The Conflicting Meanings of “Meaningful Meat”
By: Yoshua Wakeham
Tags: Culture, Ethics, Veganism, Vegan, Tradition

Photo by Pascal Debrunner on Unsplash

Every so often, I experience a spasm of quixotic impatience at the slow advance of veganism. It’s painful to imagine the suffering endured daily by the animals living under human dominion, and all but intolerable to contemplate that suffering multiplied by years, decades, or even centuries. I try to be both pragmatic and optimistic in my approach to food ethics, but I have my moments of weakness, and in those moments, I sometimes fantasize about how things would be if I were Benevolent Dictator of the World. Wouldn’t Earth be a better place if I could simply order the bobby calves¹ reunited with their mothers, the breeding sows set free, or foie gras confined to the dustbin of history?

When a fist raised in ethical outrage feels inadequate, it’s easy to be seduced by visions of an iron glove. But while I imagine the world’s carnists² smiling and thanking me as they adapt themselves to the new plant-based world order, this kind of swift and unilateral transition to veganism — if it could really be effected — would be anything but peaceful. Rather, it would entail an onslaught of psychic and physical violence. And, in reality, it would be immoral and self-defeating to trade the large-scale suffering of animals for the large-scale suffering of the humans who eat and wear them.

Violence would be necessary not only because humans are creatures of habit, but because our dietary choices are simultaneously an expression of our personal preferences, our ethical convictions, and our connection to community and culture. In a nutshell, we identify with what we eat. You don’t just eat mushroom stroganoff, you’re someone who eats mushroom stroganoff — or spinach fatayer, or apple pie, or roast suckling pig. We readily perceive an attack on our dietary choices as an attack on our identity.

Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

The tension that arises when our diet puts those aspects of our identity at odds was eloquently captured by Alicia P. Q. Wittmeyer in a recent opinion piece for the New York Times. Although Ms. Wittmeyer is uneasy with the environmental and ethical implications of eating animal products, she views the shared preparation and consumption of “meaningful meat” as an indispensable link to her Chinese Malaysian heritage. As the child of an immigrant, raised thousands of miles from her mother’s birthplace, Ms. Wittmeyer has found links to her heritage hard to come by. And it’s difficult to imagine a more meaningful dish than the suckling pig that Ms. Wittmeyer eats at her mother’s end-of-chemo party. The pig is not only a connection to southern Chinese cuisine and Chinese Malaysian culture in the large, but a specific connection to her mother, whose childhood in Malaysia was marked by the annual preparation of roast suckling pig on Tomb Sweeping Day.

The roast pig demonstrates how traditions (carnist or otherwise) can at once honour our ancestors, bind our families, and strengthen our diasporas. Traditions underwrite our group memberships, and culinary traditions — because they unite sensory and social experience — are particularly helpful in the quest to harmonize our individual and collective identities.

Photo by Christina Warner on Unsplash

But if customs are not lightly put aside, nor are they beyond reproach. To paraphrase Cyprian, custom that sidesteps the truth is only the antiquity of error. That is, a customary belief may enshrine an error of fact; a customary practice may enshrine an error of ethics.

When it comes to eating meat, moreover, we should speak not only of the antiquity of error but the antiquity of terror. The pigs sacrificed on Tomb Sweeping Day are just one example:³ however respectfully these animals were treated, and however justifiable their sacrifice from the perspective of those who sacrificed them, it is still a bald fact that thousands of innocent creatures — intelligent creatures capable of play, love, and suffering — had their lives cut short for human purposes.

I don’t mean to litigate the actions of previous generations, nor to argue that the morality of an action can be divorced from its historical context. But in this example as in many others, if we perpetuate the custom, we are making a political and moral commitment. After all, even the most stable traditions change, evolve, and sometimes disappear. Our choices enlist us in that process, either resisting or encouraging the change.

Ms. Wittmeyer’s endeavor to stay connected to her Chinese Malaysian heritage is admirable. We should not lightly dismiss the traditions that others choose to engage in, any more than we should dismiss our own traditions — and that implies a need for respect, dialogue, and patience in the fight against animal injustice. Certainly, reflecting on Ms. Wittmeyer’s article has made it that much harder for me to entertain my dictatorial fantasies.

But the next time you eat a meal containing “meaningful meat,” consider not only the meanings the meat carries for you, but those it carries for the animal whose flesh you’re eating, and others of its kind.