Vandana Shiva accepts the Right Livelihood award.

Welcome to the inaugural book club event for Conducive Media’s Left Eye on Books.  We will focus on books centered around
current progressive issues and invite readers to share their thoughts
and comments and join in on the discussion.  Our subject is Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply by the renowned environmentalist and feminist, Vandana Shiva.  In the book, Shiva lays out with stark clarity an argument about the sources of the world food crisis.  Multinationals, with the cooperation of the wealthiest countries, push monocultural, energy inefficient practices that undermine more sustainable practices that promote diverse crops and uses of plants and animals.  Claims that technological fixes like the green revolution and genetically modified crops will provide a miracle cure obscure the costs, both in terms of energy inputs required for the supposed ‘increased yields’, and the costs when traditional agriculture is undermined around the world.  Another major target of Shiva’s is the use of patent law to monopolize rights to seeds and destroy traditional agricultural practices, which depend on reusing the bounties of plants for next year, rather than purchasing more seeds from global agricultural giants like Monsanto. Whether or not you agree with her, Shiva offers much to think about.

Vandana Shiva (b. 1952) is a major figure in the alter-globalization, food justice, and eco-feminist movements.  In the 1970s, she was part of the nonviolent Chipko movement, the original ‘tree huggers’.  A fierce critic of the developmental policies proposed by the World Bank and IMF, she has championed causes of sustainable and diverse practices of agriculture for thirty years in over twenty books. She helped found Navdanya, a seed-sharing program centered around indigenous agricultural practices. In 1993, she received the Right Livelihood Award, otherwise known as ‘the alternative Nobel’.

To kick things off, you may wish to respond to any of these discussion questions.  Or, feel free to post your thoughts on the book even if they go in a somewhat different direction.

What does Shiva see as the roots of the world food crisis?  How does technology and science increase the crisis, and what role might they have in undoing it?  Who does she see as the  main actors?  Is there anyone she leaves out?  What sort of politics do you think is necessary to reverse the trends she writes about? Vandana Shiva on women\’s struggles over biodiversity

To learn more about Shiva’s intellectual ideas, watch this video.

This food justice discussion is part of Conducive Media’s commitment to reporting on food justice. Check out Conducive Chronicle’s last three World Hunger series here, here and here.

Consider purchasing a World Hunger: Be the Solution Tee.  Proceeds from the shirt will go to Vandana Shiva’s Navdanya, the Small Planet Institute Fund the International Fund for Africa.  All tees are sweat free and available in organic cotton. To see the selection of World Hunger tees at Conducive’s Humanitarian & Human Rights Tee store, click here.

Dunnewold: What progress have you seen in cultural acceptance of your theory? What issues have changed in the twenty years that the book has been in print? What stayed the same?

Adams: I am shocked that people so fear the word feminism. A young woman said “I wasn’t going to read your book, because it had the word feminism in it. And then I saw your slideshow, and realize that I want to read your book.” This resistance is to a word that encapsulates so much of how we’ve gotten where we are! Progress on women’s health care, rape crisis centers, battered women’s centers, sexual harassment laws, reproductive choice, all is because of feminism. Yet, all the progress the feminist movement achieved has been massaged in such a way that the feminist roots are lost.

Meanwhile, veganism is now “hot.” This is a shock and a thrill. It makes travel easier and more enjoyable. There are vegan restaurants everywhere I go, all around the globe. That is the wonderful part. But so much of veganism hasn’t recognized the way our culture has structured the sexual politics of meat. Many vegans seem to believe we can leave ideas of masculinity undisturbed and still end meat-eating. But it won’t work. There are vegans who are complacent about the sexualization of women. Some say, “so what if a guy is really macho, as long as he’s vegan.” That complacency is dangerous. The sexual politics of meat is what stays most unchanged. It finds new iterations; ads that may be tongue-in-cheek about men needing to eat meat, for instance, but they still convey the same message: men believe it is more masculine to eat meat, still, and that this is their right. Some men who are vegans have called themselves ‘hegans’, as if the word vegan itself is tainted by being associated with women. Given the association of women and vegetables, some vegan men appear to feel a need to recoup threatened maleness.

You asked what has stayed the same. I didn’t think that the sexual politics of meat would be both so intransigent and so mobile. It’s versatile. When it comes under attack, it’s like water finding its own level; it is just expressed in a different way. All around the world, advertisements and newspapers articles presume the normativeness of the sexual politics of meat, and here it is, 2010!

And you asked what is most changed? The sexualization of animals in images has actually increased, as the sexualization of our culture overall has increased. What Hustler magazine perpetrated against women in the 1980s, meat ads do to animals in the 21^st century. In The Sexual Politics of Meat I argue that all animals in our culture are rendered symbolically female. But I never realized how strongly that trend would be expressed through images. I also didn’t expect the animal rights movement to be so sexist in their attitudes and their activism.

Dunnewold: Can you elaborate on that?

Adams: PETA’s (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) sexist campaigns are the most visible ones; and have probably alienated more feminists from animal activist messages than any one organization. A January 2007 example was PETA’s “State of the Union Undress” (available at YouTube for anyone who verifies they are 18 or older), a video in which a young white woman is depicted (through the magic of video intercutting) addressing the US Congress on the subject of animal exploitation–as she slowly strips off all her clothing. And then when Obama was elected, PETA decided they should do the same thing but this time, in 2010, they used an African-American woman. Equal opportunity sexism. One of the implicit, if not explicit, messages of such advertisements is, “Yes, we’re asking you to give up animals as objects, but you can still have women as objects! You can become aware of animals’ lives, but you don’t have to give up your pornography.” Thus, rather than challenge the inherent inequality of a culture structured around dominance and subordination, the ad instead tries to leverage sexual inequality on behalf of the other animals. In fact, every time PETA uses a naked or nearly-naked woman to raise concern for animals, they not only benefit from sexual inequality, they also unwittingly demonstrate the intransigence of species inequality.

But the problem of sexism in the movement is much deeper than PETA’s ongoing commitment to sell animal rights by using women’s bodies. In the animal movement, men still predominate as leaders and speakers, women as the grassroots workers doing the day-to-day work. Just as the Gross National Product does not measure housework, it does not measure volunteer hours. Unpaid labor is more likely to be provided by women than men, whether in the animal movement or at home. Yet, while animal activism needs women’s labor, it also disowns the very labor it needs! For the past twenty years, a variety of male leaders of the animal rights movement have been quoted as saying, “We aren’t a bunch of little old ladies in tennis shoes.”

Such statements are truly acts of confining the feminist-vegan message and messengers by focusing or actually not wanting to focus on the aging female body. I take this ongoing denial of women’s contributions personally. I am hoping to live long enough to qualify to be a little old lady!

I don’t think the animal rights movement is able to acknowledge its indebtedness to the feminist movement and feminist theory.

Dunnewold: What events have made you happiest and/or proudest, in relation to getting your ideas out there?

Adams: At different times over the past twenty years, I would have answered this in different ways. Having an industrial rock group, Consolidated, create a track on their Friendly Fa$cism CD devoted to The Sexual Politics of Meat was pretty great. And as I have said, it gives me great joy when I hear from people who tell me the book changed their lives. The most recent event generates complex emotions, I was both shocked and in awe: It was seeing myself portrayed on Law and Order, SVU, in April 2010. The episode is entitled “Beef.” One of the characters in this episode is clearly based on me: She is juxtaposing slides that depict animals used as meat, and women, and saying, “Our society views women and animals pretty much the same… as cuts of meat.” She then says, “Meat eating and the patriarchal world go hand in hand.” She concludes by saying, “We can’t end the objectification of women until we stop eating our four legged and winged brothers and sisters.” She finishes her slide show and moves to a table to do a book signing, and the cover of the book is that rear-entry, come hither image I described to you. I sat there, fascinated and horrified. Fascinated to hear my words on Law and Order, and to see an image that I have identified and discussed being explained by a fictional me. Simultaneously, I felt both visible and invisible. If Law and Order depicted a fiction writer known for creating a world of young wizards, we’d all know who it is. But, my work doesn’t have that kind of visibility. If it did, I would’ve just been thrilled, because Law and Order conveyed the message nonjudgmentally. These ideas leaped several levels in popular culture into the stratosphere of the Law and Order world. To have that level of visibility was galvanizing. But it was depressing, at the same time. I wish the show could’ve acknowledged that someone actually does show a slide show discussing these ideas or could have identified these ideas as having come from The Sexual Politics of Meat. If only on the Law and Order website they linked to The Sexual Politics of Meat, or credited my ideas. There was a huge debate on my Facebook page. “This is great, it’s homage, you should be thrilled.” And others were saying, “why could they not have acknowledged Carol?” To me, that was a ‘meta’ event, seeing my own fictional counterpart showing my slideshow.

There have been so many wonderful experiences in so many different venues around the world. When I spoke in Buffalo, NY, near my home town, a vegan feminist created a cheesecake for me–and later presented me with a beautifully-decorated, framed, rendition of the recipe. After a reception at Peter Max’s studio, the vegan caterer copied out one of her recipes for me and signed it “I love Carol Adams.”

Dunnewold: What has made you most proud?

Adams: Many different things, like people giving copies of my book to their parents or children. But personally, something happened recently that thrilled me. This summer, my college student son was taking part in a Jazz Camp for high school and college students. One young girl was a vegan, and there were no vegan offerings at a meal. Ben realized this, and brought her a vegan meal from his apartment. When the student discovered who his mother was, she was in awe and raved with admiration. It was fun to hear my son experience, through the eyes of someone else, what it means to have me as his mother. When he was a child, I was busy writing, raising my kids, cooking vegan food for him to share with his friends—that’s what he knew of me, that “Mom.” What this writer mother meant to others, that wasn’t something he knew growing up. What he knew was that sometimes my writing meant I was unavailable to do things with him. For many years, The Sexual Politics of Meat was not well known in my own community, so my sons were not presented with signs of my public role. I think it was meaningful to him, as he realized what I meant to someone I had never met, to be able to integrate these different aspects of his mother–the public self, the writer self, the mother self.

Dunnewold: Are there other points, about this experience over twenty years that you would like to convey?

Adams: Last November, the New York Times Book Review stated that twenty years ago, the book was ahead of its time, but that now it’s essentially of this time. It was lonely to be ahead of your time. I do hope that my ideas are now timely because there are some things that I would really like to see changed.

Meat eaters, whether feminist, progressive, evangelical, whatever their stripes, think that change is hard. What I’ve learned is that not changing is harder. People just haven’t learned that yet. They are working so hard not to change, that they’re unable to discover how easy it is to change. Meat-eaters think vegans are burdened by carrying some sort of rulebook around, or that we’re living lives of deprivation. Those lives of deprivation might occur when we’re eating with meat-eaters, who have picked the restaurant. In my own home, and among other vegans, I don’t live a life of deprivation. I don’t live a rule-based life, filled with obsessing about what I’m going to eat.

There is a statement by the Buddha, “One need not carry the raft on one’s head after crossing the stream.” There is a stage where you learn, and there is a stage where you practice. You’re not always forced to learn, you’re not always carrying a raft. I’ve read that the average person prepares only ten different meals. I believe those ten different meals can be easily veganized: Start with spaghetti: Spaghetti and veggie balls, spaghetti and portobello mushrooms, spaghetti and spring vegetables, spaghetti and summer vegetables. One reason that Patti Breitman and I wrote How to Eat Like a Vegetarian Even If You Never Want to Be One: More Than 250 Shortcuts, Strategies, and Simple Solutions, was to show that it is really very easy to be a vegan.

I believe vegans actually have a wider choice of food than meat-eaters, because we actively try to learn to cook such a wide variety of vegetables. Before I became a vegetarian, I was a lousy cook–I didn’t even know how to seed a pepper –and now I’ve become a really good cook. One reason I end up talking about food with vegans when I travel, is I want to know what they’ve learned. Their rafts were different, and I want to know what they learned. The recipes and insights they have shared with me are wonderful — uses for nutritional yeast, seitan or vegan lasagna recipes, quick ways to prepare leafy greens.

Back when the book first came out, I was told that some feminists announced they weren’t going to buy the book because they were afraid they’d have to give up meat! I don’t think that’s the worst thing that can happen to someone! When you think about it, there are worse aspects of meat-eating, than having to give it up. Most importantly, I think ethically, meat eating violates every aspect of progressive or feminist thought, because it makes someone a means to our end. And that someone isn’t given a choice, to say, “no, I really don’t want to be your dinner.” The ability to widen how we live in this world, and whose lives we pay attention to, is an important aspect of engagement and awareness. Why that should end at the species line, I do not understand. In the 1970s, I wrote, “if we want to live in a world without oppression, where does meat eating fit into that vision?” For those of us living in the Western world, I don’t believe meat eating can fit itself into our vision. The great French writer, Simone Weil, said that attention is the ability to ask “what are you going through?” and being able to hear the answer to the question. My work as a feminist has been to say, “we need to ask that question and listen for the answers from nonhuman animals as well as from humans.”

Click on the following links to purchase Carol J. Adams’s books:

Sexual Politics of Meat

The Pornography of Meat

The feminist-vegetarian critical theory (referred to in the subtitle) of The Sexual Politics of Meat is comprised of three main points:

1) A link exists between meat eating and notions of masculinity and virility in the Western world. Meat eating societies enhance male identification food choice; creating and recreating an experience of male bonding in various male-identified locations, such as steak houses, fraternities, strip clubs, or (domesticated) at a barbecue. Within this sexual politics, vegetables represent passivity, and so vegetarianism is construed as acceptable for women and anyone associated with women.

2) Animals are the absent referents in the consumption of meat. The concept of “absent referent” originates with linguistics, indicating language that refers to something not present. Behind every meal of “meat” is an absence: the death of the animal whose place the “meat” takes. Without animals there would be no meat eating, yet they are absent from the act of eating meat because they have been transformed, and relabeled, as food. Animals in name, and body, are made absent as animals for meat to exist. Cultural linguistic custom entails calling meat from cows “beef,” not “cow,” hence removing the animal of the cow from our minds. The function of the absent referent is to allow for the moral abandonment of a being –while also emptying violence from the language.

3) Violence against animals cannot be understood without a feminist analysis, because this violence is embedded within patriarchal culture. The process of objectification, fragmentation, and consumption connects women and animals in a patriarchal culture, as each becomes overlapping absent referents. This cycle of objectification, fragmentation, and consumption links butchering with both the representation and reality of sexual violence in Western cultures. To highlight the experience of subjugation of female animals, The Sexual Politics of Meat coined the term “feminized protein,” (plant protein produced through the abuse of the reproductive cycle of female animals, i.e., dairy and eggs).

Dunnewold: What has surprised you the most about the process of writing The Sexual Politics of Meat?

Adams: I had the original idea for The Sexual Politics of Meat in October 1974, but the book was not published until 1990. When I initially talked about the underlying link between a patriarchal society and meat-eating, there were a few people who got it. But the majority of people laughed. It wasn’t just that as a writer I led a solitary life; I led a lonely life. I almost exiled myself, to western New York, and became an activist. Those years as an activist in the women’s movement, in particular working with victims of domestic violence and resettled migrant workers, taught me how to have a voice—and why.

During that time, the idea of a connection between meat eating and a patriarchal world would simply not let go of me. My task was to figure out what to say and how to say it. I had to learn how to be a writer. After years of incubating the idea, figuring out how to say it, and battling self-doubt, it was a major surprise that when the book was published, suddenly, I was not just a writer. I was an author. And I’d had no idea what it was like to be an author.

Dunnewold: How do you see the difference?

Adams: An author is a public person. An author has readers. I had a relationship with people I’d never met. People I’d imagined reading The Sexual Politics of Meat suddenly truly existed in the flesh. There were other people who got it!

During those years of “exile”, I was figuring out how to argue with the predominant culture in a way that could be heard. Not until ’87 did I realize how angry I was. I had to get rid of this anger, or no one would want to read it. Who wants to read a complaint? I needed a beguiling way to invite the reader in. In a book about consumption, I can’t force feed the reader. I had to trust the reader; I had to make my words work. As an author I discovered that I really did have readers, and it was right to trust them.

Early on, I was uncomfortable when people said, “I love your book.” I wanted to give them something in return, so I would say “tell me about you.” It probably took me fifteen years of being an author to learn simply to say “thank you.” “Thank you for having the openness to trust my words.”

Right away after the book was published, I began to get letters, now emails and Facebook posts, saying, “your book changed my life.” The experience of meeting my readers has overwhelmed me, though I am surprised by the degree to which people react to the book, such as the young man at Harvard who whispered “I can’t believe I’m sitting so close to her” or religious studies graduate students moved to tears to meet me. I perceive myself as just another human being. I’m honored that others trust my words. I try to eliminate the space that this idolization creates between my readers and me. That’s not the kind of author I want to be.

What an incredible gift readers give me, in letting my ideas influence how they live. When given this gift of trust in me as an author, I don’t want to betray that trust by accepting any hierarchy or authority. I try to knock it down, to equalize, to accept this gift of a relationship with them. I only knew the book from the inside out, but my readers gave me a perspective on my work from the outside in.

Just two weeks after the book appeared, a reader sent me an image illustrating the theory. Since then, I’ve received hundreds of images. In the first edition, there were only two images demonstrating the interconnection of oppression of women and the other animals. Now, I’ve received T-shirts, advertisements, menus, matchbooks—with sexist and speciest phrases, examples of the premise of the book. This ephemera surrounds us all the time, and deadens us to how we look at women or domesticated animals. With the publication of the book, the ephemera stopped being ephemera and became examples. People around the world responded, sending images from Romania, from Canada, from Australia. I simply had never anticipated this response.

I thought, after publication of the book, that I would be done engaging with this idea. I thought I had said everything I had to say. But my readers showed me that I wasn’t done. The images they sent raised questions: “Why are all the pigs in ads white? What’s going on racially? What about class distinctions?” The person who lived in my house before me had subscribed to pornography, and a pornographic flyer arrived in the mail one day. There was a picture of a woman on all fours, presenting her buttocks, and she is looking over her shoulder. The very next day, I received a picture in the mail of a billboard in Atlanta, “Hamtastic” showing an advertisement for pigmeat. The pig was positioned just like the woman in that pornography. That image is still widely used in the South. I realized that positioning animals in this way was an encoded way of talking to pornography users. I call that the “come hither/rear entry” pose; the animal is saying “I want to be consumed,” as if to be eaten is meeting the pig’s needs. It was from readers’ responses to the book, and the images they sent me, images like “Hamtastic,” that The Sexual Politics of Meat Slideshow was born. Prior to 1996, I simply talked about the interconnections when addressing audiences. Then a reader suggested that I put the images I had used in my books (Neither Man nor Beast had appeared in 1994) into a slide show, illustrating and expanding upon the theory in the books.

Then, with the creation of the slide show, my theory evolved, and I wrote The Pornography of Meat. The slide show is continually evolving, as I collect images, and track new trends (with the same old themes, sadly), and I’ve now shown it on more than 120 campuses and around the world.

I think of a quote from Jane Goodall about her dedication to her work. She said she was paying back, in part, the debt owed to the chimpanzee. After all these years, I realize that I will never be done engaging with issues around animals. My debt to animals–how they’ve gone before me, how they’ve saved me, how they live (and so many suffer) now–that debt is always ongoing. But the difference is I’m not alone any more.

Dunnewold: What is the point from the book that has been most misunderstood?

Adams: There are two key points. When the book first was released, I was often asked, especially by TV hosts in Texas, “Are you saying that if I eat a hamburger I’ll beat my wife?” As if A leads directly to B, cause and effect. What I am saying is that in a patriarchal world women are animalized and animals are sexualized. It is interconnected; it permeates our viewpoint; it’s a systemic problem. We can’t have one–or stop one, without stopping the other. I know from working with battered women that animals often are injured as part of the control a batterer exercises. It’s about control, which might get expressed by demanding meat to eat, within that couple and within our culture. But I never claimed, and don’t believe, that eating a hamburger causes one to beat his wife. I do believe that someone who believes he needs to eat hamburger, who has to restore a sense of his manhood by eating male-identified foods, tells us a great deal about our culture’s teachings about men and virility. And I also believe that if a batterer kills an animal, the woman is in danger and should seek help.

The second misconception is that it’s okay for women to just eat vegetables and still cook meat for their partners. I’d be rich if I had a dollar for every woman who has said “I’d be a vegetarian if I didn’t have to cook meat for my husband.” In terms of food preparation, women are taught to deny their own desires; they are taught that they must meet their husbands’ desires. Women need to know they can be equipped to honor their own desires and educate the men in their lives to change. I loved the story one reader related, a young woman in Michigan. She fell in love with a young man from the Southwest. He wanted to marry her. She asked him to read The Sexual Politics of Meat before she would accept his proposal. She wanted him to understand her worldview. He read the book and became a vegan. He moved to Michigan and they had a vegan wedding. I loved that the book was a tool for that kind of creative negotiation.

This is part one in a two part interview with Carol J. Adams.

Click on the following links to purchase Carol J. Adams’s books:

Sexual Politics of Meat

The Pornography of Meat

Reprinted with permission from Conducive Chronicle