If people can become meat to other predators while retaining the complexity of our humanity (being more than food), as a predatory species we humans must recognise that all living entities that can be eaten — people, other animals, plants — are both potential food and always more than that.
Plumwood provides a sophisticated critique of both the utilitarian and rights traditions, and of American cultural ecofeminism. She also offers an attractive alternative in the form of contextual veganism or ecological animalism. Her argument against a universalist moral veganism echoes in some ways the work of Deane Curtin.16 Her advocacy of an embodied ecological animalism and her emphasis on the need for coalition building among animal rights and other activists has echoes in some of the new writing on veganism in the twenty-first century. Unlike some critics of veganism, who provide a cursory reading of the canonical works of utilitarianism, rights theory and ecofeminism, Plumwood engages in depth with the work of Singer, Regan and Adams. But by calling for animal activists and vegans to form broader coalitions with environmental, workers and food justice movements she implies that these coalitions were not in place at the time she was writing, around the turn of the millennium. If she had investigated the anti-capitalist activist groups around the globe in those years she would likely have come across more than a few vegans putting that coalition work into practice.
Because she claims that there is a difference between making other animals prey and treating them as nothing more than meat, Plumwood argues that vegans should “prioritise action on factory farming over less abusive forms of farming.”17 For all their differences, in this she and Singer are on the same page.18 Plumwood is convinced that it is in “flesh factories” that animals experience total instrumentalisation.19 Her contextual vegetarianism opposes any attempt to impose Western veganism on cultures with less exploitative human-animal relations. This is an important anti-imperialist and anti-anthropocentric argument. But by associating non-instrumentalising animal relations with Indigenous cultures Plumwood fails adequately to address the question of whether it would be possible to implement less abusive farming systems in the context of the contemporary West. I look in more detail at this questions in the next chapter. There are other simplifications in Plumwood’s distinction between ontological and contextual vegetarianism/veganism. For example, while her claim that the animal rights movements in the West suffers from an “over individualized and culturally hegemonic vanguard focus on veganism” has some merit, she presents at times a familiar caricature of all vegans as people obsessed with personal purity, self denial and “unhealthy elements of self righteousness and holier-than-thouism.”20 In what is otherwise a nuanced argument, Plumwood falls for a series of clichés about veganism that are more commonly found in mainstream media.21 She gives little space for practices of veganism grounded in collective movements for change.
According to Cora Diamond, one of the main ways in which people learn how to be human is through eating other animals — ‘WE eat THEM’.22 Veganism challenges this dominant definition of humanity by disrupting the action of us eating them. Val Plumwood provides us with a potentially more egalitarian formulation — WE eat THEM and THEY eat US. Like Diamond, Plumwood challenges what she understands as overly simplistic or rationalised defences of vegetarianism based upon self-confident understandings of the categories “animal” and “human.” Neither philosopher argues against the animal rights position in order to delegitimise vegetarianism. On the contrary, like Diamond, Plumwood homes in on what she perceives as the weaknesses in some philosophical defences of vegetarianism as part of a project for developing an ethical practice of eating.
In the end, Plumwood may protest a bit too much. She recognises that contextual vegetarianism is available — culturally and practically — to many living in the West and strongly implies that it is the best ethical option for most.23 Although I find her philosophical critique of ontological veganism laudable, it is her reflection on being prey that provides the most original contribution to the project of constructing an ethical contextual veganism.
Eating sex
Elspeth Probyn is another feminist writer interested in the relationship between eating and being eaten, albeit from a perspective markedly different from that of Val Plumwood. Over the past few decades Probyn has developed a corpus of writing on bodies, sex and food that is, from the perspective of this vegan reader, both enticing and infuriating. Notwithstanding her avowedly non-vegan starting point, and her celebration, even eroticisation, of an omnivore diet, Probyn’s ponderings are provocative in ways that prove, perhaps in spite of her own best intentions, useful for thinking about the sexual politics of veganism.
In Carnal Appetites: FoodSexIdentities (2000), Probyn offers some novel takes on the old axiom “we are what we eat.” By following the not-always-predictable paths that stretch out from the points where food and sex meet, Probyn suggests that we can open ourselves up to new ways of thinking about identities. Food, Probyn points out in refreshingly vivid imagery, travels through us. Envisioning the ingestion, digestion and excretion of food draws the mind to the other functions of the organs involved in eating. The cavity that gobbles up nourishment, for instance, is the same one that spits out words. The “mouth machine” thus “brings together the physical fact of what goes in, and the symbolic production of what comes out: meanings, statements, ideas.”24 But some of the arguments dished up in Carnal Appetites stick in the throat. In particular, Probyn’s take on vegetarianism is so reductive as to make any good vegan turn up her nose in disgust. As Chloë Taylor writes: “Probyn quickly dismisses ethical vegetarianism as a rule-bound dogmatism that strictly dictates what everyone should and should not eat.”25
Probyn is at pains to acknowledge that not all vegetarians are moralising zealots who naively divide the world into good vegetarians and bad carnivores. But her hasty dismissal of two iconic vegetarian texts — Carol J. Adams’s The Sexual Politics of Meat and Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation — reflects a deep suspicion of ethical plant-based diets. According to Probyn, vegetarians like Adams and Singer inhabit a “stark moral universe in which the individual measures him or herself against a set of strict guidelines. Succinctly, what this produces is a moral subject, not necessarily an ethical person.”26 I have my disagreements with both Adams and Singer, but this neat synopsis does not do their respective work justice. For all its shortcomings, The Sexual Politics of Meat grapples with some of the challenges of being a vegetarian in human-centred political movements, including feminism. As for Singer, whether we regard Animal Liberation as presenting a “stark moral universe” depends largely on how we read it. Originally published in 1975, the book grew out of a preoccupation with the place of animals in the history of Western philosophy, and more specifically the mass maltreatment of animals in science and agriculture in much of North America and Europe in the twentieth century. To apply the arguments of Animal Liberation uncritically outside that context is to propose that the system at the heart of the problem is the one most adept to solve it. But read within its context, Singer’s book provides an important critique of industrial farming and animal experimentation, and proposes a number of practical suggestions for what people can do to challenge these. Far from laying down an inflexible set of rules, Animal Liberation takes the reader through the different steps of adopting a vegetarian diet, even including some sample recipes. Singer considered vegans “the living demonstrations of the practicality and nutritional soundness of a diet that is totally free from exploitation of other animals.” But he added that “in our present speciesist world, it is not easy to keep so strictly to what is morally right.”27
Probyn’s treatment of the work of Singer and Adams, and her references to alternative accounts of how to live as vegetarian or vegan, are short and sour compared to her exploration of what she considers more complex and ethically and aesthetically attractive approaches to food. She draws a sharp contrast between the supposedly queer celebration of food culture epitomised by the 1990s British TV chefs the Two Fat Ladies — with their “excess and