RESCUING LADY NATURE
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consumers to remain within the kingdom of consumer heaven without looking
down to see the very hell that capitalist production makes of the earth.
Carol Adams explores a similar problem of ‘concealment’ in her book,
The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist; Vegetarian Critical Theory20 In this
work, Adams describes the concealment of the grim realities of the meat
industry within capitalist patriarchy. Adams describes this concealment as the
fabricated nothingness of meat,
a popular perception shared by most
consumers of factory-farmed meat products. According to Adams, vital to an
ecological ethics is a challenge to the fabricated belief that meat is “nothing”:
...awareness of the constructed nothingness of meat arises because
one sees that it came from something, or rather someone, and it has
been
made
into
a
no-thing,
no-body...In
experiencing
the
nothingness of meat, one realizes that one is not eating food but dead
bodies.21
Adams calls feminists and all meat eaters to challenge the idea that meat is
‘nothing’, to reveal the cruelty and immorality of factory farming and of
meat-eating in general.
As we deepen our social analysis of production practices in general, we
see that the idea of the “nothingness of meat” may be extended to reveal the
“nothingness of commodities” in general. Just as meat-eaters often fail to
appreciate the subjectivity of animals that are plundered by factory farming,
consumers in general fail to recognize the subjectivity of the people who are
exploited in the production of commodities in general. For instance, while
people are often unaware of the suffering of the factory farmed calf when they
buy a plastic-covered slab of veal; they are often unaware of the struggle of
women workers in a multi-national textile industry that produce the very shirts
on their backs.
In addition, when we consider the social and ecological devastation
caused by agribusiness, we see that the consumption of vegetable products is
often as immoral as the consumption of animal products. For instance, a
banana is not always a more moral food choice than a chicken. If we look at
the social and economic relationships that transform bananas and chickens into
commodities, we often uncover a far more complex set of social problems
which determine whether the chicken or the banana represents a more ‘moral’
food choice. When we reveal the social context of banana production, we are
confronted by a moral paradox: while the content of the banana (a form of
non-sentient plant life) may represent a moral food choice, the social relations
surrounding the agricultural production of a factory-farmed banana, may
render such a food choice immoral.