see the evidences.  The very people I suspect produce the evidence, exhibit it, offer it to me.  Corpses.  Fragments of corpses that they have bought for money” (114).

When she mentions the “crime of stupefying proportions,” Costello is, of course, speaking of the treatment of animals in the industrialized world.  The question is, what do we do with the information Costello provides us?  Do we interpret what happens to animals as “crime”?  Do we conscience a comparison of that “crime” to the “Holocaust”?  If so, then what allows us to keep participating in such a crime?  And if not, how do we make sense and how do we narrate what is happening to animals in our midst? 

Pippin asserted that Coetzee’s work constitutes an act of preparing the way as opposed to bringing about a change.  He further offered that human beings can’t make themselves find important things that they don’t find important.  I can buy both of these things, to a point.  With regard to a kind of inherent inability to find important that which one does not find important, I turn to the subject of golf.  There are days when I am completely aware of the fact that I should find it important, that I should learn to play it even, because doing so would allow me access to a largely male cultural practice that embodies and enables access to certain modes of power.  But I don’t care about golf, and I have no interest in playing it, and no amount of knowing that it might be in my best interest to do so is going to change the utter lack of interest that I feel with regard to golf.  But I’m relatively certain that there’s not an ethical component to my lack of interest in golf in the same way that I feel the same degree of certainty that there is an ethical component in, say, not being interested in the suffering of animals.  Or maybe you could counter that, as a woman, it is my ethical obligation, no matter how interested or disinterested I am, to learn to play golf in order to further women’s chances as ever being anything other than second-class citizens.   If that was your counter, then touché.

Yes, this image exists.

How about this as a counter argument to the claim that we can’t make ourselves care about things that we don’t care about: to begin, I gather, first and foremost that we’re working with a tautology (“I don’t care because I don’t care”).  A colleague who has researched and written extensively about the horrific suffering of factory-farmed chickens continues to eat chicken (he’s also repeatedly told me that I’m a “better person” than him for not eating chickens, a statement that sounds laudatory but is ultimately dismissive – and lets him off the hook).  His knowledge of the suffering of chickens is not enough for him to find their plight important, at least not in the sense of refusing to participate in it.  To write about it, certainly.  To think about it, likewise.  Further, if an awareness of animal suffering is not important enough for most people (and it isn't), neither is the environmental toll of meat: the meat industry is already responsible for 18% of all greenhouse gas emissions – and global meat consumption is predicted to double by 2050 (McHugh 185).  But what if the counter argument to “I don’t care because I don’t care” is “despite not caring, you can – and should – do X anyway.”  Bad logic?  Well, so’s the original argument, so I’m working with what I’ve got.

* Look at me!  I’m philosophizin’!

OK, so back to the seminar and Pippin’s other claim, that “Coetzee’s work constitutes an act of preparing the way as opposed to bringing about a change.”  Coetzee’s work does do that.  It does get the reader to the point just prior to a potential (but highly unlikely) shift in a way of thinking or acting.  But I find that assertion just another cop out – and I said so, right at that moment when I couldn’t sit quietly by any longer.  I mean, good for us to sit around and analyze what Coetzee’s works say about the horrors of what’s done to animals, and good for us to pat ourselves on the backs for figuring out the true nature of Coetzee’s fictions . . . and then proceed to lunch and eat BLTs.  Coetzee has prepared the way; we don’t have to change.  And I realize that change, particularly with regard to the act of not eating animals, is always a fraught prospect, even among the most enlightened of folks.  After discussing Disgrace and Lives, I ate an ALT (avocado, lettuce, and tomato) and admitted to being vegan, and much of the discussion over lunch was about vegetarianism.  Over lunch, I got these questions from the same person:

1.  What about Hitler’s vegetarianism?

2.  What about abused children?  Hey, for that matter, what about plants?  Didn’t I know that plants have feelings, too?

I’ve addressed the red herring of the Hitler issue elsewhere in this blog, and I don’t want to waste another word on the subject.  In response to the second issue, I offered up Carol J. Adams’s notion of “retrograde humanism.”  Adams notes, “”when people learn that I’m a vegan . . . they react with such vehemence and accuse me of not caring for (1) abused children, (2) the homeless, (3) the hungry, (4) battered women, (5) the environment, and (6) workers, among many other things. . . .  Sometimes I laughingly claim that my veganism has prompted more people to announce their concerns for human suffering than my activism ever did.” Retrograde humanism, she notes, happens when people who aren’t vegetarian assert their own humanism in the face of feeling confronted by what feels like, well, a dietary confrontation: “finding out they might be doing more, they accuse vegans of doing less” (127).   In such a construction, animal activism or vegetarianism or veganism functions to lead one into an infinite ethical regression: the only way to be “genuine” or “good enough” in such a formulation is not to do anything, because as soon as you do something, you’re held to a standard (to which others don’t hold themselves) that immediately assumes that you’re not doing enough.

So at the end of the day – and at the end of the seminar – I’m still, despite lots of evidence to the contrary, of the belief that thinking is good, but doing is better.  And if anyone out there does become a vegetarian after reading Coetzee (or reading this blog), I’ll learn to play golf.  Swear it.

Notes

[i] “Displacing the Voice: J. M. Coetzee’s Female Narrators.”  African Studies 67.2 (2008):  11-29. 

“‘Does He Have it in Him to be the Woman?’ The Performance of Displacement in J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace.”  Ariel 37.4 (2006): 83-102.

“In Defense of Elizabeth Costello: Rants from an Ethical Academic on J. M. Coetzee’s The Lives of 

           Animals.”  J. M. Coetzee and the Idea of the Public Intellectual.  Ed. Jane Poyner.  Athens: U of Ohio P, 2006.  193-216.  

Writing ‘Out of All the Camps’: J. M. Coetzee’s Narratives of Displacement.  New York: Routledge  

            Press, 2006 and 2009.

Works Cited

Adams, Carol J.  “What Came Before The Sexual Politics of Meat: The Activist Roots of a Critical Theory.”  Species Matters: Humane Advocacy and Cultural Theory.  Eds. Marianne DeKoven and Michael Lundblad.  New York: Columbia UP, 2012.  103-138.

Coetzee, J. M. Disgrace. New York: Penguin, 1999.

---. Elizabeth Costello. New York: Viking, 2003.

---. Life & Times of Michael K. New York: Penguin, 1985.

---. Waiting for the Barbarians. New York: Penguin, 1980.

McHugh, Susan.  “Real Artificial: Tissue-Cultured Meat, Genetically Modified Animals, and Fictions.”  Configurations 18.1-2 (2010): 181-197.  

Hitler and Vegetarianism

Hal Herzog, who has already discussed this issue in his blog, and I got into a fight in front of an entire class of undergraduate students.  Hal has graciously claimed responsibility, saying of the altercation (which, I should add, was all in the spirit of academic debate), "It was my fault.  I used the Nazi animal protection movement to illustrate how a culture can twist human moral values in weird and tragic ways."  And this proclamation is true; Hal's position, astutely supported via a very comprehensive body of scholarship, is that people have some really conflicted and, as would seem to be the case in terms of the Nazis, some very contradictory views about the value of life, human and non-human alike.  Indeed, Hal's written a brilliantly accessible, illuminating, and thoughtful book about this subject, which, when last I checked, was ranked as the #14 best selling book on Animal Rights on Amazon.

Back to our fight: what Hal's blog doesn't cover about that altercation is what I was saying prior to his interjection that "Hitler was a vegetarian."  I was following Hal's lead, after he'd read from his book a particularly graphic passage about the lives of factory farmed hens.  I stood up and started talking about my veganism and then realized that no one was listening to me at all.  Everyone looked vaguely traumatized by what they'd just heard; indeed, they should have been traumatized.  I backed up, and we talked about how the information that Hal had conveyed had made the students feel.  One said, "kind of guilty about having just eaten Chick Fil A for lunch."  Yeah.  So we processed.  Then I showed the vegan police scene from Scott Pilgrim to lighten things up a bit.

Yeah, I've posted this clip before.  But I can't get enough of the "Gelato's not vegan?" "It's milk and eggs, bitch" sequence.

And then I went back to me, to why I am vegan and how my animal rights position is also the source of many of my scholarly endeavors (and, by the way, this is a topic that I NEVER discuss in class, so doing so was weird for me.  Doing so made me feel vulnerable, because I have a pretty good sense of the kinds of questions -- and the kinds of attacks -- that generally follow such disclosure.  And that's part of why I keep my personal politics -- at least in any overt sense -- out of my pedagogical practice).  My work as a postcolonial scholar is, in many ways, premised on my belief that human beings learn to "other" human beings because they are able to dehumanize them -- to treat them like animals.  And they are able to do this because of what I've termed the "primary binary opposition" of human/animal.  

My belief is that this distinction, the primacy that we ascribe to human beings and the subjection we dictate to non-human animals -- who clearly think, feel pain, and learn, activities in which humans participate as well -- is the foundation upon which we constitute all other binary thinking.  And in the context of such dualisms, one side of the binary is necessarily coded as inferior (think man/woman, white/black, culture/nature).  In order to illustrate this point, I shared a copy of Art Spiegelman's graphic novel Maus in which Spiegelman depicts the Jews killed during the Holocaust as mice.

From Maus (copyright 1986)

The Nazis gassed the Jews using Zyklon B, a pesticide used to kill rodents -- mice and rats. In depicting the Jews as mice, Spielgelman's novel illustrates the way that the Nazis dehumanized the Jews.  They treated them like rodents, and rodents fall into that category of animals that we, as a species, hate.  And this is the point at which Hal interjected that Hitler was a vegetarian.

OK, you can read Hal's blog about the Nazis and their animal rights agenda.  And you can read my argument below about how Hitler wasn't a vegetarian.  But before you go any further, what you should know is that whether or not Hitler was a vegetarian is a red herring to any thoughtful discussion about animal rights, about ethical vegetarianism, and about a life committed to recognizing the interconnectedness between human and animal life.  Hitler's supposed vegetarianism has been thrown up at me so many times that it makes me tired to think about it.  And generally, I don't even bother to take it on: people who bring up Hitler's vegetarianism, generally speaking, do so to undermine an ethical vegetarian position.  They do it to indicate that vegetarianism is highly flawed: how could vegetarianism be a good thing if someone as bad as Hitler practiced it?  

My sense is that Hitler has a lot in common with most of us, if we dare to examine Hitler as a human being.  And that might be more than we're willing to do.  But I responded badly to Hal's assertion.  I said, "no he wasn't."  And then we went from there, back and forth, each offering the evidence we have at our disposal, until I finally acquiesced.  And I only acquiesced because I could tell that we were causing the poor students to freak out a bit.  

To digress for a moment: there's a scene in Nikos Kazantzakis's 1953 novel The Last Temptation of Christ and Martin Scorsese's 1988 adaptation of it during which Jesus, who has stepped down from the cross, raised a family, and grown old, confronts Paul, who is preaching the story of Christ's resurrection.  Jesus approaches Paul and says that Paul is telling lies about him, that none of the things that Paul claims are true.  Paul responds that he has built the truth out of what people need to hear.  He says, "you know, I'm glad I met you, because now I can forget all about you.  My Jesus is much more powerful." 

Scorcese's film with Willem Dafoe as Jesus and Harry Dean Stanton as Paul. Oh, and Juliette Caton as that annoying angel thing.  By the way, all the evil people in this film have British accents (David Bowie plays Pontius Pilate); all the good guys sound like they're from the Bronx.

When I saw this film in the late 1980s, it made me understand Christianity in a way that, at least momentarily, made me want to believe -- and it made me want to be an English major, because I realized for the first time in my "I-was-raised-Methodist" life the power of fictional narrative to create truth.  And I bring this up because it's a point that I keep returning to with regard to this Hitler business.  I strike this comparison not to offer any kind of moral connection between the historical figures of Hitler and Jesus but to posit that mythologies arise -- for better or worse -- out of the human desire to explain and justify human behavior (again, for better or worse).  The mythology surrounding Hitler's vegetarianism is a case in point; positing that Hitler was a vegetarian serves to undermine an ethical vegetarian position.  It assumes, naturally, that vegetarianism is corrupt because Hitler was a vegetarian and Hitler was corrupt. 

I can tell my "truth" about Hitler's vegetarianism, and I can corroborate that truth.  Here are a few points that I'm taking from Charles Patterson's 2002 study Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust, the title of which comes from "The Letter Writer" by Isaac Beshevis Singer: "in relation to [animals], all people are Nazis; for the animals, it is an eternal Treblinka:"

1.  Hitler had irritable bowl syndrome.  His doctor advised him to eat more vegetables, which he did in order to reduce the embarrassing symptoms associated with IBS.

2.  Hitler never gave up his favorite meat dishes, which included Bavarian sausage, liver dumplings, and stuffed game (by the way, pork's not a vegetable).  Here's a quote from one of Hitler's chefs, Dione Lucas: "I do not want to spoil your appetite for stuffed squab . . . but you might be interested to know that it was a great favorite with Mr. Hitler."  Liver and squab: not vegetables.  

3.  According to historian Robert Payne, the image of Hitler as an ascetic was the product of his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels: "Hitler's asceticism played an important part in the image he projected over Germany.  According to the widely believed legend, he neither smoke nor drank, nor did he eat meat or have anything to do with women.  Only the first was true." 

Here's a link to all of the above, plus much more.  Other scholars, including Carol J. Adams and Rynn Berry, have also written to dispel the Hitler as vegetarian myth.  Here's a link to a piece about the New York Times' retraction of a previous assertion that Hitler was vegetarian, which lists a variety of sources as evidence.

So I have my sources and Hal has his, and neither one of us will ever prove anything to the other, I suspect.  Did Hitler ever call himself a vegetarian?  I very much doubt it.  But as Paul says in that scene from The Last Temptation of Christ, my truth, in the overall scheme of what people need to believe, won't matter.  Theoretically, they'll tear me limb from limb to preserve an essential myth, and that myth is that in order to be unlike Hitler, one must eat meat.  It's a tidy justification, isn't it?

"Two Little Hitlers" by Elvis Costello

* And as an aside, there's plenty of debate out there as well as to the vegetarian status of Jesus.  Maybe I'll take that on in my next blog.  Or maybe not.