Abstract
Chapter 9 shifts focus to the increased material as well as discursive visibility of ‘food’ animals, especially in the ‘ethical’ foodscape. It addressing the question of what effect increased visibility of ‘food’ animals and increased transparency of meat production processes have on the edibility of animals, and what this says about how animals are ‘made sense’ of. The emergence and deployment of visibility as a marketable commodity, promoted and used as brand leverage, is demonstrated. The chapter shows how visibility does not challenge participants’ constructions of animals as food. Power, knowledge, and pleasure are brought to bear by producers and consumers alike on the animal subject of their gaze, and consequently, under the weight of this ‘entitled gaze’, they remain firmly mapped as edible resources.
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Notes
- 1.
Although commonly attributed to Sir Paul McCartney, it was Linda McCartney who first said this. As far as I can tell, it first appears in her 1995 cookbook, Linda’s Kitchen: Simple and Inspiring Recipes for Meals without Meat.
- 2.
It is recognised that consumer ‘choice’ is not an accurate representation of the many factors that contribute to this shift in social practices involving meat. However, it depicts the nature of my participants’ engagement with a more transparent model of meat production, which they characterise as voluntary and even sought after, rather than imposed and unwelcome.
- 3.
Acknowledging that sight, like the other senses of perception, is always mediated and never independent of its co-constitutive environment of social practices which shape how what is sensed is made sense of.
- 4.
An organisation sponsored by the American Meat Institute (AMI) and used to promote the project and the accompanying videos (http://animalhandling.org/ht/d/sp/i/80622/pid/80622).
- 5.
For example:
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Chico Locker and Sausage Co. Inc. “A look inside the glass walls of a slaughterhouse.” 27 August 2012. Web. 20 October 2015.
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Smith Meadows. “Behind the scenes at a local butcher shop.” 15 April 2013. Web. 20 October 2015.
-
- 6.
Just a fraction of such accounts include:
-
Eisendrath, Ben. “Loving a good slaughterhouse.” The Atlantic 30 March 2012. Web. 21 October 2015.
-
Grover, Sami Grover. “A look inside a humane slaughterhouse.” Treehugger. 2 May 2011. Web. 20 October 2015.
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McEvedy, Allegra. “My visit to the slaughterhouse: crossing the line between life and meat.” The Guardian 29 August 2014. Web. 23 October 2015.
-
Rivera, Lizzie. “Can Eating Meat Ever Be Ethical?” The Independent. 8 April 2016. Web. 21 January 2019.
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Bell, Ryan. “The Smell of the Slaughterhouse.” National Geographic. 29 February 2016. Web. 21 January 2019.
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Timms, Katie. “Inside an Abattoir”. Plymouth Herald. 10 June 2018. Web. 21 January 2019.
-
- 7.
In the same way that knowledge contributes to how other sensory (taste, smell, touch, sound) experiences, real or mimetic, are interpreted.
- 8.
Based on US-style legislation, these laws are designed to criminalise the (unmanaged and unmediated) monitoring and investigative activities undertaken by various animal advocacy groups and organisations in relation to any industry that uses animals for profit, but particularly those that raise ‘food’ animals and produce meat.
- 9.
Characterised by the reallocation of wealth “away from middlemen and towards small producers and consumers” (Schor and Fitzmaurice 2015: 410).
- 10.
Characterised by an orientation towards consumers as “hedonic feelings-centered fun-oriented flesh-and-blood living creature[s]” (Holbrook and Hirschman 2015: 2).
- 11.
Sturken and Cartwright’s original phrase: “the conventions of popular narrative cinema are structured by a patriarchal unconscious, positioning women represented in films as objects of a ‘male gaze’. In other words, Mulvey argued that Hollywood cinema offered images geared toward male viewing pleasure” (Sturken and Cartwright 2009: 76).
- 12.
Agritourism has been a popular topic in the tourism and agricultural literature for more than a decade, where it is examined from the perspective of economic development and sustainability—that is, its respective benefits and impacts (e.g. McGehee and Kim 2004; Carpio et al. 2008; Phillip et al. 2010). As far as I know, there has as yet been no sociological or more critical exploration of its constitution as a social practice as there has been for other forms of tourism—notably dark or thanatourism.
- 13.
In her volume The Politics of Reality, Marilyn Frye describes the arrogant eye as one that organises everything seen with reference to itself and its own interests: “Everything is either ‘for me’ or ‘against me’” (1983, 67). Also: “The arrogant perceiver … coerces the objects of his perception into satisfying the conditions his perception imposes” (ibid.).
- 14.
Merriam-Webster; Oxford Dictionary; Dictionary.com.
- 15.
Elsewhere (Pick 2012), Pick takes issue with certain strands of posthumanist theory, specifically the work of Jane Bennett and more especially Donna Haraway. For this reason, I suspect her use of the term ‘vibrant assemblages’ is intended to be slightly disparaging.
- 16.
I acknowledge that practices of ethical consumption, including those involving meat, have become reflective, and therefore reproductive, of systematised relations of class, gender, and ‘race’. However, as noted in the Exclusions and Limitations section of Chap. 1, the parameters of the research process and the priorities of my research precluded me from including aspects of social location in my data collection activities.
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Arcari, P. (2020). Visibility: Inviting an Untroubled Gaze. In: Making Sense of ‘Food’ Animals. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-9585-7_9
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