Blood and Soil

Notes on Lierre Keith, Locavores, and Death Fetishism

John Sanbonmatsu / Issue 12 / 8/16/2017

https://uppingtheanti.org/journal/article/blood-and-soil

Until recently, the terms of what we might call human species right – our
perceived, autogenous R echt to appropriate, exploit, torment, and kill other
sentient beings for any and all human purposes, forever – were seen as natural
and immutable, and so went unquestioned. In the late 20th-century, however, an
international social movement for animal liberation arose to challenge the terms
of this presumed right, suggesting that it is both possible and desirable to cease
enslaving and killing other beings, for our sake as well as for theirs. Yet even as
the movement struggles to find its footing in the teeth of government repression,
widespread social prejudice, and an entrenched corporate-capitalist system
based in animal exploitation, a group of intellectuals has risen up in determined
political reaction against it. Like those who earlier mocked suffragism, opposed
the abolition of slavery, or lifted their pens to decry civil rights for blacks, today’s
anti-animal critics are trying to discredit the movement before its critique can
gain traction in the wider culture. Despite the shoddiness of their arguments, the
critics find credulous readers, not because of the quality or novelty of their ideas,
but because their prejudices happen to coincide with the bad conscience of the
majority. The Vegetarian Myth, by Lierre Keith, is a recent entry in what has
become a new genre of apologia for human empire. It is noteworthy for showing
us that that majority now includes a portion of the radical Left, which has
apparently received Keith’s intellectually dishonest and reactionary book with
enthusiasm.

With the wind of the locavore movement at her back and food writer Michael
Pollan as her lodestar, Keith sets out to destroy vegetarianism and, en passant,
animal rights. The author’s own vegetarianism almost killed her, she tells us, and
unless vegans and animal rights activists are stopped, they are going to destroy
the earth’s biosphere. This frankly apocalyptic narrative sets The Vegetarian
Myth apart from scholarly critiques of animal rights by philosophers on the
Right. The Vegetarian Myth may be many things – a paean to diet fads, a primer
on the sins of agriculture, a primitivist anti-vegetarian screed, a Bildungsroman
of Keith’s passage from infantile veganism to the “adult knowledge” of the
necessity of killing other beings. But as a literary form, its nearest cousin is the
millenarian tract. With its determination to divide the world into friends and
enemies, its willingness to scant reason and traduce fact to compel the reader to
its fevered conclusions, and above all its steely determination to abolish a
civilization it deems hopelessly corrupt and wholly evil, The Vegetarian Myth
ultimately has more in common with John’s Revelation than with Rachel
Carson’s Silent Spring. Apocalypticism in leftist discourse is not new – but the
use of apocalyptic rhetoric by an avowed leftist to attack a radical social
movement may be.

A radical feminist turned animal farmer, Keith begins by arguing that because
plant agriculture – rather than the animal economy – is the more serious threat to
the global ecological system, animal liberationists are putting our species on a
collision course with the carrying capacity of the earth by advocating a plant-
based diet. Keith writes movingly of the toll that modern mechanized agriculture
takes on local ecosystems and on the myriad animal species who live in them.
Agriculture ruins rivers through salinization, dumps nitrogen run-off into the sea,
rips the nutrients out of the soil, poisons or displaces millions of birds,
mammals, fish, and reptiles, and turns once thriving ecosystems into desert
wastelands. Corporate agriculture is indeed a “war” on the earth, one akin to
“ethnic cleansing” (37).

Keith is right that the current system of monocrop agriculture, which relies on
unsustainable and ecologically fatal infusions of petrochemicals, is broken. She
is also right that many vegans have no idea how the food on their plates got
there, nor that much of the health food market has been cornered by ecosystem-
destroying corporate behemoths. The trouble, however, is that Keith extends her
sensible critique of corporate and petrochemical-based forms of agriculture to
condemn all agriculture as such – ancient, modern, future. Agriculture, she tells
us, is to blame for everything that has gone wrong in society, from “slavery,
imperialism, [and] militarism” to “chronic hunger, and disease” (4), urbanization,
“class stratification… population overshoot… and a punishing Father God” (43).
Like the born-again Christian who discovers that one cannot be a “little” bit
saved (nor a little bit pregnant), Keith is adamant that “[a]ny attempt to grow
annual crops… will destroy the land” (55). All agriculture ends “in death” (45).
“Agriculture… is the end of the world” (137, emphasis added). Hence Keith’s
solution to this crisis: to reduce the human population by more than 90 percent,
and to replace crop cultivation with a virtuous mix of hunting-gathering and
small-scale animal husbandry.

However, Keith fails to show either that all forms of agriculture are equally bad,
or that agriculture leads inevitably to global “biocide.” There is a false dilemma
built into her argument, since there is historical precedent for sustainable
stewardship of the land. In the Tai Lake region of ancient China, to name but one
example, human beings engaged in sustainable agriculture practices for almost
a thousand years, without depleting the soil, and even increased their yields over
time.1 More recently, the postwar experience with small-scale organic farming
shows that agriculture can be both sustainable and practicable – that farmers
can nourish and replenish the soil, mitigate most of the harmful effects of
clearing the land, conserve fresh water resources, and protect the other species
who suffer the effects of agricultural technique. This is not to say that even
organic agriculture does not come at some ecological cost, nor that nonhuman
beings don’t suffer “collateral damage” from plant cultivation (they do). But it is
to suggest that the choice is not, as Keith argues, between ending agriculture or
accepting planetary death, nor between eating animals and the figure of “a
starving child” (115).

In fact, the international flesh economy is a far greater threat to biotic survival
than plant agriculture. Although Keith fails to mention the fact in her 300-page
book, of the estimated 40 percent of the planetary landmass given over to
agriculture, three quarters of these lands are devoted either to grazing animals
for human consumption or growing plant matter to feed them. Animal agriculture
accounts for about one-fifth of all gases associated with global warming, the
razing of millions of hectares of rainforests in Latin America, the Phillipines, and
elsewhere, and the poisoning of watersheds and riverways.2 The social
consequences of animal production are also abysmal. Intensified animal
agriculture displaces peasants, poor farmers, and Indigenous peoples from their
land, strengthens the power of local oligarchs and the military in the Third World,
and distorts national economies by making them dependent upon an
ecologically unsustainable, violent, export-driven form of development. The
situation is so dire that even world elites worry that the meat economy is
destabilizing the international political order: a special task force of the World
Bank, the US Agency for International Development, and the European Union
urges immediate action to offset “the very substantial contribution of animal
agriculture to climate change and air pollution, to land, soil and water
degradation and to the reduction of biodiversity.”3 Meanwhile, the United
Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has urged the world’s
citizens to reduce – or eliminate – meat from their diets as a way of combating
global warming.

But it’s not enough for Keith to argue that universal vegetarianism would destroy
the world; she suggests that a vegetarian diet is physically incompatible with our
biology as hominids. The Vegetarian Myth in fact reads like a laundry list of all the
fatal, near-fatal, and just plain ugly diseases and illnesses that a vegetarian diet
supposedly brings in its wake. Keith links vegetarianism with “illness and
exhaustion,” hypoglycemia, osteoporosis, autoimmune diseases, tooth decay,
eating disorders, sugar cravings, fertility problems, depression and anxiety,
cessation of endorphin production, endometriosis, schizophrenia, Multiple
Scleroris, and more. Vegetarianism “is not sufficient nutrition for long-term
maintenance and repair of the human body. To put it bluntly, it will damage you”
(9). Vegetarianism, she writes, can “never… provide enough protein, fat, fat
soluable vitamins, or minerals” for the human body. “You will destroy your bones
and joints,” and put yourself “at tremendous risk for cancer, especially the kinds
that kill” (239).
Keith does not bother to provide any scientific evidence for any of her claims.
Instead, warning her reader away from the epidemiological literature on meat
and plant-based diets, Keith turns to personal anecdote and invective. When not
ridiculing vegetarians ad hominem (which she does throughout her text), Keith –
a former vegetarian – begs them to quit before it’s too late, because “I destroyed
my body” (234) and “you don’t want to end up like me” (11).

In fact, both the American Dietic Association and the Canadian Dietic
Association have found that “vegetarian diets are healthful, nutritionally
adequate and provide health benefits in the prevention and treatment of certain
diseases.”4 Moreover, the overwhelming scientific consensus is that vegetarians
are significantly healthier as a group than meat-eaters. Meanwhile, meat
consumption has been positively correlated with colorectal cancer as well as
cancers of the prostate, breast, ovaries, and so on. Keith herself cites a study
showing that Seventh-Day Adventists, the largest population of vegans ever
studied, live longer and “have lower rates of ‘hyptension, diabetes, arthritis,
colon cancer, prostate cancer, fatal CHD in males, and death from all causes’”
(242) when compared to the non-vegan population. By this point in her book,
however, Keith has been arguing for more than 200 pages that living on a vegan or
even vegetarian diet is biologically impossible. How, then, can it be that these
vegans are not only not dying from excruciating diseases, but are actually
healthier than the rest of the population? She writes: “comparing Seventh-Day
Adventists to the average American is absurd, because they are also forbidden to
drink alcohol and coffee and they aren’t allowed to smoke. They eat substantially
more fresh food and substantially fewer doughnuts. Of course they’re healthier”
(242). But whether or not the extraordinary health of the Adventists is partly due
to their not drinking liquor and coffee is irrelevant: Keith has acknowledged that
people living for years on a vegan diet are far healthier than the meat-eating
mainstream. Keith thus refutes Keith.

But it is not enough for Keith to claim that we are required to eat meat. She must
also show that eating other animals is morally permissible. Killing other animals
is justified, she writes, because it is natural. In order to advance this claim, she
makes an unusal methodological choice: in the face of a veritable mountain of
scholarly work on animal consciousness and animal rights in analytic and
continental philosophy, sociology, political theory, feminist theory, literary
studies, and a dozen scientific fields, Keith pretends that none of it exists. Let me
be clear: Lierre Keith has written a book-length treatment of animal rights and
ethical vegetarianism that ignores everything written on the subject over the last
century and beyond. Besides being grossly unfair to advocates of animal rights,
Keith’s anti-intellectual approach also leads her to advance a variety of bizarre
and unsupportable claims. Among other things, she argues that plants are
sentient (a position held by not a single reputable scientist in the world) and that
sentience is anyway irrelevant in a discussion of moral interests (a position not
held by a single moral philosopher in the world). She also argues that other
animals “choose” to be our captives, and indeed prefer a life of slavery and
exploitation to freedom in the wild. These and similar positions have all been
examined and demolished in the scholarly literature.

The Vegetarian Myth is the kind of book, though, that eschews the philosophy
and sociology of human-animal relations for best- selling diet fad books like
Protein Power. Keith goes on for pages about “the cholesterol myth” and includes
a two-page chart comparing the teeth, gall bladders, colon size, etc., of dogs,
sheeps, and humans, all in order to prove that humans are not “meant” to eat a
vegetarian diet, but rather a meat-based one. Throughout, Keith falls back on the
locavore version of intelligent design, conflating an accidental natural capacity
with immanent teleological purpose. We learn, for example, that cows and other
animals brought to the Americas for ruthless exploitation five centuries ago “all
have the lives they were meant to have” (271); meanwhile, “we [humans] are
built to consume meat” (141). But it is not hard to see the fallacy in this line of
reasoning. Looking down at my hands, for example, I see vestigial claws – “nails.”
In evolutionary terms, claws served many useful purposes, including self-
defense. But the fact that I retain the ability to use my vestigial claws to gouge
out the eyes of my neighbour does not therefore mean that I am entitled to do so.
Similarly, whether or not our bodies are capable of digesting animal parts has no
ethical significance. We can also digest human flesh and bone in a pinch (and
many have, through the centuries), but that fact is a poor excuse for
anthropophagy.

II
Forgetting that human labour is an historical and social production, not a given
natural “fact,” Keith treats the human killing and exploitation of other animals as
though such practices were pre-social, even pre-categorical. However, whenever
humans find themselves in practical relations to other animals, they and the
animals are instantly bound up in historical, social relations. Unlike the shark
who seizes a smaller fish in its jaws, when humans appropriate the bodies of
other animals they always do so in media res, i.e. in the context of culture and its
web of ideologies, mythologies, and so on. Capital, too, is a social relation. One
that is culturally, discursively, and semiotically mediated. The same is true of
meat as capital, one of the biggest commodities traded on the world market.
Keith neglects the fact that the struggle over human species imperialism in
general, and over the Recht of humans to organize society around the
consumption of animal flesh in particular, is a struggle over the representation,
psychology, and even existential nature of meat. TheVegetarian Myth enters in to
this struggle, but in ways that the author is unable to comprehend.

Here we must read Keith’s text as an expression of the contradictions of

capitalist society. The key to such a reading lies in the contradictory nature of the
locavore movement and with that movement’s unconscious articulation with the
violence and aggression of late capitalist culture.

Most of the educated public is by now familiar with the term “locavore.”
Dovetailing with the urban “guerilla gardening” movements of the 1980s, the
locavore movement in the US came to the fore of popular consciousness in 2006
with the publication of Michael Pollan’s bestseller, The Omnivore’s Dilemma.
Behind the movement is a well-meaning desire for healthful, ecologically
sustainable, socially just, and locally grown foods. Locavores favour small farms
over big ones, organic and sustainable agricultural techniques, and backyard
plots filled with chickens and other animals for DIY slaughter. Some locavores
(like Keith) also subscribe to bioregionalism – the idea that we should only, or to
the extent possible, consume foodstuffs that are native to our particular biotic
region. Eating locally, or growing one’s own food, is said to build community and
encourage sustainable farming practices.

Prima facie, the virtues of locavorism seem clear. Supporting local farmers, or
family-owned ones, makes vastly more sense socially and ecologically than
does supporting corporate giants like ConAgra or ADM. Moreover, like its sister
Slow Food movement in Europe, locavorism is as much about affirming a
communitarian ethos as an environmentalist land ethic. However, while
generally depicted as a progressive or leftist movement, locavorism is more
ideologically ambiguous than it at first appears to be.

We might first note that locavorism cribs heavily from the American pastoral
ideal, which precedes it by centuries. That ideal, personified by “the gentleman
farmer” who leaves the hurly-burly of urban life for the simple pleasures of
growing his own food, can be traced back to Thoreau’s Walden and Thomas
Jefferson’s letters praising the virtues of national isolationism and self-
sufficiency through immersion in local rural life. As an ideology, the tenets of
American pastoralism have remained remarkably consistent since the 18th
century, and they tend toward the right rather than left end of the political
spectrum.

For its part, the locavore movement has yoked an unproblematized naturalism to
a post-Fordist consumer culture of “niche” commodity production: speaking of
their hope of creating “the best-tasting animals around,” locavore farmers Bill
and Nicolette Niman have built an $85 million business in goat flesh by teaming
up with “a parade of investors” and hiring a “new management team…led by Jeff
Swain, who had been at the company that produces Coleman Natural Beef.”5

The organo-libertarian narrative of self-reliance is meanwhile strongly connected

to an aesthetic of self-realization. Food not only tastes better when it is locally
grown; being “in touch” with the land bestows existential authenticity on the act
of consumption, grounding it in ostensibly unmediated relations with producers.
In some cases, the fetish of the local drifts also toward nativism: native plants,
native peoples, those who belong and those who do not. As Vasile Sta?nescu
observes, the environmental movement’s emphasis on “the local” can exhibit “a
deeply disturbing strain of conservatism, provincialism, xenophobia and anti-
immigrant sentiment.”6 In this regard, it is telling that Keith’s touchstone for the
ideal animal farm is Polyface Farms, owned and operated by Joel Salatin, a
graduate of Bob Jones University, the right-wing Christian fundamentalist
college. Like others on the agrarian right, Salatin has voiced suspicion of foreign
workers in America’s fields, and has made common cause with the anti-
immigrant movement.7 While Keith would find such a nativism anathema to her
anti- imperialist politics, she seems unaware of the hazards that her agrarian,
anti-cosmopolitan proscriptions bring in their train, and tone deaf to the
implications of aligning herself with (among others) Salatin, Teddy Roosevelt,
and the Mormons. Even Michael Pollan, the intellectual godfather of locavorism,
acknowledges the conservative implications of the movement, approvingly citing
a 2007 editorial in The American Conservative calling locavorism,“a conservative
cause if ever there was one.”8

While ordinary social conservatives would turn the clock back to the 1950s,
that’s nothing for Keith, who would like to turn the clock back 10,000-46,000
years. Whereas hunting was always tied to “the sacred,” she avers, agriculture
led to “religious theocracies” (72). Keith’s thrust is that killing and eating animals
is our heritage, and we ought to honour that heritage and keep it up. An
unapologetic primitivist, Keith asserts that hunting is natural and that animal
flesh is “the food of our ancestors” (249). Lest any of Keith’s readers not get her
point, her publisher helpfully posts a colour photograph of the cave paintings of
Lascaux on the front cover of her book. Keith refers several times to the
paintings, waxing poetic about her desire to participate in the world of the people
who created them. What “literally made us human,” she writes, was our hunting
of the “megafauna of the prehistoric world, the aurochs and antelopes and
mammoths” (28).

Here, the curious reader might wonder what happened, exactly, to all those
lovely mammoths and aurochs. Keith doesn’t say. But the prevailing scientific
view is that humans hunted them to quick extinction. In fact, while Keith
repeatedly invokes the many inherent virtues and “sacredness” of pre-
civilizational hunter- gathering cultures, she fails to ask how good those hunter-
gatherers were at managing their ecological “resources.” Jared Diamond fills in
the blanks:

Beginning with the first human colonization of the Australian continent around
46,000 years ago and the subsequent prompt extinction of most of Australia’s
large marsupials and other large animals, every human colonization of a land
mass formerly lacking humans – whether of Australia, North America, South
America, Madagascar, the Mediterranean islands, or Hawaii and New Zealand
and dozens of other Pacific islands – has been followed by a wave of extinction of
large animals that had evolved without fear of humans and were easy to kill, or
else succumbed to human-associated habitat changes, introduced pest
species, and diseases.9

These and similar grim facts would seem to complicate Keith’s romantic portrait
of hunter-gatherers. Presumably this is why she leaves them out. Unfortunately,
the pattern of human domination and extermination Diamond describes never
ended. Today, technological capitalism has greatly improved the rate and
efficiency of extermination, speeding up the grisly business many times over. It is
estimated that as many as one in three to one in seven mammalian, reptilian,
amphibian, and avian species will be obliterated from the earth in a matter of
decades.

III

The critique of all this carnage has impelled capitalism to protect its own
“heritage.” Keith’s romanticization of killing other animals ends up helping to
recover the meat mystique by reinforcing human species right just as it has come
under challenge. In the wake of hundreds of health studies showing a high
correlation between meat consumption and numerous human diseases, along
with growing public awareness of the ecological and moral crimes of factory
farming, the meat industry has been strategizing for years now about ways to
prop up its sagging public image. Faced with these twin threats, the industry has
gone on the offensive and has spent hundreds of millions of dollars in a
concerted, multi-pronged counter-movement. While Keith too is against factory
farming, her defense of killing and eating animals provides ideological cover for
this larger project.

Locavore discourse enables the animal industry to recuperate the lost “aura” of
flesh-as-commodity by re-naturalizing killing and eating other animals. In the
carno-locavore narrative, corporate or industrialized agriculture is damaging our
ecosystem, bad for our health, and “cruel” to the animals trapped inside the
system. Worst of all (for middle class locavores), it produces inferior
commodities – bad tasting flesh, cow’s milk tainted with hormones, and an
unsafe food supply. But happily there is a solution. If only we grow our own food,
raise and kill our own “meat,” we can defeat the corporate Machine, restore the
ecosystem to its former natural splendor, and feel good again about what we eat.
It’s a win-win for all concerned – for “consumers,” for poor people starved by
trade imbalances, for ecosystems ruined by a petrochemical agriculture system,
and for the farm animals who will now live “pampered” and healthy lives before
being mercifully killed.

However, the locavore ideal of “authentic” food production and consumption

segues imperceptibly into the aestheticization of violence and the naturalization
of human species right. Here, the libidinal pleasures of killing animals are
conjoined with a narrative of (white) bourgeois entitlement. Since the publication
of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, numerous articles have appeared in the New York
Times and other elite media highlighting the sensuous pleasures of killing and
eating animals one has “grown” for oneself. The Times, for example, relates how
“artist and agricultural activist” Laura Parker and her friends butchered a pig
raised on a friend’s farm, in order “to see if its flavor would match that of the dirt
it grew up on.”10 Similarly, urbanites drive long distances into remote rural areas
to personally kill and butcher “their” own animal, or spend as much as $10,000
for a course on killing and butchering.11 Meanwhile, hip young butchers exert
“the raw, emotional appeal of an indie band.” Fans can thus “be a part of meat
and liquor mash-ups at a local bar where he butchers a pig while people drink
cocktails….”12 In these stories (often in the “Style” section), the environmental
benefits of locavorism are mentioned in passing, but what counts is the
bourgeois quest for an “authentic” experience – a “primal connection” – in which
the consumer looks “his” animal in the eye.

The spectacle of killing thus gets wrapped around the spectacle of conspicuous,
and strangely eroticized, consumption – young, white, upper middle class
urbanites gathering around the table with friends to gaze upon the vanquished,
dismembered body of a goat or pig.13 When Michael Pollan and his upper
middle class white friends, seated in the lovely enclosed porch of a million-dollar
home in Berkeley tuck into the succulent flesh of a goat they have personally
butchered – and when the Times lavishes a three-page spread in the Magazine
on the spectacle, along with the recipe – we are light-years away from Keith’s
“natural predation” and closer to the fascist’s mockery of his powerless victims.
Such spectacles are clearly performative. In them, consumption merges into
sadism.

Theinnovation of The Vegetarian Myth is to bring this death fetishism to the Left.
As a young vegan, Keith relates, she would go to great lengths not to kill the
insects in her garden. Then came her epiphany: the soil in her garden “wants”
and needs blood and animal tissue (20). From then on, having arrived at the
“adult knowledge” that “life isn’t possible without death” (3), she breaks down
and feeds her soil “blood and bones” (20). To those with a historical imagination,
this literal conflation of Blut und Boden, blood and soil, cannot but sound creepy.
There are viable non- animal alternatives to fertilization and enrichment of the
soil, from phosphorous and seaweed to “night soil” (human waste) and the
waste of wild animals living on the land. But Keith dismisses them out of hand.
Plants only grow, she maintains, in blood-soaked earth – “Blood meal, bone
meal, dead animals.” In fact, experts consider blood-meal hazardous for plants.
Yet so intent is Keith to justify a political economy built on blood and bones – let
us be clear, she would organize the ideal society around the domination and
killing of other animals, in perpetuity – that she doesn’t notice. “I’ve learned to
kill,” Keith writes. “And I’ve learned to say my own grace” (271).

While other locavore afficionados have acknowledged the personal difficulty of

reconciling themselves to killing animals they ostensibly “care for” – “The
hardest part of the slaughter was the betrayal….The pigs get in the trailer
because they trust you, they get out of the trailer because they trust you, they go
into the pen because they trust you.”14 – Keith, by contrast, cannot see any
contradiction between expressing her “love” for her tender charges one moment,
and slitting their throats and bleeding them out the next. Contemplating her
friend’s killing of animals on her farm, she consoles herself with the knowledge
that the victims “would have been well cared for, indulged even” (20). Meanwhile,
her own chickens “happily lounged” (154) and her cows “spent contented lives”
(154) at pasture – again before having their throats cut or getting the pickaxe or
bullet to the brain.

By now we are all familiar with the crude Cartesian view of animals as mere
unthinking machines, and we all know where that kind of thinking leads. But we
lack a proper phenomenology of the dissociative condition that enables a carno-
locavore like Lierre Keith to describe, with warmth and enthusiasm, the animals
on her farm as “the joy of her days” (61), beings who will “accept you” – beings
intelligent, perceptive, and sensitive enough to “come to you for help” and for
“cuddle sessions” (24) – and then turn around and celebrate her killing of them.
One cannot but be reminded of Adorno and Horkheimer’s caustic remark about
the Nazis’ supposed love of animals: “The precondition of the fascists’ pious love
of animals, nature, and children is the lust of the hunter. The idle stroking of
children’s hair and animal pelts signifies: this hand can destroy.”15

How does a vegan who once “wanted to believe that my life – my physical
existence – was possible without killing, without death” (14), end up waxing
rhapsodic about hunting and singing joyously as she kills her farm animals with
her own bare hands? But then, how does a radical feminist opposed to violence,
war, and militarism end up extolling the virtues of a political economy that
subjects other beings to unending human domination?

IV

In the 1940s, Horkheimer and Adorno observed that, “for the being endowed with
reason [i.e. Man]... concern for the unreasoning animal is idle. Western
civilization has left that to women.”16 The early Frankfurt School theorists
reasoned that, like nonhuman beings, women too had been subject to the terror
and violence of a patriarchal order whose guiding premise remains the
suppression of feeling and sentiment and the fetish of control over self and
other. Half a century later, Carol Adams extended this critique into a“feminist-
vegetarian critical theory” in The Sexual Politics of Meat.17 Among other things,
Adams showed that “meat” is not something “natural” at all, but a complex
social text abounding in the metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties of
gender. Subsequent feminist critics have since elaborated on Adams’ work,
deepening our understanding of how the political economy of animal killing has
taken place within a discursive structure shaped by the values, institutions, and
myths of patriarchal culture. Among other things, they have shown how the
denigration of the so-called “feminine” emotions as mere “sentiment” by a wider,
uncomprehending masculine culture obscures the radical ethical and political
potential of mitgefu?lh – “feeling-with” or com-passion.18

Faced with this extensive feminist literature, Keith lapses into silence. Instead,
urging us to embrace the “adult knowledge” that shooting pigs in the head and
wringing chickens’ necks is necessary, beautiful work, Keith accuses animal
rights activists of sentimentalism. She turns to Roger Scruton, the reactionary
philosopher, to make her case for her. Sentiment, according to Scruton, is really
only self- love. “For the sentimentalist,” he writes, “it is not the object but the
subject of the emotion which is important.”19 By this topsy turvy logic, the
animal rights activist who is moved to political action by the unspeakable acts of
violence and violation we inflict on the bodies of hapless beings in our control, is
guilty of narcissism and anthropocentrism.

One of the most prominent conservative critics of animal rights, Scruton is a

frank misogynist who blames feminism for having ruined the natural relations
between the sexes (“[w]hen women forge their own ‘gender identity,’ in the way
the feminists recommend, they become unattractive to men,” etc.).20 It is
therefore no small irony that Keith, a radical feminist, should choose Scruton as
her ally to attack sentiment, which for generations has been a favourite target of
conservatives opposed to social change. (In 1837, for example, pro-slavery
Congressman Henry L. Pinckney denounced the “sickly-sentimentality” of
abolitionists).21 In reality, however, many of Keith’s arguments are conservative
ones, since they turn on various forms of the naturalistic fallacy. Naturalistic
arguments have long been the weapon of choice for reactionaries, since they
allow them to mask normative claims as statements of “fact.” For centuries,
conservatives have attacked social reformers and radical democrats as
dangerous individuals who would betray the “natural” order in the name of some
starry-eyed and irresponsible utopia.

Keith repeatedly describes animal rights activists as naive, infantile figures who
cling to the vision of a world that does not exist and cannot be. “The challenge of
adulthood,” she explains, “is to remember our ethical dreams and visions in the
face of the complexities and frank disappointments of reality” (76). Despite her
otherwise radical politics, Keith thus joins other conservatives in denying the
possibility of a world in which killing and domination are not the norm. Keith’s
proximity to Scruton is closer even than she realizes, since in his latest book, The
Uses of Pessimism and the Danger of False Hope, Scruton like Keith attacks
“optimists and idealists… with their ignorance of human nature and human
society, and their naive hopes about what can be changed.”22 While Keith would
reject such a sentiment when directed against progressive social movements
like feminism and anti-racism, she is unable to see how Scruton’s vicious
attacks on animal rights might be of a piece with his larger hatred of
egalitarianism. Nor is she aware of the ways in which her own positions are
reflections in miniature of the ideological program of corporate agribusiness. In
conducting its propaganda campaign to associate animal rights with extremism,
the meat industry itself has adopted the strategy of isolating “radicals” while
“cultivating” so-called “idealists.” The goal is to educate the latter so that they
might become “realists.”23 This same language of nai?ve “idealists” versus
meat-eating “realists” is identical to the language Lierre Keith uses
throughout The Vegetarian Myth.

The question remains why so many leftists and environmentalists seem to be

taken with such a poorly argued and politically regressive book. The seemingly
obvious answer is that The Vegetarian Myth – published by a small anarchist
press in Oakland, California – simply reinforces every prejudice the left might
ever have about vegetarianism, veganism, or animal liberation. W hile Keith
describes vegetarians as “Pied Pipers” who have led the left astray and “infused”
it with “the righteous aura… of plant-based foods” (153), the reality is the
opposite: most leftists remain as dismissive of vegetarianism and animal rights
today as they were a century ago.24 However, this cannot be the only
explanation, since until now the left has seen fit to ignore the animal question
altogether. What, then, accounts for the left’s sudden interest in attacking a
young social movement that is already under siege by the state and by global
capital? 1

Ironically, the answer can be found in the very failings of The Vegetarian Myth: its
aesthetic of killing, its impatience with scholarship, its contempt for sentiment.
Coming after a period of extended historic defeat for the left (including for radical
feminism), The Vegetarian Myth, with its voluntarist politics and its apocalyptic
rejection of civilization itself (136), flashes up like a primordial cri de coeur
against the existing order. At a moment when alternative forms of culture have
been all but destroyed, and when neither socialism nor feminism are anywhere
on the public agenda, is it any wonder that Keith should feel personally
empowered by dominating and consuming hapless animals, or feel the need to
vent her rage against other marginal, powerless radicals (vegans)? By the same
token, is it surprising that elements on the left should be drawn to the death
fetishism of carno-locavorism, in lieu of an effectual political program? In the
contemporary context, speciesism, rather than anti-Semitism, may really be the
socialism of fools.

I have already implied that the preoccupation in American grassroots politics

with locavorism – often to the exclusion of virtually all other forms of
oppositional politics – is indicative of the overdetermination of the radical
imaginary by the structural imperatives of post-Fordist capital. However, the
problem goes deeper than this. The acute crisis of the left – its ideological
incoherence and strategic drift – stems in part from its unexamined relationship
to a humanist tradition that obstinately reduces the other conscious beings to
the status of mere things for our unending use and consumption. Since the world
ecological crisis is itself a direct result of just such a predatorial conception of
human agency, this means that the Left is itself complicit in ecocidal and
exterminationist forms of violence. In this regard, the uncritical reception of
Keith’s book simply speaks to the inability of contemporary critical intellectuals
and activists to strike out on a path that would be truly independent of the
dominant technological order.

Carno-locavore discourse is at one with patriarchal capital’s attempt to work out

a new mode of regulation in the face of the massive social and ecological
contradictions of the existing system. Part of capital’s quest involves shoring up
the legitimacy of systemic violence. And this is as much a psycho-affective
project as an economic one. Here, Herbert Marcuse’s analysis of how the
release of libidinal instincts – rather than their repression –becomes constitutive
of late capitalism is apropos. Whereas, in healthy social forms, the destructive
drive is subordinated to and harnessed by the erotic, life-preserving drive, Eros
now finds expression in the drive toward the annihilation of all life. This same
dynamic manifests in the death fetishism of the carno-locavores, who affirm the
control and destruction of other animals with such satisfaction. The fascination
with domination of the weak now takes place openly, in the celebration of
technics of extermination. But to reconcile oneself to the enslavement and
killing of sensitive, conscious beings is only to accept the further intrusion of
technological rationality into the realm of everyday life.

Keith is right that the agricultural system is broken and that, among other things,
we must reduce our population if we are to avoid destroying the biotic
community. We should also move towards smaller scale, sustainable farms.
However, the problem facing humanity is not plant-based agriculture, per se, but
a totalizing system of domination that reduces humans, animals, and
ecosystems to the stuff of pure instrumental control. A true solution to the
ecological crisis, and to the violence of corporate industrialized agricultural,
must therefore be sought in a socialist praxis that breaks not only with capitalism
but with a leftist culture that is itself complicit in the violence of human beings
toward the other creatures.

Notes

1 E.C. Ellis and S.M. Wang, “Sustainable traditional agriculture in the Tai Lake
Region of China,” Agriculture Ecosystems and Environment (1997), 61:177-193.
2 “Food, Livestock Production, Energy, Climate Change, and Health,” The Lancet,
vol. 370, (6 October 2007), No. 9594: 1253-1263.
3 Henning Steinfeld, et al., Livestock’s Long Shadow, published by the Livestock,
Environment, and Development Initiative (LEAD) of the Food and Agricultural
Organisation of the United Nations (2006).
4 “Vegetarian Eating,” Eatright.org (website of the American Dietic Association,
undated).
5 Kim Severson, “With Goat, a Rancher Breaks Away from the Herd,” N ew York T
imes, Oct. 15, 2008, D4. The Nimans have been given plum real estate on the
Op-Ed page of the Times, where Nicolette Niman writes that while “it’s sensible
to cut back on consumption of animal-based foods,” the consumer should strive
for a “more sophisticated” approach “than just making blanket condemnations
of certain foods.” An $85 million business is of course well worth defending. N
icolette H ahn N iman, “The Carnivore’s Dilemma,” N ew York T imes, Oct. 31,
2009, A17.
sAnbonmAtsu: blood And soil 89
6 Vasile Sta?nescu, “‘Green’ Eggs and Ham? The Myth of Sustainable Meat and
theDangeroftheLocal,”inJohnSanbonmatsu,ed.,CriticalTheoryandAnimal
Liberation (Rowman and Littlefield Press, 2011), 247.
7 Sta?nescu, 250-51.
8 Michael Pollan, Magazine, 65.
9 Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and S teel, 9.
10 Dara Kerr, “Gourmet Dirt,” N ew York T imes M agazine, Dec. 13, 2009, 42.
11 Melena Ryzik, “The Anti-Restaurants,” N ew York T imes, Aug. 27, 2008, D1.
Alex Williams, “Slaugterhouse Live,” N ew York T imes, Oct. 25, 2009, Sunday
Styles section, 2.
12 Kim Severson, “Young Idols with Cleavers Rule the Stage,” N ew York T imes,
July 8, 2009, D5.
13 Michael Pollan, “Communal Oven: The 36-hour Dinner Party,” N ew York T
imes M agazine, Oct. 19, 2010. See also, Peter Applebome, “A Party for Local
Farming and Locally Grown Food,” N ew York T imes, Sept. 13, 2009.
14 Tamara Murphy, quoted in Moskin, p. D4.
15 Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment:
Philosophical Fragments (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 210.
Horkheimer and Adorno, 206.
16 Carol Adams, The S exual Politics of M eat (New York: Continuum, 1990).
17 CarolJ.AdamsandJosephineDonovan,TheFeministCareTraditioninAnimal
Ethics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). Lori Gruen, “Dismantling
Oppression: An Analysis of the Connection between Women and Animals,” ed.
Greta Gaard, Ecofeminism: Women, Animals, N ature (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1993), 60-90.
18 Roger Scruton, Animal Rights and Wrongs (London: Claridge Press, Ltd.,
1996), 127. Quoted in Keith, 75.
19 Roger Scruton, “Modern Manhood,” City Journal, Autumn 1999 (http://www.
city-journal.org/html/9_4_a3.html).
20 Manisha Sinha, “The Caning of Charles Sumner: Slavery, Race, and Ideology
in the Age of the Civil War,” Journal of the Early R epublic, Vol. 23, No. 2 (Summer,
2003).
21 AdcopyforRogerScruton,TheUsesofPessimismandtheDangerofFalseHope
(Oxford, 2010).
22 John Stauber, “Managing Activism: PR Advice for ‘Neutralizing’ Democracy,”
Center for Media and Democracy, PR Watch, Second Quarter 2002, Vol. 9, No. 2
23 (http://www.prwatch.org/prwissues/2002Q2/managing.html). See Harold
Brown, “Examining the Dynamic Between the Animal Industry and the Animal
Movement,” paper at the Thinking About Animals Conference, Brock University,
March 2009.
24 See John Sorenson, “Constructing Extremists, Rejecting Compassion:
Ideological Attacks on Animal Advocacy from Right and Left,” in Sanbonmatsu,
219-238.
25 Keith is not the only leftist attacking animal rights. See also Peter
Staudenmeier, “Ambiguities of Animal Rights,” Institute of Social Ecology, Jan. 1,
2005 (http:// www.social-ecology.org/2005/01/ambiguities-of-animal-rights/).

1. Keith is not the only leftist attacking animal rights. See also Peter
Staudenmeier, “Ambiguities of Animal Rights,” Institute of Social Ecology,
Jan. 1, 2005 (http:// www.social-ecology.org/2005/01/ambiguities-of-
animal-rights/). ↩︎