CAROL J. ADAMS.
The Sexual Politics of Meat.
Cambridge: Polity/Blackwell, 1990. ix, 247 pp. $22.95.

NICK FIDDES. Meat: A Natural Symbol.
London: Routledge, 1991. 240 pp. $15.95.

JEREMY RIFKIN.
Beyond Beef: the Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture
New York: Dutton, 1992. 368 pp. $11.00.

Lynda Birke 1
University of Warwick, United Kingdom

Meat, the meat marketing industry tells us, is wholesome, good for us, full of necessary protein, minerals and vitamins. But eating meat is more than that: meat carries with it layers of meaning. It symbolizes our domination of non-human nature, of other human societies; it symbolizes masculinity and power.

Before reading these books, I pondered on these cultural meanings that we give to meat. We have only to think of the ways in which the words "beef" or "meat" are used colloquially to see what it has come to represent within our culture. We talk of "beefing" something up, for example, while muscular men may be described as "beefsteak." We might also talk of the "meat" of an argument; "meat" can refer, too, to parts of the body ­ women as meat, or the penis as meat are common. Less sexually, in the Cockney rhyming slang of the East End of London, "plates of meat" means feet.

I also wondered what meat meant for me, particularly in the England in which I grew up. I must admit to having been vegetarian for most of my life: like many other vegetarians, beef means dead cattle to me. Beef also carries meanings replete with gender: all three authors note how roast beef is typically carved by the man of the house. As a Briton, beef undoubtedly carries meanings for me that are linked to a national identity. I am all too familiar with the "roast beefe of olde Englande" as an icon, which somehow symbolizes the "great" in Great Britain. Certainly, as Fiddes points out, meat eating in British culture increased in parallel with the social and economic changes in agriculture and industrial organization that contributed to the growth of Britain's power as an imperialist nation. 2 In that kind of rhetoric, to be a beefeater is to be part of the national heritage. The meat industry recently produced a "great British Beef" campaign, with pieces of beef in butchers' shops surrounded by the British flag.

I then pondered another association of "beef" in British culture. "Beef-eater" also means, in London, the Yeomen of the Guard, dressed in their strange red and black garb and posing for tourists. The beefeaters were established at the accession of Henry VII to the throne in 1485. But why "beefeaters"? The Oxford English Dictionary suggests that a now archaic use of the word beefeater was, contemptuously, to describe "a well-fed menial," as well as the more obvious meaning, one who eats beef. To eat beef is to be well-fed, and to be at least partly elevated above the mere menial.

Adams begins her book by recalling a trip to the British Library, and gazing at a picture of Henry VIII eating a steak and kidney pie. The picture is flanked by pictures of his various wives, each with a fruit or vegetable. The meanings here center on the power of meat in association with gender: "real men" eat meat, so elevating them above the mere female.

Feminists have often used reversal as a means of illustrating the hidden assumptions carried in our culture about gender; inserting "she" for "he" in written passages is often revealing. An advertisement currently being displayed by the Meat Marketing Board in British magazines displays an athletic man running along the seashore, accompanied by a text eulogizing the healthy qualities of meat. The message would be much less powerful if the visual image was of a woman, however athletic.

Although the approaches of these three books are quite disparate, they all explore the changing significance of meat-eating. One major theme to emerge from these texts is the power of the symbolism that meat, particularly red meat, has acquired in Western culture.

A second major theme threading through these texts concerns the costs of eating meat. An obvious cost is in terms of animals' lives ­ and deaths. We may try to disguise this cost to ourselves by talking about sirloins and hamburgers. But in reality, Adams points out, the average American eats, in a lifetime, "43 pigs, 3 lambs, 11 cows, 4 'veal' calves, 1,107 chickens, 45 turkeys, and 861 fishes" (Adams, p. 67). Another cost is to the global environment. In eating meat, humans are eating secondary consumers, animals that have already processed plant food in the creation of their own bodies. This is energetically inefficient, particularly when we plant vast acres of cornfields just to produce grain to feed cattle. Human starvation and destruction of existing ecosystems inevitably follow; or, as Rifkin graphically entitles one of his chapters ­ "Cows Devour People."

The ways in which these themes are dealt with obviously differ. Fiddes explores the cultural symbolism of meat ­ meat as a natural symbol, as a signifier of social meanings. What does it mean to eat some animals and not others? What is the cultural significance of the processes of cooking meat? But he reminds us to be critical of the claim (evident in some anthropological writing) that particular foods confer status. Whatever the meat industry says, "there is more to meat than protein" (Fiddes, p. 42): it is also deeply imbued with symbolic meaning.

Adams also explores the cultural symbolism of meat-eating, and how that maps onto feminist ideas. Her focus is not only with the myriad ways in which eating meat has symbolized masculine power over women and the rest of nature, but also with the meanings attached to not eating meat. "Vegetarianism," notes Adams, "seeks meaning in a patriarchal culture that silences it; it is continually butting up against the sexual politics of meat" (p. 13).

Rifkin's concern is less with the meanings of meat than with environmental costs. His passionate and polemic book documents the shift from the early cultures that venerated cattle, to the massive exploitation of cattle that characterizes our "cattle culture." The title of the book is optimistic: after cataloguing the devastation caused by the cattle industry, he sketches ways in which we might help ourselves and our earth by moving "beyond beef."

Exploring the Meanings: Animals in Science vs. Animals as Food

As I thought about the cultural meanings of meat, I was struck by the parallels between the use of animals for food and their use in science. I use them here as a device to explore further some of the meanings of meat brought out by these three texts.

A starting point for this line of thought was Adams' account of the Frankenstein story. As she notes, Shelley's creature was made after his creator's, Victor's, forays to slaughterhouses and dissecting rooms; it was made literally from bits of animal and human corpses.

In 1818, when Shelley wrote the novel, there was controversy in Britain over the use of human corpses in the dissecting rooms of teaching hospitals. The storm over the grave robbers in Edinburgh, Burke and Hare, is one example. So great was the concern that Parliament passed the Anatomy Act of 1832 in an attempt to control the plunder of graves. In addition to donating hanged murderers, this Act recommended that the bodies of anyone too poor to pay for a funeral could be used for the cause of science.

Death in the workhouse or hospital, without funerary funds, became something to be feared among the poor (Richardson, 1988).

The controversy was important for two reasons. The first was the pressure brought by the medical profession, growing steadily more powerful at this time. What they wanted was bodies, for research and medical teaching. The second was the inevitable social uproar resulting. Not only did the act of dissection fly in the face of folk beliefs about corpses and afterlife, but it also aligned science against the interests of the majority of the population. The poor learned that their bodies might be cut apart for scientific investigation after their death, while they watched the rich (including the doctors themselves) take immense precautions to avoid possible exhumation (Richardson, 1988).

The controversy over death and the destitute adds another layer to the Frankenstein story. What Shelley touches on is not only the struggle of good against evil, but of the poor against their exploitation, and the fears of the people that they would become subject to dissection. Even in my generation British working class families, who fear the pauper's burial, put money aside each week to pay for a "proper funeral" in a sealed coffin ­ a cultural recollection of the fears of an earlier time.

Vivisection, the slaughterhouse, and the grave all feature in Shelley's narrative. Victor asks

"Who shall conceive the horrors of the secret toil as I dabbled among the unhallowed damps of the grave or tortured the living animal to animate the lifeless clay?....I collected bones from charnel-houses and disturbed, with profane fingers, the tremendous secrets of the human frame...The dissecting room and the slaughter-house furnished many of my materials" (Shelley, 1992, p.53).

The carnage of the slaughterhouse evokes fears of the carnage of the anatomists' tables.

There are parallels, too, in language employed in both scientific uses of animals and their uses for meat. Culinary language is obviously common in association with animals bred for food. But it is also evident in the laboratory ­ animals or cells are "harvested,". Arluke (1988) describes the ways that laboratory workers joke about "recipes" for processing tissue from animals, and how dead laboratory animals or their tissues are stored in the freezer, often alongside the laboratory workers' packed lunches (p. 102).

Both animals as meat and animals as laboratory material must be sacrificed. For a living animal to become "data" it cannot simply die of natural causes: it has to be symbolically transformed by the processes of science (Lynch, 1988). Similarly, Fiddes notes how, culturally, animals have to be properly transformed into meat, by slaughter and dismemberment: slaughtering animals also entails components of ritual, of sacrifice (Grandin, 1988). Fiddes cites a farmer who had lost sheep in a heavy snow storm: "Well, we couldn't eat them obviously. ...You wouldn't want them lying around for too long, you see, in case of disease...You never know what's been up to with the meat if you haven't seen it done yourself" (p.83).

The ritual transformation into a cultural product must, moreover, take place in a location that is cloistered from public view. The laboratories and the animal houses that serve them are hidden. In part, this practice is defended by scientists on the grounds of their fears about animal liberationists (Birke and Michael, 1992). Still, most people consume the products of science ­ like meat ­ only as long as they can distance themselves from the nasty facts of its production. "Geographically, slaughterhouses are cloistered," Adams reminds us. "We do not see or hear what transpires there" (p.49).

In meat production and laboratories, the animals used are constructed, both literally and metaphorically. The controlled livestock breeding of the 18th century, that gave rise to many of the breeds we know today (Russell, 1986), was followed in the 19th century by selective breeding of other kinds of animals. "Fancy" breeds of dogs and cats, for example, were bred in the 19th century (Ritvo, 1989). Much of the expertise in breeding was taken into the laboratories by the early 20th century; several strains of laboratory rodents, for instance, were developed from fancy strains (Paterson, 1957; Wright, 1922). In both cases, too, what is created is something that is no longer a representative of its wild counterpart: it is bred to become a human artifact.

From Bloodlines to the Table

Despite modern genetics, beliefs about the importance of "blood" persist in the folklore of livestock breeding. "Blood" has long meant both the red stuff that flows in our veins and something which is inherited. The Oxford English Dictionary cites references for both meanings back to the 13th/14th centuries. One's blood is inherited from one's ancestors; the word also carries connotations of aristocracy, as in "blue blood."

This usage is particularly persistent in animal breeding. Racehorse breeders refer to their industry as the "bloodstock" industry; horses may be "hotblooded," they may be "warmbloods" or "coldbloods." "Bloodlines" are pedigrees as they are sometimes for humans. Echoing Aristoteleian ideas about the generation of animals, the bloodstock industry also persists in the belief in the primacy of the male. In "bloodlines," the sire of a particular animal is paramount (de Moubray, 1987).

This terminology obviously owes nothing either to Mendel or Darwin ­ indeed, genetics itself implies the same beliefs etymologically, by referring to "consanguinity" or to physiology ­ the blood of all mammals is approximately the same temperature. A central notion here is the idea that a bloodline should be pure ­ purely aristocratic, in particular. It should be "uncontaminated" by "inferior" blood. This is the reason for the maintenance of stud books in the breeding of prize horses or agricultural animals. These books reflect a crude understanding of genetics and rely on the symbolic significance of blood: blood symbolizes power.

The very color of blood, notes Fiddes, represents danger, aggression, or warning in our culture. People are drained of their life-force in the Dracula tales as the vampire sucks their blood; therein lies the horror of the tale. The significance of this is underlined by one of Gary Larson's cartoons, in which the mother in a vampire family serves up three glasses of dark liquid. "Green blood", objects the son, "I hate green blood." Blood that is green loses its symbolic value.

It is for that reason that meat-eating becomes significant. By eating meat, we take in the life-blood of the animal; in eating the flesh of powerful animals, we take on their power. The aristocratic bloodlines of Europe were literally that: they were the people who ate the bloodied flesh of slaughtered animals, as Rifkin reminds us.

More broadly, meat eating has come to symbolize the power of (Western) man (sic) over nature. As Fiddes observes, "Killing, cooking, and eating other animals' flesh provides perhaps the ultimate authentication of human superiority over the rest of nature, with the spilling of their blood a vibrant motif...bloodshed is central to meat's value" (p. 65). Killing animals is about conquering nature. The meanings we ascribe to this association have changed historically. On the banqueting tables of Medieval Europe, cooked animals were served whole, symbolizing human mastery by the way that the animal is prepared for the table. Today, we would feel revulsion at such a sight. Instead, human conquest of nature is represented in the way we are culturally removed from the fact of killing; we do not see part of dismembered animals but carefully packaged "steaks" or "topside of beef."

Meat as a Symbol of Power

Embedded in the meaning of meat is the sense of conquering nature. During imperialist expansion, this stood as a metaphor for the conquest of other peoples and cultures and their lands. Harriet Ritvo, Describing game hunting by European colonialists in Africa and Asia in the 19th century, Ritvo notes, that "Dead wild animals, especially if there were a lot of them, symbolized the British suppression of the Afghans or the Ashante....Rows of horns and hides, mounted heads and stuffed bodies, clearly alluded to the violent, heroic underside of imperialism" (p. 248).

Cooking is part of the way that the transformation of nature into culture is achieved. Plant foods are often eaten raw, in their natural state; all human cultures use cooking, by contrast, to convert pieces of flesh from their natural state into a cultural artifact ­ meat. Only rarely is meat eaten raw, and when it is, it stands for domination and power. Fiddes illustrates this point by quotations from a boxer and a businessman, both of whom ate raw steak for this reason; in the business lunch, it "totally unnerves the other guy seeing you eating this raw meat with blood dripping out of it" (p. 91).

Adams also draws a parallel between the conquest of nature and the male conquest of women. Feminist writing has often noted the associations in Western culture between gender and the nature/culture dichotomy. Women are seen as closer to nature, while men represent culture ­ although see Birke (1986) and Haraway (1989) for a critique of this association. Typically pejorative and infantilizing images of animals are invoked to describe women: I may thus become a chick, a bunny, a pussy, or, when I'm answering back, a bitch. Further, "images of butchering suffuse patriarchal culture," notes Adams (p. 58), particularly in pornography. Women are dismembered in pornographic representation, she points out, reduced to buttocks or thighs or have actually been dismembered in the infamous "Snuff" movies. It is perhaps easy to dismiss such images as "just" images, but I recall the emotional shock of many women to the photomontage on the cover of Hustler magazine that depicted a woman's torso being put through a meat grinder: images create meanings.

The meanings of meat in terms of the rise of civilization are flexible. One set of meanings hinges on the dominance of American culture as an icon of civilization. The hamburger is the dominant motif here. As Fiddes notes, hamburgers have acquired the status of "the tastiest symbols of American cultural imperialism" (p.66), while Rifkin notes the expansion of McDonalds into every corner of the earth. They bring not only hamburgers, however: Rifkin quotes the chief of the company's Japanese operations, Den Fujita, "If we eat hamburgers for a thousand years, we will become blond. And when we become blond we can conquer the world" (p. 271).

It is not only the conquest of other cultures that is symbolized by meat. In the movie Babette's Feast meat is imbued with association with greater sophistication within western European culture. Babette has fled the turmoil of revolutionary Paris and goes to live in the household of two sisters in Jutland in northern Denmark. The sisters live an austere, ascetic life influenced by a puritan religion; their diet is simple, consisting largely of bread, a few vegetables, and dried fish. When Babette wins a huge prize in the French lottery, she chooses to spend it all on a vast French meal for the villagers. The sisters watch with horror as Babette arrives with various live animals ­ a cow, a turtle, and a quail. At night, their dreams are interrupted with nightmare visions of the dismembered animals. In an ironic twist of assumptions about gender, we later learn that Babette was previously the chef for a famous Parisian restaurant. In this tale, meat represents the cultural sophistication of the Parisian table, set against the semi-vegetarian backwardness of the Jutland villagers.

If meat equals sophistication, vegetables and bread equal dullness. It is precisely for this reason, suggests Adams, that vegetarianism offers a threat to the dominant carnivorous narrative:

Vegetarians see themselves as providing an alternative ending, veggie burgers instead of hamburgers, but they are actually eviscerating the entire narrative. From the dominant perspective, vegetarianism is not only about something that is inconsequential, which lacks 'meat', and which fails to find closure through meat, but it is a story about the acceptance of passivity, of that which has no meaning, of endorsing a 'vegetable' way of living (p.94).

Adams sees both women and animals as similarly situated with respect to the dominant narrative: both are subordinated to patriarchal culture, both are objects. One manifestation of this is what she calls the "absent referent." Thus, "animals in name and body are made absent as animals for meat to exist" ­ just as women are (p. 40; emphasis in original). For this reason, vegetarianism and feminism have overlapping concerns, she believes. "What feminists see in the fate of women's texts, vegetarians see in the fate of animals...In their parallel concerns, feminists and vegetarians seek to establish definitions against patriarchal authority" (p. 99).

Vegetarianism has long been given pejorative associations. It is "effeminate" not to eat meat. In the 19th century, meat eating was seen as the preserve of the "civilized" races, while "savages" tended to eat foods that were nearer to them on the scale of evolution ­ that is, plant foods (Adams, p.30). What is at issue is the rhetoric of power and domination, the hunting instinct. Killing animals and cooking meat stands for our superiority over other creatures (or other, less carnivorous cultures). The meanings are parodied in another Gary Larson cartoon depicting a group of stone-age hunters walking through the jungle carrying their spears, and bearing aloft a giant carrot. The caption reads, "Early vegetarians returning from the kill."

A crucial part of this rhetoric is the construction of nonhuman species as "others." "Animals" becomes an undifferentiated category symbolizing all that which humans are not ­ the untamed, the bestial. When animals are other, we can eat them. We do not eat those animals that, culturally, we allow to transgress the self/other divide such as companion animals.

On Eating "Others"

The figure of the "other" is a recurring motif in Western thought; women, Simone de Beauvoir stressed in The Second Sex , are "other" to men in the dominant discourse, for example. The racist imagery of "savages" similarly evokes an icon of otherness, counterposed to "civilized man". The "other" is also an image (or images) that threaded through European visions of other cultures during colonization. Thus, "America", Peter Mason has argued, was constituted as other in the European imagination (Mason, 1990).

In the discovery of the New World, Europeans projected their fantasies and fears ­ of strange races, of bizarre creatures. Thus, Mason suggests that the concepts of "America" during colonization drew on an iconography of ancient myths of creatures that are part-human, part-animal ­ the horse/human centaurs, the dog-headed Cynocephali. 3 The images Mason discusses "are all products of a process of exclusion: witches, Wild Men, madmen and animals are aspects of the European self that self cannot tolerate" (Mason, 1990, p.41).

One aspect that many of these creatures have in common is their ability to eat human flesh. Anthropophagy ­ cannibalism, the consumption of human flesh by humans ­ raises many questions about what it means to be human, a point also raised in Fiddes' book.

"Love your friends ­ don't eat them" is the statement on the front of a T-shirt produced by the Vegetarian Society in Britain. Similarly for many people involved in the animal rights movement, at least some species of non-human animals should transgress the human/animal divide and be treated as fellow-citizens (Sabloff, 1992). The issue here is that while it is culturally permissible to eat inferior beings, it is not permissible to eat your friends. The proscriptions against anthropophagy are powerful.

Attributions of cannibalism have long been part of the rhetoric of otherness. "Everyone", points out Fiddes, "has believed others to be cannibalistic. A reflection of the medieval English mind, for example, is represented in the Mappa Mundi (c.1290 A.D.) and, sure enough, somewhere west of the Black Sea" we find cannibals reputed to eat their parents' flesh (p.123).

Despite the frequent allegations, there seems to be little concrete evidence of the practice (except occasionally under survival conditions). "One function of the taboo", suggests Fiddes, "has been to demarcate the sanctity of human society. Our culture is distinguished as civilised, as a higher form of life that cannot be preyed upon. Our humanity itself is quite literally at stake" (p. 128).

The revulsion that humans feel about the notion of humans becoming flesh is implicit in the way people might make uneasy jokes about being left to "the worms" after we die. It is amusingly underscored, for example, in Rohinton Mistry's novel, Such a Long Journey . In the story, new deluxe apartment blocks have been erected very close to the Parsi Towers of Silence (where, in accordance with the Parsi religion, the dead are left for their flesh to be disposed of by vultures). The apartment inhabitants are furious because, they claim, the vultures are dropping bits of meat on their balconies. Relatives of the deceased start to complain: "They protested that they were not paying funeral fees to have their dear departed ones anatomized and strewn piecemeal on posh balconies" (Mistry, 1991, p.317).

To preserve our humanity, humans universally locate human flesh in the category of the inedible. How we locate other species of animals, by contrast, varies with different human cultures. For plant food to be inedible, of course, usually means either that it cannot be easily chewed or digested, or that it is poisonous. Animal flesh is different; it is cultural categories that classify them. Thus, Brahmins do not eat cows; we abhor the consumption of horses or dogs.

The notion of defilement is important in the classification of flesh foods: thus, Jewish tradition proscribes the eating of the flesh of "unclean" animals such as pigs. We would react similarly to the idea of eating rats ­ unclean creatures. Fiddes uses the black humor of the Monty Python team to underscore our revulsion and, incidentally, to highlight "the torment inherent in animal cookery." A Monty Python book gives several recipes for cooking rats, "Rat-atouille," for instance. The example Fiddes quotes is for "Rat Soufflé":

Make sure that the rat's squeals are not audible from the street, particularly in areas where the Anti-Soufflé League and similar do-gooders are out to persecute the innocent pleasures of the table. ...Raise the chopper high above your head, with the steel glinting in the setting sun, and then bring it down ­ wham! ­ with a vivid crunch ­ straight across the taut neck of the terrified rodent, and make it into a soufflé" (Palin et al., quoted in Fiddes, pp. 141-2).

Part of the foolishness ascribed by European colonists to "savage races" is that they seemed unable to discriminate between the edible and inedible, between the clean and unclean. They would thus consume "human flesh and [that] of lower species of animals or plants (rats, snakes, locusts, worms, roots, berries, etc)" (Mason, 1990, p.53).

Apart from failing to eat the proper kinds of meat such as roast beef, they also ate roots and berries. This kind of diet is part of the powerful mythic image of the Wild Man or Woman. This gentle creature lives in a Rousseauesque "state of nature" and is vegetarian.

As Adams notes, the mythic Wild Man is invoked in Frankenstein's monster. Shelley's tale is subtitled, The Modern Prometheus . Starting from this myth, the narrative finds the Creature discovering some cooked offal, left by travellers. The Creature tasted it but, unlike Prometheus, did not fall. Rather than taking up the eating of flesh, he learns to cook the nuts that he continues to eat. "My food is not that of man", the creature explains; "I do not destroy the lamb and the kid to glut my appetite; acorns and berries afford me sufficient nourishment" (Shelley, 1992, p.141).

The Costs of Meat

A yearning for that mythic state of nature fuels, in part, present day concerns for the environment. There is a strand in environmental rhetoric which asks us to leave nature alone, as though somehow an uncontaminated nature, an original wilderness, exists outside of human culture. In Europe particularly, that can no longer be true for the landscape is shaped by human mediation.

The authors of these books concur that a passion for beef contributed to changing patterns of land use in Britain, and set up patterns that were quickly exported to the New World. On both continents, changes of land use meant the expropriation of land by ruling elites. Existing animals ­ and people ­ have been ruthlessly cleared to make way for herds of meat-producing animals.

The land I see around me in central England bears testimony to that history, fields still corrugated from Medieval strip farming. Medieval peasants grazed their stock animals on common land. The resulting landscape was fairly open, with large fields. This began to change in the 16th century as landowners sought to enclose the land, making it private property. The peasants lost their right of commons and cattle were increasingly kept in large herds by the landowners (Williamson and Bellamy, 1987). 4

By the 18th century, herds of cattle were sometimes seen as an adornment for the grand parks developing around stately homes. 5 The development of specific breeds of livestock was closely linked to social class in this period: the so-called English thoroughbred, the elite racehorse, is one example of breeding for "aristocratic" features. Elite strains of cattle were often excessively fat, as breeders sought to maximize profits. This contributed to the development of the "British liking for fatty beef" that Rifkin notes (Russell, 1986; Ritvo, 1989).

The expropriation of land for cattle in the United States had a somewhat different history. Until the ranchers came, the land had not been worked over by extensive agriculture. The native American populations subsisted on the prairies more symbiotically, taking buffalo as needed. But this changed rapidly, so that, Rifkin reminds us, "By the time the U.S. Census Bureau declared the frontier officially closed in 1890, an area the size of all of western Europe had been transformed into the largest pastureland in the world" (p. 67). Rifkin documents the gruesome and systematic extermination of the American buffalo, a process greatly facilitated with the arrival of the railroad. This served to get rid of that species most likely to compete with cattle, and it removed the species on which the indigenous populations most relied, so hastening their own demise.

Like Britain in the previous century, cattle ranching in the western prairies was accompanied by enclosures; native fauna and people were dispossessed. Fragile ecosystems were destroyed to make way for monoculture. As Rifkin points out, this tale does not quite match the story we are told through children's books and movies:

The real story of how the west was won bears little resemblance to the storybook accounts handed down to generations of young Americans. Behind the facade of frontier heroism and cowboy bravado, of civilizing forces and homespun values, lies a quite different tale: a saga of ecocide and genocide, of forced enclosures of land and people, and the expropriation of an entire subcontinent for the exclusive benefit of a privileged few (p. 107).

The worst part of the whole tragedy is the extent to which it continues today: cattle ranching is still big business. Rifkin documents ways in which the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has colluded with the ranchers in efforts to exterminate native wildlife, to introduce non-native grasses and to divert water supplies. Even that symbol of the west, the American mustang, is driven off the plains ­ with the permission and assistance of the BLM. As Hope Ryden observed, "...there was no lack of [federal] money to pay for helicopter chase planes, hired cowboys, corrals and horse feed. The problem was how to spend the millions fast enough [to destroy the equine herds in 1985]" (1990 p. 301).

The ecological damage is increased by the move, in this century, toward grain-fed cattle. Huge areas of North America are now devoted to growing corn to feed cattle which are then "finished" in vast feedlots. The result of all this, says Rifkin, is that "large sections of the western rangeland lie in ruins, while the rest teeters on the edge of ecological collapse" (p. 211). Rifkin does not mince his words: "Every beef-eating American contributes personally to the process. The Worldwatch Institute estimates that each pound of feedlot steak costs about 35 pounds of eroded topsoil" (p. 203), and "nearly half the grain-fed cattle in the United States are raised in midwestern or western states that rely on a single underground aquifer."

The damage is not restricted to the western prairies. The ecological damage that results from the spread of industrial concerns such as cattle ranching is global: the Amazonian rainforests are disappearing fast to make way for cattle. Global warming and loss of biodiversity are the ecological consequences. The disrespect for indigenous people continues, too; the murder of Chico Mendes is one example. Further north, taiga forest and tundra are destroyed to make way for oil pipelines and hydroelectric projects, with little heed to the impact on native populations. Here, too, the native populations traditionally subsisted on indigenous animals, which are fast becoming threatened by the demands of Western industry. (See Herscovici, 1989 for a discussion of the effects on the native populations of the Canadian north).

The Last Slaughterhouse?

Meat has become an icon of Western domination over the rest of the natural world. Each of these books acknowledges that power, and each recognizes the dangers of that power in terms of the consequences for the earth and for species of all kinds.

The potent symbolism of meat is not always recognized. Fiddes wonders if its power might be reduced if its meanings were discussed more openly and explicitly. "The power of the ideas depends upon their being communicated without being explicit, for their meaning can then be understood by all concerned, but at the level of assumption, common sense, and accepted fact" (p. 44). Are we, he asks, moving towards a rejection of meat-eaters in the way that smokers are now considered somewhat vulgar and anti-social?

Rifkin and Adams are less concerned with posing questions than with the need for change. For Adams, the central issue is the way that the domination of man (sic) over animal ­ that ends as meat ­ symbolizes male power over women in our culture. The machismo of the bullring or rodeo are clear examples. She points out that one of the reasons men batter women is that the women have not served up meat. Adams sees as necessary changes that focus on the gendered significance of meat. "Carnivorous animals provide a paradigm for male behavior", she notes, and asks, "How do we overthrow patriarchal power while eating its symbol?" (pp.189 and 188).   

For Rifkin, a move away from meat-eating is essential to enable us to see nature in a more nurturing and cooperative light and for the salvation of the planet's ecosystems. For how can we see ourselves as part of nature if we are violent toward other creatures? His final chapter is utopian, outlining changes that will follow once we move "beyond beef." We can return the bovine to her place as an ancient symbol of generativeness, as part of the "primeval community" of nature in which we dwell. There is more than a hint of the pastoral idyll here.

In broaching the topic of the meanings of meat, these books are breaking relatively new ground; each attempts to chart the terrain in broad sweeps. Inevitably, such efforts can seem to gloss over some areas, while making connections between others more visible. Rifkin, for example, writes polemically and persuasively, but leaves the reader wondering what else there is to the arguments. Fiddes, similarly, makes some generalizations: my experience of feminist scholarship made me want to quibble, for example, at his suggestion (p.161) that "women...in general..." tend to view nature differently from men. Which women? And in what way? Adams' linkage between women/feminism and vegetarianism, too, seems occasionally too easy. Yet, in making these points, I feel I am quibbling for the sake of being academically critical. Whatever their faults (and I challenge anyone to write an interdisciplinary, wide-ranging book without seeming to gloss over things occasionally), these books, taken together, raise important issues for understanding the complexities of our culture. And, more importantly, for understanding the ways in which that culture's hegemony threatens the very survival of our earth.

As symbol and metaphor, meat stands for power. Although other cultures do eat meat, that symbolism and the belief that plenty of flesh protein is essential for health are constructions of the West. They have helped to create the global crisis that threatens our environment and continues to impoverish the environment of the poorer peoples on earth, as Shiva has stressed (1989). Each of these books recognizes the consequences of Western overindulgence in meat, and the role that it plays in the global balance of power. Many people throughout history have seen in the killing of animals for food a connection to the destructive side of human nature: vegetarianism, by contrast, becomes associated with the possibilities of a global peace and harmony, of a world in which everyone gets enough to eat (Kapleau, 1982).

"In all the world of Utopia there is no meat. There used to be. But now we cannot stand the thought of slaughterhouses. And in a population that is all educated and at about the same level of physical refinement, it is practically impossible to find anyone who will hew a dead ox or pig. We never settled the hygienic aspect of meat-eating at all. This other aspect decided us. I can still remember as a boy the rejoicings over the closing of the last slaughterhouse"

[H.G. Wells, from A Modern Utopia ]

"For hundreds of thousands of years

the stew in the pot
has brewed hatred and resentment

that is difficult to stop.
If you wish to know why there are disasters

of armies and people in the world,

listen to the piteous cries
from the slaughterhouse at midnight"

[ancient Chinese verse, cited in Kapleau, 1982]

Utopian dreams of a better future? Yes. And undoubtedly not everyone would agree with the link forged in this verse between killing animals for meat and the terrible history of human warfare. But those piteous cries from the slaughterhouse are the meanings of meat: as long as there are slaughterhouses, we are all guilty of complicity.

Notes

1. Correspondence should be sent to Lynda Birke, Department of Continuing Education, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK.

2. However, they disagree on the extent to which it continues. Rifkin describes Britons as the meateaters of Europe, while Fiddes (p.26) puts the U.K. at the bottom of the European league of meat eaters.

3. Although they clearly breach the human/animal boundary (and so threaten the sense of animal otherness), the "otherness" in these creatures of the Medieval European imagination lies precisely in their challenge to those boundaries.

4. The situation was different in the highlands of Scotland, where rich landowners forced the poor crofters off the land in the infamous Clearances to make way, of course, for meat-producing animals.

5. I am reminded of this history where I live. The area in the Middle Ages had the somewhat sylvan name of "Ladygrove." After the seizure of the land by Henry VIII from Woburn Abbey, it was increasingly enclosed, eventually becoming part of a grand estate.

Significantly, its name changed around the end of the 18th century to Stockgrove.

References

Arluke, A. (1988). Sacrificial symbolism in animal experimentation: Object or pet? Anthrozoos, 2 , 97-116.

Birke, L. (1986). Women, feminism and biology . Brighton: Wheatsheaf.

Birke, L. and Michael, M. (1992). View from the barricades. New Scientist , April 4.

de Moubray, J. (1987). The thoroughbred business. London: Hamish Hamilton.

Grandin, T. (1988). Behavior of slaughter plant and auction employees toward the animals. Anthrozoos 1 , 205-213.

Herscovici, A. (1991). Second nature: The animal-rights controversy . Toronto: Stoddart.

Kapleau, P. (1982). The Buddhist case for vegetarianism. London: Rider (Hutchinson).

Lynch, M.E. (1988). Sacrifice and the transformation of the animal body into a scientific object: Laboratory culture and ritual practice in the neurosciences. Social Studies of Science, 18, 265-89.

Mason, P. (1990). Deconstructing America: Representations of the other. London: Routledge.

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Paterson, J.S. (1957). The guinea-pig or cavy. In A.N. Worden and W. Lane-Petter (Eds.), The UFAW handbook on the care and management of laboratory animals, universities federation for animal welfare (2nd edition). London: Bailliere Tindall.

Richardson, R. (1989). Death, dissection and the destitute. London: Pelican.

Ritvo, H. (1987). The animal estate: The English and other creatures in the Victorian Age. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Russell, N. (1986). Like engend'ring like: Heredity and animal breeding in early modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Ryden, H. (1990). America's last wild horses. New York: Lyons and Burford.

Sabloff, A. (1992). Animals into citizens: The animal rights movement and culture change. Paper presented to "Animals and Us" conference, Montreal, Canada, July.

Shelley, M., (1818/1992). Frankenstein. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Shiva, V. (1989). Staying alive: Women, ecology and development, London: Zed Books.

Williamson, T. and Bellamy, L. (1987). Property and landscape: A social history of land ownership and the English countryside. London: George Philip.

Wright, S. (1922). The effects of inbreeding and crossbreeding on guineapigs. US Dept of Agriculture Bulletin , No. 1090.

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