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 extravagance” and avid anti-vegetarianism — on one hand, and what she interprets as the condescending, do-gooder earnestness of vegetarian food justice activists on the other.28 Carnal Appetites thus replaces the “stark moral universe” of vegetarianism with an equally stark world in which hearty carnivorous consumption constructs complex human subjects while restrained plant eating creates simple selves.
The repeated association of plant-based diets with simplicity, restraint and moralising is similar in some ways to Plumwood’s reductive representation of “ontological” vegetarianism, and echoes claims in more popular portrayals of veganism.29 These representations raise an important question: why is the proposal to encourage a plant-based diet sometimes dismissed as facile, unrealistic or even ethnocentric, while other ways of eating and doing politics ostensibly are not? The remainder of this chapter swims around these questions, as I follow Probyn’s line in new directions. In her most recent work she immerses herself and her reader in the world of ocean life and the ways it runs through human lives. Although often overlooked in analyses of rearing and eating animals, fish and other marine creatures offer important insights into the challenges of ethical, sustainable eating in the early twenty-first century.
Fishy tales
December 2014London
Last night, another disastrous date. Even after I said I would have dinner beforehand (avoiding the awkward “What can I eat?” moment as manifestly unsexy), my internet date insisted on going to a sushi joint. She sat across from me like some selfish god, stabbing at the pink and black corpses flayed and displayed before her, banging on, between chomps, about one life drama after another. I felt like I was being force fed someone else’s minor traumas. I sipped my beer and tried to close my ears. Anger rose like bile in my throat, hotter than the ball of green fire globbed on the plate that marked a border between us.
These words were written as a kind of purging, a visceral reaction to an encounter that left me feeling physically and emotionally out of sorts. I don’t want to paint a picture of a sensitive vegan who cannot stomach dead fish in her presence; I have learned to plug my nose and hold my tongue (as many, many vegan and vegetarian friends did with me for years). My diary entry was a way of disgorging a memory of an encounter with an obnoxious human whose bad dinner table behaviour I cannot separate from my visual memory of the pieces of salmon and tuna being pierced in rhythm to the monologue, munched and swallowed between rants. Let’s set aside the rather obvious question of why someone would be so rude and unattractive on a first date (on any date for that matter). On the level of romance, I put this ugly experience down to an episode in what I subsequently dubbed my “year of dating disastrously,” a period in which I had a go at online hook-ups and assorted rendezvous, most of which ended sourful and sexless, and involved fraught moments over food — specifically fish food. The bad sushi date with a cute but verbally objectionable butch dyke forced me to swallow a chunk of my own pride and acknowledge a kernel of truth in Carol Adam’s argument that flesh-eating sometimes goes hand-in-hand with macho posturing. The fact that this was a bravado performance of carnivorous female masculinity adds a queer dimension to Adams’s argument, in spite of its best radical feminist intentions.
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