Veganism, Sex and Politics. C. Lou Hamilton
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consumption constructs complex human subjects while restrained plant eating creates simple selves.
The repeated association of plant-based diets with simplicity, restraint and moralising is similar in some ways to Plumwood’s reductive representation of “ontological” vegetarianism, and echoes claims in more popular portrayals of veganism.29 These representations raise an important question: why is the proposal to encourage a plant-based diet sometimes dismissed as facile, unrealistic or even ethnocentric, while other ways of eating and doing politics ostensibly are not? The remainder of this chapter swims around these questions, as I follow Probyn’s line in new directions. In her most recent work she immerses herself and her reader in the world of ocean life and the ways it runs through human lives. Although often overlooked in analyses of rearing and eating animals, fish and other marine creatures offer important insights into the challenges of ethical, sustainable eating in the early twenty-first century.
Fishy tales
December 2014London
Last night, another disastrous date. Even after I said I would have dinner beforehand (avoiding the awkward “What can I eat?” moment as manifestly unsexy), my internet date insisted on going to a sushi joint. She sat across from me like some selfish god, stabbing at the pink and black corpses flayed and displayed before her, banging on, between chomps, about one life drama after another. I felt like I was being force fed someone else’s minor traumas. I sipped my beer and tried to close my ears. Anger rose like bile in my throat, hotter than the ball of green fire globbed on the plate that marked a border between us.
These words were written as a kind of purging, a visceral reaction to an encounter that left me feeling physically and emotionally out of sorts. I don’t want to paint a picture of a sensitive vegan who cannot stomach dead fish in her presence; I have learned to plug my nose and hold my tongue (as many, many vegan and vegetarian friends did with me for years). My diary entry was a way of disgorging a memory of an encounter with an obnoxious human whose bad dinner table behaviour I cannot separate from my visual memory of the pieces of salmon and tuna being pierced in rhythm to the monologue, munched and swallowed between rants. Let’s set aside the rather obvious question of why someone would be so rude and unattractive on a first date (on any date for that matter). On the level of romance, I put this ugly experience down to an episode in what I subsequently dubbed my “year of dating disastrously,” a period in which I had a go at online hook-ups and assorted rendezvous, most of which ended sourful and sexless, and involved fraught moments over food — specifically fish food. The bad sushi date with a cute but verbally objectionable butch dyke forced me to swallow a chunk of my own pride and acknowledge a kernel of truth in Carol Adam’s argument that flesh-eating sometimes goes hand-in-hand with macho posturing. The fact that this was a bravado performance of carnivorous female masculinity adds a queer dimension to Adams’s argument, in spite of its best radical feminist intentions.
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