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Australian Law Reform Commission - Reform Journal |
Charlie the Tuna, and other ‘suicide food’ fallacies
By Mark Kingwell*
We’ve all seen them, adorning the signage of a local rib joint or charrusqueria: a laughing lamb pouring barbecue sauce on its leg, a cow wearing a bib happily slicing off steaks from its own haunch, a slouching chicken beckoning diners toward a char-broil spot. Charlie, the hipster beret-sporting tuna, longed to taste good enough for the picky StarKist canners. Kermit the Frog once angled to get a job shilling a fried frog’s-leg restaurant. In Douglas Adams ’The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, a talking cow recommends its own liver as main course.
These images, once funny or charming, have an increasingly ghoulish tinge now that humans are more and more uneasy about their position at the top of the food chain. Witness the recent spate of hand-wringing books and films about consumption, the slow and organic food movements, and the idea of lessening one’s food-consumption footprint—even as obesity is on the rise throughout the developed world. What we eat is an ethical issue. But so is how we picture and package it.
Making animals publicists for their own digestion is the last revenge of humans on their food. Some bloggers bluntly label the images 'suicide food' and have collected an unnerving archive of them over the last year (see suicidefood.blogspot.com). 'Suicide food is any depiction of animals that act as though they wish to be consumed,' they write. Suicide food actively participates in or celebrates its own demise. Suicide food identifies with the oppressor. Suicide food is a bellwether of our decadent society. Suicide food says, ‘Hey! Come on! Eating meat is without any ethical ramifications! See, Mr. Greenjeans? The animals aren’t complaining! So what’s your problem?’ Suicide food is not funny.' The outraged-theorist tone of the prose may not be for everyone, nor the aggressive vegetarian position, but suicide food forces us all to examine our actions. Suicide food is a naturalizing myth. It makes animals complicit in our desires to eat them.
Anthropomorphising animals is a familiar move, and has its benefits. Satire often employs animals that are more human than human, for better and worse: Jonathan Swift’s noble Houyhnhnms and Will Self’s apes are both cruel reflections on our weakness. But naturalising myths cut both ways. The family-values boosters who saw the nuclear family defended by the staunchly faithful breeding in March of the Penguins may be shocked to hear of the polymorphous erotic antics of bonobo monkeys, our much nearer evolutionary cousins. (Nobody is likely to make a documentary called 'The Orgy of the Bonobos'.) Nothing is natural until we make it so, and we usually do that for self-serving reasons. We should defend the reasons, not hide behind the charming fictions.
Suicide food is vile because it adds cuteness to the common avoidance tactic of packaging dead animals in forms distant from their lived reality. We like animals better, can relate to them more easily, when they look and speak like cheerful cartoon versions of themselves than an actual pig. From Grimm to Disney, domestication of the animal world has been a staple of our story-telling; modern childhood is probably unimaginable without it.
At the same time, the death of winsome animals is harder to bear. Suicide food is thus a neat resolution of the cute-animal paradox. Depict a cute beast with a cartoon face (aw..), then have it cheerfully dispose of itself so...we don’t have to (yay!). See, kids, the happy pig stripping bacon off its belly! Look how fetching, the lobster throwing itself into a pot!
The logical extension of suicide food is murder food. That’s when one member of the target species offers up another member, usually on a platter, for human consumption. I always wonder who decides which pig gets to be the one in the apron and chef’s toque, and which, the supine with an apple in its mouth—a variant of the Goofy/Pluto Conundrum, (why does one dog get to be the man while the other has to stay, you know, a dog?).
If you are going to eat animals, you must at least confront the truth of their lives—and deaths. We raise or hunt these creatures in order to eat them. The circumstances of their demise should not be a black box, decorated with lurid cartoons of them killing themselves. There are associated costs, too, in hectares of rainforest destroyed or square metres of carbon dioxide generated. Enjoying the fruits of a choice, especially a violent or damaging one, without bearing any of its costs is one definition of decadence, as the bloggers rightly claim. It is taking comfort without taking responsibility.
Decadence is not just about food, or even advertising. Suppose that you drive a large luxury SUV—this form of experience is impossible without a reliable supply of fossil fuel. Suppose further that this supply can be maintained only through military actions in which young men and women are killed daily. (Those actions are defended with reference to other reasons, of course, like liberation and justice and democracy). Now suppose, finally, that you have no wish to give up the first supposition because of your knowledge of the second. What would you do? Would you, perhaps to cover your discomfort or suppress your knowledge, decorate your vehicle with large yellow ribbons and flags and loudly express your ‘support’ for the dead?
The process of a society consuming itself, feeding off its own citizens by making them into digestible energy, is what the philosopher Paul Virilio calls endocolonization. Endocolonizers do not exploit distant peoples and resources, they mine their own populations. Suicide food is imagery that makes animals unwitting accomplices to their own death—we can presume they would object if they were able.
Our own forms of self-consumption are more confused and even more sinister. We know fossil fuel, like meat, comes from dead animals. But which species is actually being burned?
*Mark Kingwell is a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto. He specialises in theories of politics and culture.
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URL: http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/ALRCRefJl/2007/4.html