Disordered Pronouns, Disordered Eating, and Absented Women: A Journey to The Sexual Politics of Meat

This is an excerpt from a longer piece appearing in Defiant Daughters, soon to be released by Lantern Books.

Back Story

I have to situate myself: I am a middle class white woman from North Carolina, a state that on May 8, 2012 became the 31^st to pass an amendment making same sex marriage constitutionally illegal.  According to a New York Times article about North Carolina that appeared three days after the passage of Amendment One, the ambiguous and broad text of which reads that “marriage between one man and one woman is the only domestic legal union that shall be valid or recognized in this State,” “Social and religious conservatism and economic populism have historically gone hand-in-hand in a state that, for many decades, consisted largely of small farms and mill towns. Thus in a state that became known for first-rate universities, it was illegal to buy a cocktail for most of the 20th century.”

In other words, I exist – and have existed for the majority of my life – in a state (literal and in many ways figurative) of problematic socially ascribed contradictions, a place that, despite its many forward thinking actions, enacts codified and tacit rules that disenfranchise members of its populace.  I have lived elsewhere, in Massachusetts and New York, and I could argue, I suppose, that things were clearer and less muddled there.  But I’ve come back to North Carolina, and it is from within that literal state and its engagement with these various states of being that I continually seek to enact a vegan feminist social activism informed by Carol J. Adam’s The Sexual Politics of Meat, a text I happened upon quite by accident in 2001.

But first things first.

1. I have an early memory of asking my mother why “he” was the universal pronoun.  I didn’t use the phrase “universal pronoun,” but I was conscious at about age five of the fact that “he” was used to mean male or female.  Things have changed since then; I am neither young nor exceptionally old, but old enough to remember being a child prior to “they” entering the mainstream lexicon as both singular and gender neutral;[1] at one point, we were all “he.” 

2. When I was 13, my class took a field trip to a fellow classmate’s father’s sausage processing plant.  I never ate sausage again. 

3.  At the age of 19, I stopped eating just about everything.

4.  A graduate school colleague of mine was beaten within an inch of her life by her ex-spouse, a man against whom she had a restraining order.  The day before he broke into her house and savaged her, he came to her house and killed her dog.  This was the second incident of which I was aware where the mistreatment of a companion animal preceded violence against a woman.  The first happened several years earlier, in 1991.  My parents’ friends’ daughter, Nan Schiffman, was brutally murdered by two men who had worked on a paint crew at her house.  One of the men had done something to her dog, and she had complained to the men’s employers. The men abducted, raped, and murdered Nan, burying her body at an abandoned farm. [2]

How do I link these experiences in this backwards-glancing exercise?  To my mind, they are all about arbitrary and contradictory rules that are gender specific, about consumption, and about violent control.  They are all, as well – and this is something I can only see now, in retrospect – about restoring the absent referent, Carol J. Adams’s term for the way that language is used to remove actual bodies from discussions of the brutalization and consumption of bodies.  In Adams’s formulation, tricks of language are used to characterize “meat” as distinct from “animals”: “through butchering, animals become absent referents.  Animals in name and body are made absent as animals for meat to exist” (40).

But as I lived these early experiences, I hadn’t yet found and read The Sexual Politics of Meat.  So to reiterate and expound: I come from contradictory circumstances, a state both liberal and conservative, a family both permissive and dictatorial, the daughter to a father who treated me, in many ways, like the son he likely wished I was, but who always came up against his beliefs that girls and women should occupy certain confining spaces.  So here’s the rub: as a teenager, I could drive a tractor and I knew a lot about cars, but if I swore or stayed out late, I’d get in trouble.  I was expected to be smart and pretty, and that was for me an impossible balance, to be cognizant of all the reasons why being pretty was a trap, to be able to articulate those reasons, and to be held to those expectations nonetheless.  To hold myself to them and to punish myself for not adhering to either piece of the equation of beauty and brains.  Hegemony is, after all, rule by consent.  Oh, and I was expected to eat meat.

To be pretty and smart in the south in the 1970s and 1980s, for me at least, was to disappear, to make myself absent.  To absent myself – my body – already rhetorically absent in the universalizing pronouncement of “he,” via an eating disorder that overtook my life for over a decade.

I.  Disordered Pronouns

I don’t remember my mother’s answer to the question about the universal pronoun, or maybe she didn’t have an answer, having always just accepted as truth the fact that femaleness, in the abstraction of generalization, simply ceased to exist, simply disappeared in the crush of overwhelming masculinity.[3]  But to this day I remember raising the question, knowing that there was some injustice in the negation, even as I grew more and more acquainted with what it meant to be negated. And that knowledge stuck.

When I went on that class trip to the sausage plant several years later, I’d already asked my poor parents a second question: where does meat came from?  Did the animals die naturally before we ate them, or were they killed?  Again, I don’t remember the answer, probably, this time, because whatever I was told proved woefully untrue in the blinding glare of the truths revealed to me that day in the processing plant.  Lessons learned and then discarded: “he” is the universal pronoun because it is.  Animals are violently killed and I eat them because I do.  And then I didn’t anymore, at least not those animals, at least not pigs, whose bodies I’d seen hung on hooks, gutted and waiting to be processed.  Never those animals.  Never again.  Sausage was pigs, real, once-living pigs, the bodies of which were bigger than I was, the eyes of which, on that day, stared at me out of dead sockets. 

I stared using “she” as my universal pronoun thereafter as well; I lost points on papers for doing so.  I was consistently corrected, all the way through my undergraduate studies.  I never stopped.[4]

II. Disordered Eating

When I went to college at Appalachian State University, I became a vegetarian, fully and completely, and I started running.  I lived in Boone, North Carolina a tiny town at the time, where nothing bad ever happened.  I ran on backcountry roads; I ran I night.  Running made me feel free.  I was able to eschew eating some meat – sausage, for example – while I lived with my parents, but I couldn’t make a case for not eating any meat without getting in trouble at home.  My life up until that point had been, at least from the time I was about 13 until I left at 18, a struggle to gain some semblance of control of my body and intellect from my parents who – with what I have no doubt were the best of intentions – continually wrested control away from me in their attempts to protect and care for me.  Such circumstances are not unusual; I was the elder of two daughters, the one upon whom they had experimented, as parents must, with how to parent.  They were by turns loving, demanding, and incredibly rigid; I, in turn, was perfectionistic, overachieving, and often profoundly angry. 

The power struggles between my parents and me were more often than not about my body: what I wore, how my hair looked, how far my stomach protruded and why I didn’t hold it in as was more appropriate for a girl of my upbringing.  Undoubtedly, then, food became for me, as it is for many girls like me, both an enemy and a weapon; food was by turns a catalyst for unseemly and inappropriate appetites that threatened to overwhelm me and alternately something that I could resist, the concrete substance through which I demonstrated my will and strength.  Not eating was a paradoxical act of control, one that enabled my first clear acts of defiance even as doing so undermined my health and sanity.  The problem, at least initially, is that I wasn’t sure what I was defying.    

But to be clear: becoming a vegetarian when I went to college and asserting that identity when I went home to visit my family was a manifestation of an awareness that fomented on that visit to the sausage plant years before, that animals that become meat suffer and die to feed us.  I became a vegetarian out of a desire not to participate in that suffering, but my vegetarianism also served as an assertion of my own identity and an affront to my parents who didn’t know what to do with or how to feed a vegetarian daughter and who took understandable offense at what they viewed as a rejection of their care, their nourishment, and their heritage.

I am well aware of the ways that women use vegetarianism as a so-called excuse to cut things out of their diets, and there is a significant body of research on this subject, as chronicled and detailed by my colleague and friend Hal Herzog on his blog at Psychology Today.  What some research would seem to indicate is that women cut meat out of their diets to lose weight; they claim to be vegetarian in order to make an excuse for not eating certain things.  In this light, being a “vegetarian” is divorced from its ethical implications and becomes a way to mask disordered eating. Hal notes an interview he conducted for his recent book Some we Love, Some we Hate, Some we Eat: Why it is so Hard to Think Straight about Animals, one woman claimed that “she became a vegetarian when she was a teenager. Then she dropped the bombshell: ‘My vegetarianism was tied up with my eating disorder.’” 

OK, so my vegetarianism was likewise tied up with the eating disorder that fully manifested itself around 1989, but I think that for women who find themselves in such circumstances, the connections between these two things – vegetarianism and eating disorders – are much more complicated than simply one serving as an excuse for the other.  I know that in my case this reality is a profound truth.  Not eating meat made sense to me, and I was not eating meat for ethical reasons; I have never doubted that reality.  But along with not eating meat, I was left with a void with regard to how to eat thereafter; essentially, I was left without resources to enable one great leap in terms of my consciousness with regard to a kind of care for non-human animals – my vegetarianism – to translate into self-care that could nourish and sustain a position that felt so unfamiliar and, in many ways, unsafe to me. 

Think about it this way: if at 19 I was aware on some visceral level – and I was – of a kind of erasure of women and animals via tricks of language that render them absent, then I was not yet aware of the connections between such rhetorical violence and actual violence done to animals and women.  I had no roadmap for making those connections (The Sexual Politics of Meat was still a year from publication, and, as I’ve already noted, I didn’t discover it for another decade) or for knowing how to assert an alternate and independent female identity, no matter how much I wanted to do so.  In the space of being a vegetarian whose prior existence had been predicated on the eating of meat and of being a fledgling feminist whose prior attempts at self-assertion had been effectively quelled, deemed inappropriate, and that I had internalized as the source of doubt and guilt, I found myself shuttling between a positive sense of self-assertion (“eating animals is wrong”) and a negative internalization of learned helplessness (“so what do I do now?”).  I started, quite literally this time, to disappear.  And then women around me, women I knew, women who were independent and self-actualized, disappeared as well.

III.  A timeline

1989: I become a vegetarian.  And Jeni Gray is abducted from the same sidewalk where I run every day in Boone, North Carolina.  She is found raped and murdered two weeks later.  Daniel Brian Lee, the man who killed her, abducts another woman, Leigh Cooper Wallace[5] – a fellow college students and runner like me – again from my running loop and rapes her.  She escapes and identifies him.  He dies of a brain aneurysm in prison several years later.

1990: The Sexual Politics of Meat is published.

1991: Steven Bishop and Kenny Kaiser rape and murder Nan Schiffman after she complains to their employers about their treatment of her dog.

1992: I graduate from Appalachian State University with a BA in English and start graduate study at East Carolina University, where I write an MA thesis on Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions, a novel about a young Shona woman named Tambu who goes to live with her English educated relatives.  At one point in the novel, Tambu’s mother lashes out at her “Englishness,” admonishing her “if you are so greedy you would betray your own mother for meat, then go to your [aunt] Maiguru.  She will give you meat.  I will survive on vegetables as we all used to do” (141).  

Tambu’s cousin, Maiguru’s daughter Nyasha, develops an eating disorder, caught as she is between her English upbringing and her Shona culture – one defined by a diet based on meat and the other on a diet based on vegetables – the weight of European and Shona patriarchal standards, and the conflicting expectations of her father that she be an “intelligent girl but . . . also develop into a good woman . . . not seeing any contradiction in this” (88).  When Nyasha’s parents take her to a psychiatrist, he negates her condition telling her family that “Africans did not suffer in the way that they had described.  She was making a scene” (201).

1993: My graduate school colleague’s ex-husband kills her dog and then returns the next day to brutally beat her.

The Impact

“Sexual violence and meat eating, which appear to be discrete forms of violence, find a point of intersection in the absent referent.  Cultural images of sexual violence, and actual sexual violence, often rely on our knowledge of how animals are butchered and eaten.”                                                                                  

                                                --- Carol J. Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat, p. 68

“When you have sex with someone strange – when you trap her, hold her down, get her under you, put all your weight on her – isn’t it a bit like killing?  Pushing the knife in; exiting afterwards, leaving the body behind covered in blood – doesn’t it feel like murder, like getting away with murder?”

                                                --- Lucy Lurie, J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, p. 158

Yeah, I've just harshed your mellow, and I'm sorry bout that.  But to read the rest, buy the book.  I promise that the story gets better -- and so do I.  Proceeds to go Our Hen House.

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[1] Actually, this statement is not remotely true: “for centuries the universal pronoun was they. Writers as far back as Chaucer used it for singular and plural, masculine and feminine” (O’Connor and Kellerman).

[2] The court transcript of the Schiffman murder case can be found here.

[3] Here’s the answer, as it appears in an 2009 New York Times editorial by Patricia T. O’Conner and Stewart Kellerman, authors Origins of the Specious: Myths and Misconceptions of the English Language: “If any single person is responsible for this male-centric usage, it’s Anne Fisher, an 18th-century British schoolmistress and the first woman to write an English grammar book…. Fisher’s popular guide, A New Grammar (1745), ran to more than 30 editions, making it one of the most successful grammars of its time. More important, it’s believed to be the first to say that the pronoun he should apply to both sexes.”

[4] There is really no right solution to this universal pronoun business, but there are lots of ways to play with the reclamation of language and, therefore, of identity.  Using “they” is one way; alternating between “he” and “she” another.  Creating one’s own gender neutral pronoun – “shhe”? – is an option.  But I decided that I liked using “she” because doing so was jarring, a kind of Brechtian alienation effect.  Brecht claims that “a representation that alienates . . . allows us to recognize its subject, but at the same time makes it seem unfamiliar.  The classical and medieval theatre alienated its characters by making them wear human or animal masks” (192).  “She” masked the universalizing “he” in my lexicon; I used it in a way that was recognizable but unfamiliar.  Doing so called the “he” into account, and that was the idea.

[5] The transcript of Leigh Wallace Cooper’s 2010 Oxygen Channel interview about her abduction and rape can be found here.

Vegan Terrorist: The Rhetoric of Veganism and the Post-9/11 Backlash

On September 20, 2001, then President George W. Bush addressed a joint session of Congress in response to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon that took place on September 11.  In a speech that constituted his declaration of war on terror, the President designated al Qaeda a terrorist organization distinct in its beliefs from the rest of the Muslim world and an organization capable of “evil and destruction.”  The rhetoric Bush employed in the speech established a clear divide between “America,” land of freedom, and terrorism, an ill-defined, looming menace comprised of anyone who would dare to attack us.  Bush outlined the cause of the attack as hatred, stating the that terrorists “hate our freedoms: our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other,” and he asked the rest of the world to choose a side: “Every nation in every region now has a decision to make: Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.”

In creating what William D. Lutz terms a “rhetoric of permanent war and fear,” the Bush administration established a political and social environment that lasted throughout his tenure as President and that continues to impact public discourse up to the present moment.  A month after his speech, the subsequent passage of the Patriot Act, which allowed the government heretofore unheard of license with regard to surveillance and detention of suspected terrorists, established a general erosion of privacy and civil liberties that further placed on lockdown any attempt at dissention.  During his September 20 speech, Bush offered a mandate: “I ask you to uphold the values of America,” and in the wake of a changed world, we were left to posit continually and forcefully certain behavior as patriotic and American and to just as vociferously denounce anything that was not as aligned with terrorism.  You were, after all, either with us or with the terrorists.  You had to be an American with American values; you flew a flag, were Christian, and ate like an American.  And whatever you did, you did not question the government.

In the wake of the attacks, Americans turned to so-called comfort foods to feel better, and they shied away from expensive restaurants, many of which served ethnic cuisine.  According to Brian Gallagher, in the subsequent decade, “restaurants focusing on simple, familiar and hearty food – though often rendered in an upscaled and inventive way – would become the culinary zeitgeist.”  Gallagher notes the popularity of such items as fried chicken, macaroni and cheese, and hamburgers in the decade that followed the attacks, and he notes that in terms of dining out, people “wanted places that felt, in terms of scale, much more like home.” 

While the desire for so-called comfort foods makes a kind of psychological sense, other shifts in terms of our culture’s relationship with food were clearly a product of the rhetoric of fear espoused by the Bush administration; for example, in an act of outright xenophobia that remained in tact until 2006, when France refused to support the U.S.’s 2003 invasion of Iraq – a direct result of the September 11 attacks – Republican lawmakers following the lead of North Carolina based restaurant Cubbies retaliated by renaming French fries “freedom fries” on cafeteria menus in three House office buildings (Loughlin) in a move that was followed by other restaurant owners in the private sector.  And in an article published as late as 2011, Michele Payn-Knoper discusses the potential dangers associated with the fact that the U.S. imports 40 percent of its food:

At a time that Americans are so sensitive about our national security, do we really want to rely on other countries for the majority of our food?  Consider what’s happened to oil and our gas prices; it makes no sense to have our food “held hostage.” Yet, the increasing regulations, lack of understanding about today’s modern farm and constant scrutiny of American agriculture is pushing more food production out of the U.S. and Canada.

Given such post-September 11 sentiment with regard to the sanctity and nature of “American” food, it should not seem odd or even outrageous to consider that our current understanding of veganism in the U.S. has been hugely impacted and shaped by the Bush administration’s rhetorical response to the attacks.

How embarrassing for us.

I want to look briefly at the decades of the 1980s and 1990s, a period during which vegetarianism – and even veganism to an extent – experienced a kind of mainstream recognition and acceptance that was significantly diminished in the subsequent decade.  To begin, Ingrid Newkirk and Alex Pacheco founded People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) in 1980, and that organization’s dissemination of graphic literature and images shocked the public and forced it to come face to face with the cruelty inherent in Western culture’s treatment of animals.  Newkirk believes that decades later, “the popularity of animal rights revived vegetarianism in America” (Iacobbo and Iacobbo 199), and PETA’s ability – controversial as it has been – to force people to recognize that their food once had a face was largely responsible for this shift. 

Also during the 1980s, even as sale of chicken products increased, “sales of beef slumped,” and “ethnic cuisine, traditionally prepared with vegetables or grains, and a much smaller portion of meat than Americans were typically accustomed to, or none at all, started to increase in demand” (Iacobbo and Iacobbo196).  This interest in non-Western cuisine marked a moment of culinary multiculturalism that allowed many Americans, for the first time, to consider dietary options other than those that were typically standard American.  Sushi was the rage on the West coast, and Japanese and Chinese food thrived in the U.S. during this period.  Furthermore, John Robbins published Diet for a New America in 1987, and this work linked meat consumption with environmental destruction in ways that allowed Americans to consider that meat eating, animal cruelty, and environmental devastation are inherently connected in ways that jeopardize human existence.

Yes, I went there.

If the 1980s was in many ways a good decade for vegetarianism, the 1990s were perhaps even better, ushered in by “a flood of scientific evidence supporting vegan diets” (Iacobbo and Iacobbo 209) as healthier than their omnivorous or even vegetarian counterparts.  The work of Caleb Johnson and Dean Ornish was influential and its impact long lasting.  In 1990, Carol J. Adams published The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory, a work that examined the linkages between the exploitation of animals and the exploitation of women and advocated for veganism as a necessary feminist act.  In 1991, the basic four food groups, recommended by the United States Department of Agriculture since 1956, received an overhaul led by Neal Barnard, M.D., founder of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine; Barnard’s model relegated both “meat and dairy to optional status” (211).  This recommendation was made after decades of research by Barnard and other physicians, namely T. Colin Campbell, Oliver Alabaster, and Denis Burkitt that effectively proved both “the health benefits of vegan foods” (212) and the detrimental aspects of consuming meat. 

During this same period, veganism entered mainstream and popular culture in ways that depicted that lifestyle in a sympathetic light.  In 1995, Babe, directed by Chris Noonan and staring James Cromwell, who became outspokenly vegan while acting in that film, was released and, in its anthropomorphic depiction of farm animals, caused viewers across the country to stop eating them.  Howard Lyman, author of Mad Cowboy: Plain Truth from a Cattle Rancher who Won’t Eat Meat, appeared on Oprah in 1996 and explained to America why and how he, a fourth generation cattle rancher, became vegan.  Lyman and Winfrey, who declared during the broadcast that she had eaten her last hamburger, were subsequently sued for libel by the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association for anti-beef comments made during the broadcast.[i]  And in 2000, Rod Lurie’s film The Contender portrayed a female, vegan political contender for the office of Vice President of the United States as a heroic champion of American values.

Some good stuff from Lurie's The Contender

While awareness of vegetarianism and veganism has continued to rise in the U.S. since the 1990s, prompting even the most recalcitrant aspects of our culture to make some concessions and accommodations – even Burger King saw fit to start offering a veggie burger in 2002 – there has been a pronounced shift in the discourse of veganism since the beginning of the twenty-first century.  Even prior to the 2001 attacks, chef Anthony Bourdain aligned vegans with anti-American terrorism in his wildly successful 2000 exposé Kitchen Confidential:

Vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter faction, the vegans, are a persistent irritant to any chef worth a damn. . . . Vegetarians are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit, and an affront to all I stand for, the pure enjoyment of food. The body, these waterheads imagine, is a temple that should not be polluted by animal protein. It’s healthier, they insist, though every vegetarian waiter I’ve worked with is brought down by any rumor of a cold. (70)

Bourdain is famous for his disdain of the non-omnivorous in general and of vegans in particular, and his incendiary claims about them are oft quoted.[ii]  Bourdain’s association of veganism with terrorism, however, constructed veganism (a decidedly pacifist ideology) as dangerously, violently radical, a behavior that posed a threat to any sane conceptions of diet.  Vegetarians and vegans, in this construction, are the “enemy” of the very “human spirit.”  After the advent of the so-called War on Terror, terms like “Jihad,” “al-Qaeda,” and the omnipresent and pervasive “terrorist” entered the mainstream U.S. vernacular, part and parcel of a political rhetoric that divided the world into the simplistic categories of good and evil, and Bourdain’s construction of vegans as terrorists held a different and more powerful sway. 

A search for "Anthony Bourdain douche" pulls up this.

And Bourdain reiterated his point after the terrorist attacks.  While in Philadelphia on a book tour promoting his 2007 release No Reservations, Bourdain said that vegetarians “are the worst kind of terrorists. And they must be stopped” (qtd. in Valocchi), asserting again – and this time in a post-September 11 world – that not eating meat constitutes an act of terrorism.  In the years since that statement, the supposed connection between cruelty free diets and terrorism has played out in startling ways.  For example, a Village Voice article by Matt Snyders chronicles the FBI’s solicitation of informants to monitor protest groups during the 2008 Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota.  Snyders discusses the case of Paul Carroll,[iii] a student at the University of Minnesota, who was approached by the FBI.  According to Synders,

What they were looking for, Carroll says, was an informant – someone to show up at “vegan potlucks” throughout the Twin Cities and rub shoulders with RNC protestors, schmoozing his way into their inner circles, then reporting back to the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, a partnership between multiple federal agencies and state and local law enforcement.

Snyder quotes attorney Jordan Kushner who notes that “the Joint Terrorism Task Force is another example of using the buzzword ‘terrorism’ as a basis to clamp down on people’s freedoms and push forward a more authoritarian government.”  Veganism, as a non-normative dietary choice, represents an ideology at odds with an increasingly authoritarian regime; in this case, it becomes associated with protest, dissent, and terrorism and must be covertly monitored.

Ha.

In 2009, police in the U.K. secretly investigated 47,000 suspicious travelers who booked flights into and out of Britain.  These travelers were red flagged “as potential terrorists [for such things as] ordering a vegetarian meal, asking for an over-wing seat and travelling with a foreign-born husband or wife” (Lewis).  Travelers were selected via a terrorist detector database that was introduced by Britain’s Labor Party, yet the system, which cost over a billion pounds to implement, “has never led to the arrest of a terrorist” (Lewis).  And also in 2009, the FBI for the first time placed an animal rights activist, Daniel Andreas San Diego, on its most wanted list.  San Diego, who is still at large and was the first domestic terrorist to appear on the list, is accused of bombing two corporate offices in California in 2003 – both of which were associated with animal testing – causing property damage but no loss of life. 

In the slew of media that followed his placement on the list, San Diego’s status as a “strict vegan” (Frieden) was highlighted.  The headline of a 2011 article in Boston magazine reads “Violent, Vegan Animal Rights Terrorist Suspected in Northampton,” and in a Fox News article, Joseph Abrams says “San Diego's bespectacled face masks a violent hate that authorities say turned him into an eco-terrorist, a vicious vegan with an ax to grind.”  To be clear, discussing the media’s coverage of San Diego’s veganism is in no way to advocate for his methods; San Diego’s actions are reprehensible, violent, and antithetical to the predominant ideology that, I would argue, influences most people who opt for a vegan lifestyle.  But in their coverage of the San Diego case, the FBI and the media have, like Bourdain, linked veganism to terrorism in ways that elide veganism with dangerous extremism.

As America has continued to fight its seemingly never ending War on Terror and as we have shifted from one administration to another, at least some of the paranoia and fear that gripped the nation in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks has abated.  But the rhetoric that the Bush administration employed immediately after those attacks established a pervasive and still extant need to clarify certain behavior as patriotic and American while denouncing anything that did not comfortably fit that model as not only un-American but anti-American, as behavior that might underscore and compliment a terrorist mentality, and as behavior that must be closely monitored, even if such monitoring violates basic civil liberties. 

Veganism, which had enjoyed a mild and even at times positive reception during the preceding two decades, became at the dawn of the twenty-first century suspect in its sudden associations with fundamentalism, radicalism, and anti-government protest; in its deviation from the Standard American Diet (SAD), it appeared alien and dangerously ethnic, influenced by the ideologies of the non-Western world.  To be vegan was to be un-American, to be with the terrorists and not, as Bush commanded, with the rest of “us.”

* I realize this blog is too long.  Sorry bout that.

* Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations airs its final episode tomorrow.  Buh-bye, ass clown.

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[i]   The case was dismissed in 1998.

[ii]  Bourdain has tended to focus on vegan and vegetarian arguments about the health supportive nature of those diets and on what he views as a kind of cultural elitism that keeps vegans from being able to travel to other cultures and eat their foods.  He has tended to stay away from the ethical arguments for veganism.

[iii] “Paul Carroll” is the alias of young man who wished to remain anonymous.

Out of the Closet? Veganism as Orientation or Preference

I was running, stepped on a rock, rolled and then broke my right ankle on October 3.  I’ve never broken a bone before, and I can tell you that of all the bones I could have broken, my right ankle would not be my first choice.  Things I’m observing while trying to heal: there’s nothing worse than a runner who can’t run.  I am currently in a space of telling off random strangers in other people’s Facebook posts (I’ve forbidden myself from FB for a week as a result of telling off a friend’s friend for trying to mansplain why veganism is bad), nearly punching the last person who told me that at least I’m getting good upper body workout from the crutches, and sending a nasty letter to some random news station after reading a horribly written and factually inaccurate article about Mickey Shunick’s murderer.  I corrected the article using Track Changes and requested that those folks hire an English major. 

 Again, hire an English Major.

So I’m in a rare space that constitutes a haphazard mixture of rage at not being able to run and the subsequent depression resultant from such a state, feminist ire from reading too much social media (binders full of women!) – a position that arises from my inability to do much of anything else – and generalized misanthropy, aimed at

1.  Anyone walking, running, or driving, all of which I can’t do

2.  My neighbors, whose Romney/Ryan sign keeps creeping closer and closer to my yard

3.  The gym that I’ve joined (cause rowing machines and exercise bikes suck and are not even remotely as awesome as running)

4.  Anyone who doesn’t offer to hold a door for me when I’m trying to get into the gym (cause I can’t open doors and manage crutches)

5.  Anyone who offers to hold a door for me (cause don’t feel sorry for me, asshole!)

You see my predicament.  I’m a miserable bastard, and there is no making it better til I can run again.  Anyway, I have been doing a lot of reading and writing and thinking.  Here’s what’s new.

But first, here are my ankles.  The one that looks like a loaf of bread is the one that's broken.

I went out to dinner about a month ago with three people, two of whom are friends, and the other someone I’d just met.  While we were ordering, one of my friends shared with the new friend that I’m vegan.  I don’t mind this at all; I am, at present, wearing that status like a gigantic badge of honor (“vegan” tattooed on my arm and all), so it’s not like I’m trying to hide that fact from anyone.

This hasn’t always been the case.  For a long time, I was very private about both my vegetarianism (when I was a vegetarian) and my veganism (after I became vegan) for a whole variety of reasons, the most prominent of which was that I didn’t want to make other people feel uncomfortable or judged.  Another reason was that I’d found that often when I would disclose my dietary weirdness, there would ensue all manner of things that I didn’t want to deal with: people telling me their stories of their failed attempts at vegetarianism (usually something along the lines of “I used to be vegetarian, but then I got sick…”), questions about where I got my protein, and, sometimes, worst of all, blatant attacks on my lifestyle.

Now, however, I don’t care about whether or not I make people uncomfortable.  I’m not judging anyone; I just refuse to self-judge to protect other people’s feelings.  It took me a long to get here, and I’m not leaving.

So when my friend outed me as vegan, there was that moment that I always feel when this happens around someone I don’t know, when I wonder how I’ll be treated thereafter.  This new friend was very nice; she thanked me for being a “normal” vegan, as she’d known quite a few who weren’t.  And then she told me about them. 

On the one hand, it’s nice to be the friendly face of non-judgmental veganism, to be the “normal” one among so many weirdos, despite the fact that there’s nothing at all normal about me. I exist within a subculture that constitutes at most something like 3% of the U.S. population, and our very existence (and I’m seriously not trying to speak for vegans as a whole because we are not in any way a unified movement) is about as counter-cultural as anything that’s out there. 

Here’s what happened when I told my friend Will about being a normal vegan.  He said, “Oh my God.  That’s exactly what happens to me, only I’m the ‘normal’ gay guy.”

The whole experience got me thinking about the way that veganism, like homosexuality, constitutes a non-normative identity position that requires one to constantly negotiate whether to be in or out of the closet, and, should one come out, to manage other people’s reactions to that position.  Sex and food: two of our most primal and primary needs; mess with how the majority of folks think you should fuck or eat, and watch what happens.

Right?  And I've already talked about this one.

To take this comparison further, a 2007 study by Annie Potts and Jovian Parry even explores the emergence of “a new ‘sexual preference’ and a new controversy [that subsequently] appeared in the global media-scape and on the internet: ‘vegansexuality’” (53), which surfaced after a 2006 nationwide New Zealand study that looked at the perspectives of vegetarian and vegan consumers in that country.  Several vegetarian female respondents – only one of whom identified as vegan – noted that they engaged in sexual and long-term relationships only with others who likewise abstained from meat and animal products.  Potts and Parry note that in subsequent news stories, the term “vegansexual” was coined to define this phenomenon and that the global coverage of it “was, predictably, highly sensationalized” (55). 

The backlash that ensued was aimed at women who would dare to express this new sexual orientation – and Potts and Parry read vegansexuality in Foucauldian terms, noting its creation “through various machinations of power and resilience, discourse and confession” (55) – with the most vitriolic contempt for vegansexuality coming from omnivorous heterosexual men (57). The various criticisms from this group aimed at women who express this orientation include the assertion that both veganism and sex with only vegan men constitute a form of self-imposed abstinence by women who really prefer meat eaters – and meat – “but deny their ‘true’ desires,” or as dietary and sexual dysfunction, a deficiency, and/or a form of discrimination against men who eat meat (64). 

My attempt to consider veganism as somehow analogous to something like homosexuality is probably raising flags.  And it should (cause the two aren’t the same), but I’m going to push this comparison still further.  Homosexuality is a characteristic that people are forever seeking to establish as based in some sort of causal relationship.  What causes a person to be homosexual (or, for that matter, what causes a person to be heterosexual)?  Is it a biological or learned?  What’s the role of culture vs. nature in a person’s sexual orientation?  And are culture and nature even distinct categories (I’d argue that they aren’t)?  Is there any aspect of choice involved in the forging of sexual orientation?  There has never been a clear consensus with regard to these questions. 

Big ole question mark.

Veganism is considered a lifestyle preference (remember that we used to say that homosexuality was a sexual preference as well, but in our infinite sensitivity, we switched to “orientation,” which implies that there’s more at work here than simply what people prefer) based on deeply held beliefs that consuming animals and animal products is wrong.  As a result of this belief, one chooses not to consume those things, opting instead of a diet and lifestyle that is devoid of such items.  In this context, veganism is no more an “orientation” than is purchasing a Honda over a Toyota (I’ve had both; I’m bi-carious.  C’mon: that’s pretty funny).

But I want to trouble the notion of what constitutes an “orientation.”  The third definition of “orientation” that’s found in the Oxford English Dictionary is the one that pertains to our thinking about sexual orientation: “a person's basic attitude, beliefs, or feelings; a person's emotional or intellectual position in respect of a particular topic, circumstance.”  And “basic” in this sense means “fundamental,” or “essential.”  For one to be “oriented” towards something implies, at least in the case of sexual orientation, an essential or fundamental position; an orientation, therefore, is something much more deeply rooted than a mere preference. 

Consider that veganism, like homosexuality (or heterosexuality, for that matter) has been around forever (although it wasn’t called “veganism” until 1944) and present in vastly different cultures,[1] even though we tend to think of it as some trendy, new, Western thing.  In Vegetarianism: A History, Colin Spencer notes, for example, that the ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras (whose name was evoked by Percy Shelley, himself vegetarian, to “describe an ideal way of life” (38)) was vegan (38).  But veganism has never been the dominant dietary position in any culture at any time.  So what causes people, over vast amounts of time and in decidedly different cultures, to be vegan, particularly given the minority position that such an option has always mandated?  Being vegan, no matter where and when, has always constituted a non-normative position, one that often inspired persecution.  

While there’s been tons and tons of research about what makes people gay, there’s been precious little about what makes people vegan, but there has been some. Barbara McDonald’s “‘Once You Know Something, You Can’t not Know it’: An Empirical Look at Becoming Vegan” examines the experiences of a group of “successful and committed vegans” (19) to ascertain why they became vegan.  She notes that “becoming vegan represents a major lifestyle change, one that demands the rejection of the normative ideology of speciesism” (3).  McDonald identifies a process involving catalytic experiences, which lead individuals to seek education about the plight of animals, which then leads to the decision to become vegan.  She situates veganism as an activist position in that vegans “reject institutional power by choosing cruelty-free products and by engaging in protests and other activism” (17). 

All of this is interesting, if somewhat unsurprising to me.  But what kind of caught my eye were two points raised in the study, first that “most of the participants claimed to have been ‘animal people’ all their lives” (6, my emphasis) and that for the participants in this study, the decision to become vegan felt “inevitable,” “comfortable,” and “final” (15).  McDonald reads veganism as an orientation – a kind of pre-existing condition, if you will – one that is there prior to the potential vegan’s ability to act on it through catalytic experiences, education, and information.

The idea that there’s some essential quality in certain people that makes them vegan may seem hokey – and I’ll give you that if it does.  But to turn it around a bit, is such an idea any less unlikely than the notion that there is some essential quality that causes someone to grow up and become a serial killer?  No one has ever really been able to argue very convincingly that socialization is always the only thing that causes that behavior.  But I’ve always been incredibly wary of essentialism, and I sincerely believe that we are all combinations of both biological and social influences.

 

Still considering veganism as an orientation resonates with me, because I think that on some very primal level, I always knew that I was vegan, or, rather, that I have always believed and felt the things that drove me to the inevitable conclusion to become vegan; my core self, whatever has created it, has always been vegan.  I just had to fully realize that aspect of my identity before I could come out of the closet.

And such a position also really resonates with my previous criticism of Robert Pippin’s position that people simply can’t care about things that they don’t care about; maybe he’s right after all. 

Works Cited

McDonald, Barbara.  “‘Once You Know Something, You Can’t Not Know It’: An Empirical Look at Becoming Vegan.”  Society and Animals 8.1(2000): 1-23.  Print.

Spencer, Colin.  Vegetarianism: A History.  New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2000.  Print.

Stuart, Tristam.  The Bloodless Revolution: A Cultural History of Vegetarianism from 1600 to Modern Times.  New York: Norton, 2006.  Print.

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[1] Tristam Stuart’s exhaustive study The Bloodless Revolution: A Cultural History of Vegetarianism from 1600 to Modern Times is a valuable resource for examining the long and multicultural history of vegetarianism and veganism.