Meat Love: An Ideology of the Flesh by Amber Husain

Writing about veganism and against not just factory farming but also against so-called “ethical” meat consumption is difficult to do without coming across as superior and – a generous term – a killjoy or – an ungenerous term – a scold. In Meat Love: An Ideology of the Flesh, Amber Husain manages to avoid both of these traps, but – for me – she does so at the cost of rhetorical impact. Maybe, tho, as someone who has read agitative radical pamphlets on the same topic, I went in expecting a mode and a metre that isn’t compatible with something made for a more general (i.e. less revolutionary) readership…

(& let’s be clear from the off, I’m very very very anti meat, but I’m also (technically) quite mentally ill, so my opinion that a pig’s life should be given no less respect than a human life is maybe more based in my profound disinterest in people rather than in any positive interest in animals, at least that’s what people tell me it must be whenever I express this opinion aloud, though is this just another example of the same commodification and objectification that Meat Love explores and acknowledges???)

People – again, can someone who subsists on the flesh of another truly be considered a living being with a supposéd soul (which is the different between people and beast, right?) – love meat, and a certain type of people – definitely not people this time because Husain makes it very clear that she means a very specific sociopolitical demographic of middle class professionals who like restaurants and braying laughter and probably not properly washing their genital area (middle aged dick men, basically) – love loving meat, and treat any kind of criticism of meat as a personal attack.

These people deserve to be criticised, in my opinion, and they deserve to be criticised with much crueler, nastier, meaner and more judgemental comments than can be found in this reasoned, persuasive, articulate and researched and evidenced non-fiction book on the hypocrisies and inconsistencies of society’s attitude to meat consumption and the animals from where meat comes.

(obviously the book is aimed at people less radical than I am in thought, which (I must admit) is most people (though most people are probably more radical in action than I am; I’m not really alive enough to do anything that fosters change whoops lol and also I’m nothing aha))

Except for in the introduction and acknowledgements section, where Husain displays an ingratiating (though, maybe, again, it’s intentional and would make the book more appealing to the people who need convincing that slaughtering a small animal and butchering it then literally eating its literal body isn’t a morally repugnant act) historic camaraderie with the meat-loving world, which unfortunately (for me) sets the whole text into the uncomfortable position and tone of something like a million little pieces or even the genuinely excellent but still guilty the pleasure of regret: a post-recovery/serious life change memoir where the most shameful acts of ones life are anecdotalised with a faux not-gleeful enthusiasm, i.e. “what kind of a glamorous and exciting cool but damaged person would do this???”

(If you’re not aware, the pleasure of regret is a book I myself wrote, basically about being too naive to function, but it does kinda dwell on the shameful stupid acts, so I too am definitely guilty of the same sin.)

This weird muted praise combined with disapproval for a book that I think is very good and probably important is all because there’s a phrase in the Acknowledgements that soured the book for me and I just can’t get over it and and and and-

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“the vegans I once trolled and the carnivores who now resent me”

the bile-dredging “thanks” in the Acknowledgements that (in my opinion) re-casts the book as friendly dinner party debate rather than as urgent rallying cry

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It’s an interesting book, but it is soaked in blood and it soaked in meat and it contains lots of photography from pro-meat types that is – if you don’t see flesh as food (which I don’t because I’m a living thing and I wouldn’t like to be eaten and also living things are disgusting, why would want to eat one???) – frankly disturbing, and of the kind that would definitely come with a warning label were the splayed corpses, beheaded carcasses, disjointed and dismembered guts and organs and arms and bones and muscles of human origin, and though this is a central part of Husain’s argument – that the acceptability of animal flesh as food but human flesh as sacred is a key point of contention – it is conspicuous that the only images of human flesh “as meat” included in the book are all stills from fictional films: i.e. props, rather than human remains…

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This is a book that looks at “nose to tail” cuisine (exemplified repeatedly here by the middle class bore[s] in your life’s favourite restaurant, St. John, in a way that almost feels like product placement???) and the idea of well-reared, cared-for, “loved” animals being slaughtered and turned into “food” and how there is no logical or morally justifiable connection between this fantasy and the reality of slaughter and what the meaning is, then, I suppose, is that—

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As someone who’s been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, something I make an active effort to try and do with regards to the opinions and feelings of others is not to presume moral certitude is standardised and universal.

Dialectical, hard black/white thinking is something I’ve been told is something I do because I’m mentally ill/a total fuck up, and something that I mustn’t judge others for not doing.

The message that “all meat consumption is evil” may be something that I agree with, but lots of people don’t agree with that and I worry these people would be less likely to respond to a text like Meat Love by giving up meat completely, rather than by returning to a diet of battery-farmed and cruelty-embraced mass produced meat from abused animals. If there’s no such thing as “good meat”, then it doesn’t matter if the meat you eat is “bad”, right? But is that me (and possibly Meat Love) doing “bad” dialectical thinking?

I do think that there isn’t much (if any) moral difference between killing and eating the body of pig that’s been tortured every second of its brief life and killing and eating the body of a pig that’s been hand-fed milk, cuddled daily by a red trousered tosser and served pistachios instead of raw sewage adjacent protein powder and penicillin smoothies…

I agree with Husain, but I really do feel that this is a book that won’t convince anyone either way: I can’t imagine that anyone appalled by meat (like me) is going to suddenly run to a steakhouse after reading this, nor can I imagine any of the kind of people who would refer to people exactly like them but who they don’t know as “hooray henries” won’t snortingly dismiss the text as woke/leftie/pinko/commie nonsense… And put the book down & reserve a table at St. John,

Maybe I’m too close to this; I’ve hung out with moneyed people as they eat seafood platters and suckling pig, I’ve watched people drink the marrow from bones of animals, and even in the 17 years since I’ve been theoretically strictly vegetarian (and the three or four years I’ve been 70/80% vegan, which isn’t enough, I know), I’ve contributed to this evil: I ate some bites of pig flesh stuffed into pig intestines in 2011, some fish flesh in 2013, the chest flesh of a duck in 2014 and some bites of the cooked brain of a sheep in 2015, and I’ve also eaten cheese and eggs and products containing them that definitively caused and contributed to cruelty and abuse…

But – and this is something Husain doesn’t mention in the book – does the human cost of arable farming, the environmental damage caused by pesticides, fertiliser production , displacement of people for farmland, the fuel used for transportation of foodstuffs, the plastic used in packaging, the mining and factories that produce tractors and threshers and and and… does this not also mean that a high proportion of non-meat food is also fucking tainted by human evil, by the repercussions of the destructive capitalistic profit motive and pursuit of perpetual growth?

If it’s food not grown in an allotment or bought direct or near-direct from an organic farm that pays its laborers a living wage, then it’s also fundamentally dangerous and damaging to people and the planet, right? This kind of food is also much more expensive, and the rich hoard their fucking wealth as they try to – and succeed in – controlling and impoverishing the rest of us…

We cannot all afford, financially, to eat well; we cannot afford, environmentally, to not all eat well. And it’s not a paradox, it’s a system that has been deliberately and intentionally constructed…

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Look.

I don’t know.

I’m not an expert on this.

I’m not a moral authority.

I’m a mentally ill “literary lifestyle blogger” (my phrase) who lacks integrity and isn’t actively doing anything to make the world (or even my own life) better.

Meat Love is an an an an an interesting book and it’s clearly well-researched, and informed and informative, and maybe I’m just being cynical when I project that it won’t change any minds; Maybe it will!

But that phrase in the Acknowledgements, it just sticks with me, it holds with me, and it pollutes the rest of the book…

I don’t feel like life, like the future of the planet, is something we should debate. Everyone knows what’s happening/happened and people opposed to positive change are making a choice to do so… It’s not 2016 any more and we cannot pretend that everyone voting for destructive right wing governance is doing so because they’re stupid: a lot of them are doing so because they’re nasty bigoted shits.

& I say this, but But but But but BUT I’m also not acting, am I, I’m not I’m not I’m not-

Sorry, I could probably keep going for hours more here, but for whose benefit?

Not mine.

I’m not happier for writing this kind of stuff!

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AaAaAaAaAanyway, Meat Love is a beautiful object, as is the other book I’ve read from this publisher, and I suppose, broadly, I would advocate for more people reading this and more people thinking about these topics… Environmentalism and capitalism and the ethics of an absent or inconsistent empathy…

But, for me at least, a positive and sustainable future just feels a very long and near-impossible way away and I think it is this hopelessness that mutates into apathy that causes me to do nothing, to have nothing, to be nothing.

A mentally ill literary lifestyle blogger is not something to be.

Order Meat Love direct from Mack Books here