Self-indulgence and the Love of Death
It’s a peculiar state of affairs when a food magazine can speak more truth about a thing than theology generally does, notable exceptions excluded of course. Here’s Mark Morton in the winter ’09 edition of Gastronomica, in an article titled “Joie de Mort”, which translates “Love of Death”.
“This notion that the natural world is not antagonistic to humans – “nature, red in tooth and claw”, as Tennyson put it … – but rather that it willingly bends itself to comply with human desire, is a version of what literary critics call the pathetic fallacy. Sometimes dismissed as jejune, the pathetic fallacy can, at its best, offer us a vision of a world where humans and their environment coexist in harmony. But at its worst, the pathetic fallacy can become a grotesque fantasy of self-indulgence. In the culinary world, that began to happen about a century ago in print advertisements that depicted animals perversely and gleefully seeking their own slaughter – all in a bid to satisfy human consumption.” via: Eat Me Daily
*** The article goes on to cite some pop culture references along the same lines. For example,
“In Douglas Adams’s 1980 novel The Restaurant at the End of the Universe a species of talking cow has been bred with an innate desire to be eaten. “I am the main Dish of the Day,” the bovine announces. ”May I interest you in parts of my body?” When the cow leaves to shoot itself for dinner, it promises to do so in a humane manner. In an episode ofThe Simpsons entitled “Homer’s Triple Bypass,” Homer dreams of a paradise where a roast pig removes the apple from its mouth in order to remind him, helpfully, that “The best meat is in the rump!”
He’s talking about what my favorite blog of the same name dubs Suicide Food, the notion that animals desire and in fact enjoy their own slaughter, presumably in contrast to their wild brethren who struggle for their lives in the face of danger and death. How does the fact that we selectively breed animals for domesticity (and therefore “sacrifice” others) get translated into the idea that somehow animals want us to kill them? That says more about our own psyche than what might be going on in the mind of an animal. It becomes even more telling when we justify the notion that we can kill them because they don’t have inner lives like ours … while at the same time attributing to them enough inner life to imagine themselves as dying for something as abstract as perceiving the needs of others and then consciously acting to meet them.
We need animals to be docile so we can manipulate them. We need them to be trusting so we can more easily betray them. We need to be looking at what that says about us. It’s nothing new though. It goes all the way back to the beginnings of animal domestication. So does the idea of ritual sacrifice. (see various selections here for starters, particularly Jensen and Smith) It’s just as important today that we believe animals want us to kill them, or that we ‘need’ to eat them to survive, or that God wants us to do it, as it is and has been with ‘primitive’ cultures; otherwise we are exposed for what we are; straight up killers, and that’s not what most people really want to see on their spiritual resume.
If killing really was as natural as breathing we wouldn’t have so much psychology wrapped around defending ourselves from the implications of our own behavior … up to and including theology that serves the same purpose. What exactly, after all, is the psychological difference between a justification built around ”the Devil made me do it” as opposed to justifications based on “God needs it” then “God may not need it but he enjoys it as much as I do” (the primitive formulations of ritual killings) and even “God allows it”. Of course, the “God allows it” excuse usually only applies to satisfaction with what we are allowed to kill, and not with what is allowed to kill us.
You know where this is going so let’s compare some of the actual symbolism of the animal that wants to be consumed. I wonder which of these came first in the human psyche? ”I want it ergo it must desire that I have it” .. or else …. Or else what? is the question.
*** The article referenced claims that “in the culinary world this began to happen around 100 years ago.” This doesn’t include that same element in ritual animal sacrifice. An early Christian example of that here.
