Suicide Food and Other Uncomfortable Insights

The pervasive power of advertising makes certain that we have likely seen the colourful cartoon of a fat and cheerful chicken happily summoning us into a fast-food restaurant for servings of its own deep-fried body parts. Or shopping in supermarkets has acquainted us with the the huge depiction of a smiling cow placed high on a wall above the meat department inviting us to eat the flayed flanks and thighs of its own carcass.

“These images, once funny or charming,” writes Mark Kingwell, a philosopher at the University of Toronto, “have an increasingly ghoulish tinge now that humans are more and more uneasy about their position at the top of the food chain” (Globe & Mail, May 12/07). The issue Kingwell is describing is our making “animals complicit in our desires to eat them” so we do not have to confront the ethical dilemma of killing them.

Kingwell notes that bloggers have identified this depiction as “suicide food”, defining it as any animal that “actively participates in or celebrates its own demise.” They see it as “a bellwether of our decadent society”, a society that believes it can function without acknowledging the “ethical ramifications” of its actions. If we are to eat animals, we must “at least confront the truth of their lives.”

The disconcerting issue underlying suicide food is not that eating meat is inherently right or wrong but that we are disconnecting ourselves from the reality of our behaviour. The problems begin to occur, Kingwell explains, when we take “comfort without taking responsibility”, when we enjoy “the fruits of a choice, especially a violent or damaging one, without bearing any of its costs...”. This, he says, “is one of the definitions of decadence.”

“Decadence is not just about food, though, or even advertising,” contends Kingwell, it’s about everything we do without attention, without a care or a sense of consequence — Buddhism would call this an absence of mindfulness. Whatever we do, writes Kingwell, has “associated costs”, whether “in rain forest destroyed or carbon dioxide generated.” Decadence is the disconnection between ourselves and the world in which we live, the illusion that our individual and collective behaviour has no impact beyond our own fulfilment. When practiced widely by a culture, this disconnection becomes a social pathology that isolates ourselves from everything but our own self serving interests.

Kingwell raises the subject of oil, of which America’s present misadventure in Iraq is the most recent and blatant example of self-serving interests gone awry. To maintain and secure supplies, it went to war under the respectable guise of bringing liberation, human rights and democracy to a dictator-controlled nation.

A more ethically acceptable but equally destructive strategy can be the coercive forces of international trade arrangements, often manipulative and exploitive strategies that are couched in such praiseworthy objectives as bringing economic development and modern civility to undeveloped countries. The outer forms of political activity can seem different than suicide food but the psychology is often the same; don’t call it what it really is because the ethical realities are too uncomfortable to confront.

Ethical issues are the crux of our environmental problems. We refuse to see beyond the cartoon of the happy chicken offering its body parts willingly to the deep fryer. We don’t want to recognize the ethical connection between glitzy packaging and the depletion of rainforests, the convenience of plastic shopping bags and the consumption of oil, the
vacation to far-away places and the production of greenhouse gases. Each tree cut represents the death of a most extraordinary living thing; each hole drilled releases foul and toxic gases that cannot be returned to the ground; each moment of flight produces carbon dioxide. The cleansing and deceptive magic of marketing, of advertising and of our own collective denial is supposed to make our consumer mania look innocent, benign and necessary.

Of course, we are sometimes forced to glimpse through cracks in the facade of our ethical avoidance. A broken tanker spewing oil into a pristine sea is difficult to dismiss as a regrettable mistake. A decimated forest is difficult to rationalize as an unfortunate inadvertence. A ruined river is difficult to excuse as a engineering miscalculation. A released carcinogen is difficult to forgive as a simple error. An extinct species is difficult to justify as a correctable oversight.

But the cracks are getting bigger. And they are occurring more often. The light of interconnections keeps shining ever more brightly. The scientific evidence of our environmental travesties has reached a frequency and intensity that can no longer be denied. The ethical dimensions of our behaviour are becoming unavoidably obvious. Drowned sea lions at a fish farm are not easily dismissed as an inexplicable misadventure. The carbon dioxide from an airplane flight is not overlooked as a carefree holiday when the gas will stay in the atmosphere from 50 to 200 years — some of it indefinitely. Air-freighted grapes fresh from Chile and bright apples from New Zealand no longer look so innocent.

Like suicide food, we are beginning to see beyond self-deception and are starting to confront the ethical implications of our behaviour. Nature needs to be itself, not the dumb provider for our endless wants. The progression of our awareness, like all personal journeys of growth, will be disquieting and uncomfortable. In the end, however, a rising consciousness will deepen our character and make us better citizens of a beleaguered planet. Even chickens may benefit.