can never be food. In contrast to what she understands as this anthropocentric position, Plumwood proposes what she calls “ecological animalism,” defined as “re-envisaging ourselves as ecologically embodied beings akin to rather than superior to other animals.”9
Plumwood also detects ontological veganism in the work of Carol Adams and some other American ecofeminists. Plumwood is one of the few thinkers to highlight the problem with Adams’s comparison between violence against women and animals.10 Plumwood challenges the parallel that Adams draws between the reduction of farm animals to meat and the reduction of women to sex objects. In both cases, Adams mistakenly conflates use with instrumentalisation. Just as it is possible to imagine non-exploitative sexual relations, Plumwood insists, it is possible to imagine animals being used by human beings in a way that is not purely exploitative. Against a veganism based upon the premise that all use of animals for food or human benefit is exploitative and instrumentalist, Plumwood argues that it may be possible for people to use animals without reducing them to mere instruments for our own ends.11
When we human beings take ourselves out of the food chain, refusing to be food for other creatures (including as rotting corpses), we take from other living beings — including plants — without giving back.12 Plumwood does not object to human beings eating plants, though her critique of ontological veganism anticipates recent critiques of moral vegetarianism based on scientific evidence of plant sentience.13 Nor did she espouse the eating of meat. Her experience of being potential prey for the crocodile confirmed her vegetarianism. However, Plumwood argues that it is wrong to privilege animals above other forms of life and to prioritise animal advocacy over other forms of political commitment. She stresses the inseparability of the struggle against anthropocentrism and campaigns to end the exploitation of people, calling upon animal rights activists to form political alliances with workers’ movements, radical health movements, environmental organisations, small farmers and movements against neoliberalism. According to Plumwood, proponents of ontological veganism put too much emphasis on the actions of the individual activist, forestalling the kinds of alliances necessary for the construction of an effective ecological ethics. Her contextualised ethics of eating, in contrast, targets “the most extreme examples of distortion and instrumentalisation of animal lives — the intensive farming practices that treat animals as no more than living meat or egg production units.”14
Plumwood contrasts the unethical reduction of factory farmed animals to “no more than living meat” with her own moment of revelation, following the near-death experience with the crocodile:
We are edible, but we are also much more than edible. Respectful, ecological eating must recognize both of these things. I was a vegetarian at the time of my encounter with the crocodile, and remain one today. This is not because I think predation itself is demonic and impure, but because I object to the reduction of animal lives in factory farming systems that treat them as living meat.15
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
