Abstract
This chapter explores how ‘systems of thought’ that make edible animals and meat more and less edible are constituted as part of practices of ethical and sustainable meat. Delving deeper into my participants’ accounts, informed by the validating discourses, I identify a variety of non-hierarchical distinctions that further carve animals and their flesh into diverse and fluid constructions of the ethical, less-ethical, and un-ethical. These distinctions include: (1) the species of animal; (2) their age and breed; (3) the type of ‘production’ system (organic, free range, wild, or farmed); (4) the type of operation (industrialised or not); (5) the size of operation; (6) the local-ness of production; (7) the type of outlet (supermarket, butcher farmers market, farm-gate) and, (8) the method of slaughter.
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Notes
- 1.
Jeffory Clymer (2012: 84) identifies a similar “rhetoric of tender fondness” in his exploration of family, property, and race in the nineteenth century whereby institutionalised violence is cloaked in the “warm embrace” of interracial “affection” and “companionate marriage” (84). Still relevant today, a study of modern-day compassionate or benevolent sexism reveals that it both “masks” and reinforces gender inequality and thus undermines efforts towards equality (Hideg and Ferris 2016).
- 2.
If the negotiation simply involves a perceived tipping point in populations whereupon an animal becomes designated as a ‘pest’, it is theoretically possible that koalas, wombats, and other native herbivores would similarly become edible if their habitats were to recover sufficiently to allow their populations to grow.
- 3.
Graham may be referring to prisoners being employed at abattoirs in the Northern Territory since 2014 as part of the state government’s ‘Sentenced to a Job’ Program. However, questions of cause in the mistreatment of animals in slaughterhouses are a more complex social issue, as Richards et al. (2013) and Fitzgerald et al. (2009) have highlighted.
- 4.
There is a shift in this space as many abattoirs now permit visitors by arrangement, while some in Europe and the US are open to the public and conduct daily tours. This development will be discussed in more detail in Part IV.
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Arcari, P. (2020). Negotiating Edibility. In: Making Sense of ‘Food’ Animals. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-9585-7_5
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