Meatsplaining: The Animal Agriculture Industry and the Rhetoric of Denial

For readers who are vegan, the phenomenon documented in this new book Meatsplaining: The Animal Agriculture Industry and the Rhetoric of Denial will seem very familiar. It is difficult to live as a vegan without running headlong into the deeply established traditions, habits, and unreflective beliefs that support the consumption of nonhuman animals. The culture of animal consumption is wrapped up in people's identities. Just being a vegan is a threat to these identities because the existence of our movement questions the power that humans violently exercise over nonhuman animals. Conversations about animal agriculture are thus fraught with cultural baggage even before you add in the profit motive driving whole industries to actively undermine and resist any critical reflection. In these conversations, we see a predictable rhetorical pattern that is not just disagreement. Too often those defending animal agriculture rely on obfuscation, denial, gaslighting, and ad hominem attacks. The book offers us a pithy name for this rhetorical strategy: meatsplaining.This collection consists mostly of case studies. Scholars carefully examine the rhetoric associated with public conversation about animal agriculture, with a close eye to the kind of arguments and language that are used to discuss animals, food, and veganism. As such, the book does not focus on documenting the harms caused by animal agriculture nor does it spend any significant time convincing the reader that nonhuman animals are deserving of political rights or legal protections. Instead, the authors in the book mostly start off with the assumption that animal products are violent, destructive to the environment, and harmful to human health. In short, it is a book largely written by and for vegans. This allows the authors to move decisively on to some of the interesting cultural questions in this area. In my experience, scholarly work about animal agriculture is dominated by philosophers and scientists. This book shows that to really understand the place of animal agriculture in our culture, we have to ask a different set of questions.The book starts out with an introduction that offers a helpful Marxist framing for the book's topic, arguing that the damage caused by animal agriculture is buffered by the material interests of those in the industry as well as the ideological commitments to exchange value and property rights that animate our economic culture. This creates a strong incentive to dismiss the rights of nonhuman animals and discredit vegans and other activists. The first chapter dives into a case study of the public controversy surrounding the use of lean finely textured beef (LFTB or “pink slime”). The chapter describes the misuse of paid experts as “corporate ventriloquism” and exposes it as a particularly potent form of greenwashing. Chapter 2 focuses on the rhetoric of an egg production advertisement and the surrounding online conversation. It highlights the imagined moral communities assumed by advertisers and viewers in this particular case and the ways that these communities can include or (more often) exclude animals. Chapter 3 picks up similar themes, this time examining a social media campaign that invited bloggers and influencers to visit a farm. While offering a veneer of transparency, the author argues that the campaign still reinforced a moral distance between the chickens on the farm and the viewers. Chapter 4 provides a case study of beef marketing in Canada, highlighting the ways in which nationalist and colonialist narratives get tied into the marketing of animal products. Chapter 5 and 6 both focus on political battles over public environmental pronouncements. In Chapter 5, the focus is the US Department of Agriculture's dietary guidelines, focusing in particular on the attempt to integrate sustainability criteria. The chapter does a good job highlighting the importance of symbolic legitimacy in the rhetoric of these debates. Chapter 6 turns to lobbying in the European Union to limit the attention paid to meat consumption in climate change reports. Chapter 7 examines meat-exporting industries in Australia, paying close attention to the rhetoric of economic development and narratives of progress and modernization that favorably position the meat industry in people's diets.Chapter 8 turns attention to the rhetorical treatment of vegans and veganism, examining a series of media treatments that consistently position vegans as extremist outsiders who are antagonistic to the media consumer. Chapter 9 examines the role of meat eating in the traditional legends of the Mi'kmaq people using an ecofeminist postcolonial lens, highlighting a positive place for a vegan identity in a culture that is sometimes assumed to be closely tied to meat consumption. Chapter 10 considers the labor and perspective of dogs in the context of the trade in dog meat in order to shift the focus away from humans, whether they be omnivores or activists. Chapter 11 details the main principles of the Save Movement, which focuses on grassroots animal advocacy. Finally, the afterword highlights the rhetoric of those who promote grass-fed beef, examining the questionable assumptions and pseudoscience common in the movement.Any edited collection of chapters on a theme will be less focused than a single-author volume, and this book suffers from that problem. At times I wanted some of the more astute authors to just keep writing another chapter or two to really draw out the implications highlighted in their chapter. For an edited volume, though, this book is remarkably focused. With only a couple of exceptions, the authors all examine the rhetoric used in defense of animal agriculture in very specific instances. The overall result is a powerful and specific indictment of the way that the interests of nonhuman animals are consistently marginalized or outright ignored. The gaslighting and pseudoscience that is all too common is laid bare for the reader to see in chapter after chapter.This book will be essential for animal studies scholars, particularly those who engage in rhetorical criticism. The writing is consistently clear, however, and will be approachable for those in other disciplines as well. Moreover, the fact that the chapters are self-contained case studies would make it very easy to use the book in part or in its entirety in animal studies, animal ethics, or rhetoric courses. The collection deserves to be widely read and should be on the shelves of any interdisciplinary scholar in this area.

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