Letter from the Editors
Our MEAT issue
Struggling to define your relationship with meat? Wanting to learn more about how other people navigate the fraught dynamics of raising and/or eating animals? Our MEAT issue is for you. In it, you’ll find stories about colonialism, consumption, queerness, cultural eating practices, spirituality and faith, identity, and so much more. These are presented in podcasts, poetry, essays, interviews, and illustrations.
Our MEAT issue is concluding, and we’re here with our usual Letter from the Editors to discuss what we learned and felt. As always, it’s hard not to find ourselves trapped in the sappy treacle that is our nostalgia — we put our hearts and souls into every issue, from our call for pitches to commissions, edits, publication, and finally, these recaps. When we commissioned MEAT, it was in the early days of December 2023, a year that already feels remarkably distant.
We were overwhelmed by the volume of high-quality pitches we received and selecting our final lineup was no easy feat. There is so much to say about meat — how bodies are rendered into it and what it means to consume it — from intersectional feminist perspectives. We hope the content we chose for MEAT has surprised, challenged, and perhaps even changed you over these last five months.
In our MEAT issue:
British Beef vs. French Foppery, an essay* by Annie Dabb
Engorged, a poem by A.J. Parker
Meat: The Four Futures, an essay* by Tamsin Blaxter to accompany a podcast by TABLE Debates
Manning the Grill, a podcast by Amirio Freeman
Mutually Assured, a poem by Natasha Matsaert
Not A Small Act, a podcast syndicated from Farmerama
Offal Conundrums, a podcast by FFJ editor Isabela Bonnevera
So Much Equity, That All Flesh Would Experience Salvation, an interview with pastor and organizer Aline Silva
Tai, You Ate Her Face, an essay by Sadie Barker
To Speak In Two Tongues, an essay* by Mwinji Nakamba Siame
*Premium subscribers have access to audio versions of these written pieces, read by the authors themselves. Premium subscribers are the ones who keep FFJ going. Please consider becoming one if you can. It costs less than one cup of good coffee per month.
Having started to dabble in fiction and video with SEA, we are thrilled that MEAT featured poetry, another new format for us. MEAT also marks the first time we commissioned a podcast to be produced externally, which was a raging success!
As with all issues, we’re so grateful to the talented writers, poets, and podcast producers who chose to make FFJ a home for their work. Learning with and from them is one of the best things about running Feminist Food Journal.
Here are some highlights of what they shared with us.
Meat and consumption
MEAT came roaring out of the gate with evocative descriptions of a scene from the 2021 TV show Yellowjackets: a festive feast on human flesh reminiscent of a Greco-Roman bacchanalia. “Tai, you ate her face” by Sadie Barker uses cannibalism as a framework to ultimately unpick the ways taboos — and rules about who we consume, why and how — can be reified and instrumentalized by oppressors to expand or consolidate their power. In this piece, Sadie skillfully weaves nuanced arguments about the politics of consumption from gendered, colonial, racial, and geopolitical perspectives. “If cannibalism appears at the grotesque fringe of Western storytelling, it is no coincidence,” she writes. “Western storytelling has long been married to expansion, and colonialism has long relied on the construction of monstrous ‘Others’.” It was the perfect essay to open the issue with, as it raises many themes — consumption, inequality, and expectations of femininity — we see echoed in other pieces.
After Sadie’s essay came poetry. With their own suggestively cannibalistic imagery, the poems “Engorged” and “Mutually Assured”, by A.J. Parker and Natasha Matsaert respectively, also offer feminist perspectives on the politics of consumption.
A.J.’s “Engorged” is powerful because how it depicts the violence of conforming to society’s ideas of what it means to be a woman. The poem evokes the visceral discomfort of tamping down those parts of ourselves that might, as Sadie writes of the impulses that take over Yellowjackets’ characters in the wilderness “defy expectations of girlhood and later, womanhood” — expectations that, as A.J. puts it, form “the bone you choke on when no one is looking”.
Natasha’s “Mutually Assured” offers an erotic exploration of flesh as meat. We appreciate the way it approaches the objectification of bodies, especially of women’s bodies, from an alternate perspective. There can be power in the process of being consumed, of rendering oneself ripe for consumption (“I want to desire you and make you fear me/It is central that you view me as less human following this colonising of form”). Indeed, many of us even take pleasure in it.
Part of the beauty of poetry is that we each take something different from it, so we’d love to hear what these pieces brought up for you in the comments below.
Meat and identity
The rest of the pieces in our issue focus on meat more literally. Many explore what it means to eat, or not to eat, the flesh of other Animals.
In her short audio story, “Offal Conundrums”, FFJ editor Isabela Bonnevera grapples with the impossibility of squaring her love of offal with her politics. Through a personal history of her experiences both eating meat and going vegetarian, she unpicks why eating organ meat feels so oddly foundation to who she is, and what it would mean to tear these foundations down. “I want to do my best in this world, but I also need to feel like me to do so,” she says. “Maybe it’s feeble to need chicken livers to prop me up, but in a way, they feel as vital as my own internal organs.”
Mwinji Nakamba Siame’s essay “To Speak in Two Tongues” touches on similar themes. Mwinji finds that eating meat is damaging to her sense of self, despite the fact that her culture encourages and values its consumption. We love her articulation of her journey towards finding comfort in living in a grey zone:
So, I’ve decided to abstain from meat most of the time — except for important social occasions related to my Namwanga culture. To you, this might not be “vegetarianism” at all, and I have come to terms with that. To me, isolation from my culture and community would be as painful as having to fully deny my moral qualms about eating meat. I think my experience as an African meat-avoider has also shown me that in reality there are no simple answers to how to build a truly humane and egalitarian society for both humans and animals.
This passage — one of the most powerful of the issue — speaks to the tensions of making highly individual consumption decisions within the wider social contexts that sustain us. Mwinji refuses for her choices to be reduced to naught over any perceived incompatibility or hypocrisy. She rejects the pervasive modern urge to sort people into polarized and clearly demarcated camps.
Mwinji’s piece also argues against using Western frameworks, such Carol J. Adam’s classic “absent referent”, to interpret the relationships between meat-eating and gender relations in African cultures. “In a dietary discourse largely dominated by the West, I have felt lonely in trying to navigate vegetarianism intellectually as an African who still draws a lot of my solutions philosophy and perspective from Africanist thought and experience,” she writes. Her use of African proverbs throughout the piece highlights the power of situated and lived knowledge in navigating dietary change.
Meat and faith
When we talk about meat, we often talk about culture. But an under-explored dimension of our food systems and dietary choices is faith. It feels like most people in our personal bubbles of food writers and policy wonks would consider themselves to be agnostic or atheist, making it easy to overlook the fact that 80% of the global population identifies with a religious group. We are therefore excited to feature two pieces discussing faith and theology in relation to meat.
“So Much Equity, That All Flesh Would Experience Salvation” is a written interview with Aline Silva, a queer, Black and Indigenous immigrant of Brasil to the US who works as an organizer, pastor, preacher, and life coach. In it, Aline explains her choice not to eat non-human animals, whom she considers “her fellow worshippers of God”. Aline illustrates powerful connections between industrial farming, meat-eating, and a tangle of social issues: the corporate control of agriculture, the treatment of (often racialized) workers in the meat industry, the hypocrisy of hormone use in animals in a country that denies trans folks access to adequate healthcare, and so much more. These connections are deeply gendered: “Black and Indigenous women are the foundation of the over-explored world’s agricultural economy,” Aline writes. “But we receive only a fraction of the land, training, and economic support that white cis heterosexual men…additionally, female animals farmed as food are the ones continuously impregnated for their milk while at the same time having their offspring kidnapped.”
The podcast episode “Not A Small Act”, which Farmerama Radio generously let us syndicate from their recent Less and Better Series, conversely offers insights into faith-based reasons for eating meat. Hosted by Katie Revell and Olivia Oldham, the episode centers on the question of whether it can ever be morally right to farm, and kill, animals. In addition to their conversations with those who justify their consumption of animals through theology and faith, the hosts of the episode bring together a variety of other voices — from farmers to researchers, meat eaters to abstainers — to explore the various cultural and personal ways people relate to animals. It was powerful to hear such a range of perspectives together at once.
Meat and masculinity
FFJ’s body of work has often addressed the entanglements of food and masculinity more implicitly, considering it the undercurrent compelling the flow of many of our stories. In this issue, however, we had the chance to tackle the meat-masculinity nexus head-on.
“British Beef vs. French Foppery” by Annie Dabb traces the central role of beef in defining British masculinity, from the early days of the empire to our modern times of jacked-up muscles and online dating. Writes Annie:
As sociocultural contexts change, persistent meat-eating and communal muscle-building are ways of positioning masculinity as a real, necessary, and moreover achievable thing, rather than a conceptual myth. Perhaps this is because there’s a lot of room to be proudly feminine, with ways of emotionally and socially reaffirming that femininity. Whereas, in recent discourse, masculinity has unfortunately developed a lot more negative connotations.
By pointing out the colonial and capitalist paradoxes embedded in the meat-masculinity link from the very beginning, Annie offers a fresh context in which to situate the current crisis of masculinity, which can be seen manifesting in incel culture, a rise in misogynistic rhetoric, as well as the disproportionate rates of suicide and alcoholism among men in Britain.
“Manning the Grill”, a podcast produced by Amirio Freeman and Joy Imani Bullock, analyzes meat and masculinity from another perspective. “I have yet to taste a burger that’s better than one grilled by my father and I cower at the thought of attempting to replicate his mastery,” says Amirio. “As the oldest of three boys, there’s a shared sense that I’m responsible for preserving this family tradition. However, the domain of grilling has always felt overly masculine and, therefore, incompatible with a queer Black boy like me.”
The podcast centers on an intimate conversation between Amirio and his father, and delicately weaves this family portrait into a broader analysis of race, gender, resistance, and barbecuing in the US. Amirio asks, “The link between grilling and men in America has always been smoke and mirrors. But where did the illusion come from?” The answers subvert the image of a cis-white man at the grill and present new possibilities for how we think about “traditionally” masculine food domains.
Meat in the future
The historical perspectives in MEAT, like those in Annie Dabb’s essay, provide important context for understanding the present moment. They also suggest taking steps into what we hope will be a more just and feminist future related to animal agriculture and meat consumption. “Meat: The Four Futures” by Tamsin Blaxter, a researcher at TABLE, investigates what this future could look like in reality.
“Meat: The Four Futures” offers a feminist analysis of four different meat “futures” (initially presented in TABLE’s eight-part podcast series of the same name): Efficient Meat 2.0, No Meat, Less Meat, and Alternative “Meat”. In it, Tamsin deftly connects strands of feminist and postcolonial history to examine why certain futures resonate differently with different folks. We appreciate this piece because it helped us to not only identify our own hopes for meat in the future, but to better understand the perspectives and motivations of those with whom we might disagree.
Coming up next: BODY, podcasts, and interviews
And with that, we say goodbye to MEAT. You can now find us hard at work on our next issue, BODY. To put on the finishing touches, we’ll be taking a short publishing break; in the meantime, we encourage you to dive into our back catalogue. Nearly one year to the date, we were sending our Letter from the Editors for our CITY issue, which is our issue that received the most engagement! Along with CITY, we have the popular SEA — with one piece on sea moss panna cotta that resonates strongly with MEAT — as well as MILK, WAR, SEX, EARTH.
If you’re looking for more resonances with our MEAT issue, options abound: ḥačatakma c̓awaak (Everything is interconnected) is a podcast interview from EARTH with First Nations scholar Charlotte Coté that emphasizes the deep relationships between Indigenous peoples and animals in the context of the food system. In MILK, The Future of Cultivated Milk by Ingrid L. Taylor unpicks tricky questions about capital, patents, and food justice related to animal-free milk that echo those posed around animal-free meats. Our 2022 interview with activist Harley McDonald-Erckersall is also highly relevant.
Otherwise, we’ll be back in your inboxes with some non-themed content to keep you occupied until BODY is ready. We will soon be able to share an exciting podcast interview — with us as guests, rather than hosts — and we’re also hoping to publish an interview on school food programs with the authors of a great new book. We’re also eagerly looking forward to the release of our RICE zine made with Wedu Global and the 2024 U.S.-ASEAN Women’s Leadership Academy for YSEALI.
Stay tuned and see you soon!
What did you learn from our MEAT issue? Let us know in the comments!
Gratefully,
Isabela & Zoë