Dissociation

Since I've started taking this class, I've not been eating meat. I can't bring myself to do it knowing what I know now. However, I find it harder to make those meatless choices on Sundays and Mondays and Tuesdays. Why? Because my Animal Planet class meets on Wednesdays and Fridays. When I have long breaks of time away from the thought-provoking discussions revolving around eating animals, I catch myself thinking, why am I doing this? Why do I care about eating meat? Why should I change?

I blame this partially on my appetite, but mostly on language.

On Monday, I read Animal to Edible by Noelie Vialles. One of the topics of her novel was the dissociation between slaughter and butchery. The slaughterer is the actual person who does the killing - the butcher no longer does, rather he distributes the meat to the consumers. Directly and indirectly, Vialles mentioned quite a few other dissociations that have been made in terms of consuming animals.

In slaughterhouses, there is a dirty sector and a clean sector. The dirty sector is the entrance where the animals come in, the clean sector is where the meat comes out. In between there is a 'trap' where animals are caught in the middle of their life and death - between dirty and clean. One cannot simply go from the dirty sector to the clean sector. Slaughterhouses have ample rules and regulations to keep the dissociation of the dirty from clean in tact.

An animal goes into the slaughterhouse and meat comes out of it. However, while in its "making", the meat is fixed and adorned so that meat no longer resembles animal. The dissociation between animals and meat is a major reason that people continue to eat it. Every time I begin to tell people about the meal they are about to eat, I get the response, "I don't want to hear about it". Recognizing that their food is actually part of an animal, it's parts now distant and spread across the world, would spoil their dinner by bridging the dissociation. I would be shocked if I ever heard anyone say that they're craving animal rather than craving meat for dinner.

During this process of an animal becoming meat, the animal must be killed. However, 'administering of death' or 'killing' has taken on a new name: 'shedding of blood'. Before an animal's throat is slit and the blood is drained, the animal is stunned between the eyes in order to render it unconscious. Therefore, as Vialles put it, who actually does the killing - the stunner or the slitter? I would argue the throat slitter, but nonetheless, this process creates a kind of foggy confusion in which no one can be completely certain. Shedding of blood is no longer congruent with administering of death. They are conveniently dissociated.

All of these dissociations have one thing in common - they humanize something inhuman. From slaughter comes butchery. From dirty comes clean. From animal comes meat. From administering of death comes shedding of blood. By changing our language, we change the connotations that come with the meaning.

According to Vialles, killing of animals used to be a commonality in the streets, for all people to watch. Over time, society decided that they no longer wished to see their food be killed. The slaughtering was thus confined to slaughterhouses on the outskirts of town. This way, the people could completely dissociate their society from having anything to do with the killing of animals for food (or so they thought). They could HIDE the killings and all of the negativity that came with it.

Dissociation is a way of hiding, of concealing from view. We dissociate, as I have described, through language. In the first part of Animal to Edible, Vialles states that, "The development of vocabulary often provides a very clear indication of the way in which a society's eating habits evolved." Our vocabulary around food has developed in such a way that it hides the actual meaning - it is dissociated from the actual meaning. All of the inhumane words are made human and are not only tolerated, but accepted, by the majority of the population.

This brings me back to my original problem - why do I find it harder to stick to a vegetarian diet on Sundays, Mondays, and Tuesdays - or rather on days that I am farther removed from the knowledge of what meat really is, and how it became meat? The language that our society uses to talk about meat and animals makes it easy to revert back to how I originally thought. It makes it easier for me to forget what I have learned because the language that we use today hides the truth. I am dissociated from the truth.