Abstract
This chapter explores designations of animal kinds, or “order and its modes of being” (Foucault, The Order of Things. London; New York: Routledge, 1989), and specifically how different animals are more broadly constructed as edible or not. This enquiry focuses on the language and discourses used by the project’s participants in relation to animals, and the knowledge they enlist to support orders of edibility, which together contributed to how they make sense of ‘food’ animals and ‘meat’. From this taxonomical analysis of sense-making, a number of ‘validating discourses’ are identified. These are common discourses used by producers and consumers that support and reinforce overarching orders of animal edibility. Validating discourses are understood as a Foucauldian mechanism of power.
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Notes
- 1.
Butler’s theory has been critiqued for failing to account for how ‘human-ness’ is similarly performed resulting in an inherent speciesism (Iveson 2014). The significance of this critique lies in how oppressions based on gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, ‘race’, religion, ability, economic status, and many subaltern ‘others’ draw repeatedly on tropes of ‘more’ and ‘less’ human, and ‘more’ and ‘less’ animal (Iveson 2014: 28; see also Kim 2015). However, while wholeheartedly accepting Iveson’s objections, I see value in thinking how, like gender, animals can be similarly ‘done’ (Gherardi 1994; Martin 2003) by the performance and reproduction in social practices of pre-determined categories which are in turn re-inscribed on their bodies.
- 2.
Due in part to their constitution as livestock according to the National Livestock Identification System (NLIS). As such, in Australia, as in most Western nations, they are subject to a different set of welfare guidelines and codes of practice than ‘companion animals’.
- 3.
For example, see: http://americanminipigassociation.com/owners/ready-mini-pig-owner/mini-pig-facts-myths/, www.orangegrovefarmstinypigs.com/specific-breedsize-standards- and also Cyranoski (2015).
- 4.
Unwanted calves destined for slaughter. Most bobby calves are male, but they also include female calves who are, for whatever reason, considered unsuited to ‘herd’ replacement or milk production (Voiceless 2015).
- 5.
- 6.
That life lasts an average 5–7 weeks for ‘broiler’ chickens or ‘meat’ birds (natural lifespan 8 years); 5–7 months for pigs (lifespan 10–12 years); 18 months for ‘beef’ cattle (lifespan 15–20 years); and 6–8 months for lambs (lifespan 12–14 years). The lifespans of most of these animals are not too dissimilar from domestic cats and dogs and so there is the direct equivalence of considering them to have lived ‘enough’ of a life to be acceptably killed for food at between 5 months and 18 months of age. Contributing to the perception of these food animals as ‘old enough’ are the genetic modifications that have been undertaken to make them grow bigger and faster than they would ‘naturally’.
- 7.
Melanie Joy famously highlighted that the association of meat with being natural is one of three defence mechanisms that support the ideology of carnism. The other two are that it is also normal and necessary. According to Joy, these defence mechanisms rationalise a values-behaviour gap in relation to eating animals. As well as locating the constitution of carnism in individuals and their beliefs, rather than in social practices, Joy does not problematise how what is deemed natural is constituted more broadly, or, in other words, the process by which something is naturalised, which is through shared understandings and the social practices they are part of. Instead, carnism is conceived and approached as a reified ideology associated with ‘meat’ that is detached from the array of social practices and complexes that shape it.
- 8.
Note that the meat that is the product of practices perceived as unnatural is not necessarily inedible, as I will illustrate in Part II. The ‘natural’ edibility of animals in general remains.
- 9.
This is in reference to the CO2 gas chambers now widely used for the slaughter of pigs—a method of killing that is far removed from simply falling asleep (Akbar 2015). CO2 stunning, as it is commonly referred to (or Controlled Atmosphere Stunning), is used in slaughterhouses in the UK, US, Europe, Canada, and New Zealand.
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Arcari, P. (2020). Animal Categories and the Maintenance of Order. In: Making Sense of ‘Food’ Animals. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-9585-7_4
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