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1 di 10 18/08/2021, 04:53
Meat Country | J.M. Coetzee | Granta Magazine https://granta.com/meat-country/
S ummer in central Texas. Days dawn warm and steamy. Clouds build
up and sit over the land like a lid on a pot. By ten o’clock the weight
of the sun lies heavy on your limbs. It is a sun that burns white skins
shades of wooden brown, from light oak to deep walnut, not unattractive
but without any hint of the luminous honey-gold one sees under a
temperate sun.
Nor is it like the sun of the African uplands, which whips the body dry as
a bone. Here one moves in a pocket of humid warmth, sweat streaming
from one’s pores. Yet, surprisingly, the somatic imagination, the pre-
verbal, reactive imagination of the desiring, craving body, turns not to the
cold and moist – lettuce, berries, watermelon – but to the hot and dry.
2 di 10 18/08/2021, 04:53
Meat Country | J.M. Coetzee | Granta Magazine https://granta.com/meat-country/
carrying water, but the water is already at blood heat, warm enough to
make one gag. My fantasies are anyhow not of water but of food: of a
great dish of rice and peppers – poblano, ancho, manzano, chimayo,
serrano. Peppers in all their hundredfold variety belong to the New World.
It was from Mexico, via the conquistadors, that they spread to the Orient.
The wisdom of Mexico, which fights the fire of the sun with the flame
tongues of the earth.
In our time and place, tales like these evoke moral disapproval, even in
deeply carnivorous circles. The death of the bear, the deaths of the
flamingos, disturb us as the death of the beef ox does not. Why? Because
there are so many more oxen than bears on earth, we say. Because we eat
so much more of the carcass of the ox than of the carcass of the flamingo
(do flamingos have carcasses or mere bodies?). The gourmet’s nonchalant
wastefulness, the disproportion between his pleasures and the slaughter
that must take place to satisfy them, affront our sense of what is right.
(What a relief we have a pet-food industry to grind up all the leftover flesh
and put it in cans, so that no death occurs in vain!)
The sacrifice of the bear angers us because there are so few bears left. If
we go on killing bears for their paws, we argue, bears will disappear as a
species. Oxen, by contrast, are two a penny. They can be bred without
end, their species is not threatened. The life of the species is of a higher
order than the life of the individual.
L ife being nasty, brutish and short, Diogenes the Cynic believed that
thinking men and thinking women should refuse to procreate. No
one has ever taken Diogenes seriously, and rightly so. However sorry a
business life may be, men and women cleave to each other, engender
babies, bring them into the world. Having children is part of human
nature; only a fool could imagine that mankind would change its nature
for the sake of an idea.
Similarly, whether or not it is a good idea to kill fellow beings and eat
them, that is the way of the world, the animal kingdom included. The few
exceptions to the rule (cows, horses, deer) would probably follow suit if
3 di 10 18/08/2021, 04:53
Meat Country | J.M. Coetzee | Granta Magazine https://granta.com/meat-country/
only they could find out how to digest flesh: it is certainly not for the sake
of principle that they restrict themselves to grass. Our cousins the
chimpanzees, whom we used to think herbivorous, turn out to prefer fruit
with worms to fruit without.
The question of whether we should eat meat is not a serious question. The
‘should’ in the question is anomalous: bringing ‘should’ into contact with
eating meat, as with bringing ‘should’ into contact with sex, is like asking,
‘Should we be ourselves?’ Interpreted to mean ‘Should we be what we
have made ourselves to be?’ the question might perhaps be a real one. But
we have not made ourselves to be creatures with sexual itches and a
hunger for flesh. We are born like that: it is a given, it is the human
condition. We would not be here, we would not be asking the question, if
our forebears had eaten grass: we would be antelopes or horses.
Asking whether human beings should eat meat is on the same level of logic
as posing the question, ‘Should we have words?’ We have words; the
question is being posed in words; without words there would be no
question. So if there is going to be any question at all, it will have to be a
different question, one I have not even begun to frame.
Wandering around the first hall of Central Market, the atrium of fruit and
vegetables, is indeed like being in the mythic Land of Plenty. Why, then, is
the experience of the next chamber, the Hall of Meats (meat, fish and
poultry), so different? Partly, perhaps, because the smell has changed. No
longer does the air hold the scent of melons and peaches. Instead there is a
smell of blood and death, and all the exertions of the smiling assistants
behind the counters to scrub and sterilize will not chase it away.
The infernal atmosphere in which they have to operate is not their only
handicap. However willing they are to advise, to chop and slice and weigh
4 di 10 18/08/2021, 04:53
Meat Country | J.M. Coetzee | Granta Magazine https://granta.com/meat-country/
and pack, they cannot compete, as a show, with Fruits and Vegetables.
The very current of modern marketing is against them. The modernist
food hall consisting of nothing but rows and rows of gleaming refrigerated
beds holding antiseptic packages, neatly labelled and priced, is becoming
an anachronism. The new fashion is rough, homely, mock-rustic: fruit and
vegetables cascading out of bushel baskets, with folksy handwritten signs
planted in them telling where they come from, what they taste like, how to
cook them. A spectacle, in other words, of origins.
How is the Hall of Meats to move with the times? How can it rival this
pageant of origins? Ineluctably the meat halls of Texas and the rest of the
United States are being tugged towards the model of the Cantonese
market, where you can pick out a goose and have its head chopped off
before your eyes; or of the Riviera restaurant, where in their aerated tank
lobsters await the distinction of being selected for the cauldron; or even of
those Hong Kong establishments where a live vervet monkey is brought to
your table and trepanned so that you can spoon out its warm brains (good
for potency or longevity or sagacity, I forget which). Towards theatre, in
other words.
Respect for life, one might call it, but for the fact that the same customers
who might shrink from the spectacle of locusts being de-winged or ants
being fried alive – to say nothing of pigs being stuck – will unblinkingly
call in the pest exterminator to their homes. It is not death that is offensive,
but killing, and killing only of a certain kind, killing accompanied by
‘unnecessary pain’. Somehow the imagination knows what the other’s pain
is like, even the ant’s pain. What the imagination cannot encompass is
death. Death, it says to itself, is the end of pain. Death is a relief.
5 di 10 18/08/2021, 04:53
Meat Country | J.M. Coetzee | Granta Magazine https://granta.com/meat-country/
knowledge that tells which plants may be eaten and which are to be
avoided seems to be separate from the branch that tells which kinds of
flesh may be eaten and which are unclean. The basis of plant lore is
experience, passed down by word of mouth. To the extent that it is
indistinguishable from herbal lore (knowledge of the medicinal properties
of plants), plant lore belongs to folk science. Flesh lore, on the other hand,
belongs squarely to tradition, to taboo, and therefore to religion (this
despite efforts to persuade us that, for instance, the rabbinical ban on pork
was a public health measure, an effort to control the spread of trichinosis).
Even in the case of so-called clean meat, like beef, the same people who
eat the muscle flesh of cattle are revolted at the thought of eating their
eyes, their brains, their testicles, their lungs. They would vomit if they had
to drink blood. Why? The question is pointless: distaste for certain body
parts, and particularly for body fluids in their fluid state, belongs to the
penumbra of taboo, well outside the realm of rational explanation.
What is the nature of this horror? It has something to do with the essential
distinction between plants and animals in our everyday understanding:
that animals are alive and plants are not, that animals cannot or should not
or dare not be eaten while they are alive, while plants can be eaten with
impunity because they have never been, in the full sense of the word, alive.
6 di 10 18/08/2021, 04:53
Meat Country | J.M. Coetzee | Granta Magazine https://granta.com/meat-country/
Dietary habits took hold in early colonial times that would not thereafter
be easily shaken off. Egalitarianism came before democracy, and
egalitarianism meant an end of the stratification of society into those who
hogged the supply of meat and those who had to stuff their stomachs with
grains. America typifies the triumph of the common people in their
historical drive for animal protein, and Texas is, in this respect, the capital
of America. The Texan family sitting down to a meal of chicken and fried
steak with french fries on the side is making up, atavistically, for European
forebears who had to make do with milk and bread, or polenta. Day after
day, meal after meal, their diet celebrates the New World. Life is good
here: no amount of argufying is going to change that. ‘Ribs first and then
7 di 10 18/08/2021, 04:53
Meat Country | J.M. Coetzee | Granta Magazine https://granta.com/meat-country/
8 di 10 18/08/2021, 04:53
Meat Country | J.M. Coetzee | Granta Magazine https://granta.com/meat-country/
9 di 10 18/08/2021, 04:53
Meat Country | J.M. Coetzee | Granta Magazine https://granta.com/meat-country/
10 di 10 18/08/2021, 04:53