{"id":8617,"date":"2016-01-12T10:19:49","date_gmt":"2016-01-12T15:19:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/?p=8617"},"modified":"2016-01-12T11:01:51","modified_gmt":"2016-01-12T16:01:51","slug":"a-case-for-a-non-mammalian-food-ethic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2016\/01\/12\/a-case-for-a-non-mammalian-food-ethic\/","title":{"rendered":"A case for a non-mammalian food ethic"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Front<\/a><\/p>\n

Vegetarianism has been part of my identity for the last 25 years (thanks to arguments like this one<\/a>\u00a0and this one<\/a>), but I’ve been increasingly recognizing the term’s limits.<\/p>\n

For one thing, I’ve eaten dairy, eggs, fish and seafood all along — which makes me a lacto-ovo-pesco-vegetarian. For another, I’ve started to occasionally eat locally farm-raised chicken (and rarely, when offered, meat of locally hunted deer or other things freely given and which would otherwise be wasted — which makes me a bit of a freegan<\/a>). I also recognize that the food industry has changed, in ways that makes food\u00a0ethics\u00a0more complicated\u00a0than the old binary of veganism versus carnivory, with moderate vegetarianism as a reasonable half-way\u00a0station.<\/p>\n

Realizing I need a better term for my own food consumption\u00a0practices, I’ve struggled with meaningless terms like flexitarian<\/a>\u00a0and briefly considered locavorism (forget about that in Vermont).<\/p>\n

But mostly I’ve fallen back on some form of eco-ethico-politico-cultural\u00a0selectivism<\/a> (as opposed to the culturally selective but otherwise freewheeling omnivory most North Americans practice). That is, I’ve remained committed not so much to the vegetarianism I’ve espoused as to a diet that takes into account a welter of factors, including\u00a0the suffering of animals and humans in food production systems, the\u00a0ecological impacts of those systems, the promotion of\u00a0viable and desirable cultural alternatives to industrial food production, and of course the undeniable influence of taste, convenience, and the needs and desires of loved ones.\u00a0All of\u00a0which\u00a0is a little difficult to describe in a\u00a0word.<\/p>\n

But\u00a0with all my reading\u00a0about the implications of the Anthropocene and the deep time it allows us to inhabit, I’ve found myself flirting with another identity, one that draws a line between one kind of creature class — to which we belong — and others. That class, or\u00a0clade<\/a>\u00a0as biologists call it, is the class of animals that emerged into prominence with the\u00a0Mesozoic-Cenozoic transition<\/a>\u00a0— which we might think of as a new “global hegemony” that followed the\u00a0last great extinction crisis 65 million years ago.<\/p>\n

I mean\u00a0mammals<\/a>:\u00a0creatures like us, who give birth to live offspring, bodily nurse their young, have neocortexes (no need for neural reductionism to hypothesize\u00a0that this contributes to a different sense of selfhood), and so on.<\/p>\n

Drawing a\u00a0“line in the sand” around that class feels like a form of extended ethnocentrism: broader, to be sure, than any form of human ethnocentrism (racism, nationalism, and so on), and even broader than speciesist anthro<\/em>pocentrism, but discriminatory\u00a0nonetheless. But\u00a0we need to make decisions, and when these are too complex, a categorical crutch can be helpful and an easier sell than the kind of complicated checklist I summarized above.<\/p>\n

For lack of a catchier word, I call this simplified dietary preference a “non-mammalian” diet.\u00a0And its\u00a0discriminatory prohibition only extends to taking the lives of other mammals, not to drinking their milk. We, or our infants, drink human milk\u00a0after all.<\/p>\n

Judged by an\u00a0ethic of\u00a0minimizing harm to sentient beings (and of\u00a0honoring those we do harm), a non-mammalian diet is only partial, and clearly a crutch. But I like that it\u00a0provides a\u00a0deep bio-geo-historical perspective on our\u00a0affiliations that doesn’t negate respecting differences — or taking ecological, sociopolitical, and other concerns into consideration —\u00a0but that makes deciding what to eat a bit easier for us.<\/p>\n

From the perspective of vegetarianism, a “non-mammalian” diet\u00a0discriminates against birds, reptiles, fish, and other living and sentient beings. In preferring members of our own clade, such a diet is “cladist.” In the slow march of extending rights to beings like us, and progressively to beings unlike us, does this step make sense as a tentative goal?<\/p>\n

Thoughts welcome.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Vegetarianism has been part of my identity for the last 25 years (thanks to arguments like this one\u00a0and this one), but I’ve been increasingly recognizing the term’s limits.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":99,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[196],"tags":[350219,350215,350213,350214,350216,350217,350220,350212],"class_list":["post-8617","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ecoculture","tag-diets","tag-food-ethics","tag-freeganism","tag-locavorism","tag-mammalism","tag-mammals","tag-veganism","tag-vegetarianism"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4IC4a-2eZ","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":9408,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2017\/08\/18\/post-vegetarian-food-ethics-continued\/","url_meta":{"origin":8617,"position":0},"title":"Post-vegetarian food ethics, continued…","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"August 18, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"This post is a follow-up to my \"case for a non-mammalian food ethic.\" I've given that case some more thought\u00a0and have decided that honesty requires more nuance than either continuing to call myself a (straight) vegetarian or calling myself a \"non-mammalian.\" The latter term is confusing in any case, since\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Eco-culture"","block_context":{"text":"Eco-culture","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/ecoculture\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":8394,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2015\/09\/18\/eco-humanities-glossolalia\/","url_meta":{"origin":8617,"position":1},"title":"Eco-humanities glossolalia","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"September 18, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"I've just come across the earliest outline I wrote for the course I'm currently teaching (in its third incarnation), \"Environmental Literature, Arts, and Media.\" The course has also turned into a book project I'm working on, which will be a thematic primer to the environmental arts and humanities.\u00a0Both course and\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Academe"","block_context":{"text":"Academe","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/academe\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5729,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2012\/04\/03\/green-countercultures\/","url_meta":{"origin":8617,"position":2},"title":"Green Countercultures","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"April 3, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"An interesting call for papers from Ecozon@... Call for Papers: Ecozon@ Issue 4.1 (Spring 2013) Green Countercultures Guest Editor: Peter Mortensen, Aarhus University From the late 1950s to the early 1970s an extraordinary counterculture emerged among young people in various western countries, opposing the values of mainstream society. 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The meals were extended food fests where serving after\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Academe"","block_context":{"text":"Academe","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/academe\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"PicForNewsletterSpainSept2006OGroveLunchFish-709515.jpg","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2010\/10\/PicForNewsletterSpainSept2006OGroveLunchFish-709515.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":11801,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2021\/05\/13\/post-pandemic-what-will-have-changed\/","url_meta":{"origin":8617,"position":4},"title":"Post-pandemic, what will have changed?","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"May 13, 2021","format":false,"excerpt":"When we look back at this time a few decades hence, what changes will we take the pandemic of 2020-21 to have ushered in? How will it have transformed work, recreation, travel and transportation, food, politics, and everything else? The following are some initial thoughts toward a hopeful eco-justice based\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Manifestos & auguries"","block_context":{"text":"Manifestos & auguries","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/manifestos-and-auguries\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2021\/05\/cracks_with-green-1.jpeg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2021\/05\/cracks_with-green-1.jpeg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2021\/05\/cracks_with-green-1.jpeg?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2021\/05\/cracks_with-green-1.jpeg?resize=700%2C400&ssl=1 2x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2021\/05\/cracks_with-green-1.jpeg?resize=1050%2C600&ssl=1 3x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2021\/05\/cracks_with-green-1.jpeg?resize=1400%2C800&ssl=1 4x"},"classes":[]},{"id":10876,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2020\/06\/29\/we-are-surveillance-capital-stock\/","url_meta":{"origin":8617,"position":5},"title":"We are surveillance capital stock","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"June 29, 2020","format":false,"excerpt":"I\u2019m reading Shoshana Zuboff's widely lauded The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, which some have placed alongside Thomas Piketty\u2019s Capital in the Twenty-First Century as essential reading for understanding today's global economy. The big conceptual idea I find most useful in it is its insistence that we are in the midst\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Media ecology"","block_context":{"text":"Media ecology","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/media_ecology\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2020\/06\/zuboff.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2020\/06\/zuboff.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2020\/06\/zuboff.jpg?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2020\/06\/zuboff.jpg?resize=700%2C400&ssl=1 2x"},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8617","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/99"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8617"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8617\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8635,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8617\/revisions\/8635"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8617"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8617"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8617"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}