Week Two: A History Doomed to Repeat Itself

I had one week to grasp the hominid's carnivorous history. Tom suggested I start with a tome on the shelves behind the bar at Marlow & Sons called Larousse Gastronomique, written by Frenchman Prosper Montagné and prefaced by Escoffier, "king of cooks and cook of kings." Inside its decaying covers I found an encyclopedic pastiche of butchery's past, which began with the kind of scene depicted in ancient Greek bas-reliefs – a man with outstanding posture slitting the throat of some hulking animal. Within half of a page, however, this history had so noticeably morphed into nationalistic prose nostalgic for the heights of French butchery under Napoleon's reign as to make me doubt its veracity.

After all, this is the kind of armchair anthropology that makes me physically uncomfortable – the kind that touts France as the last in the line of civilization's evolution, the natural height of human cultivation. And meat, a symbol for the physical domination and incorporation of other animals, is the perfect language to write such a history in. In Eating Meat: Evolution, Patterns and Consequences, Vaclav Smil writes, "There is little that is neutral about meat." And Larousse's truth is anything but neutral.

But truth – ultimate, un-biased and objective – is not the aim of this post. Which is to say, these things happened, and may have happened. As I read, I realized I couldn't put together a complete and neutral chronology of meat-eating any better than Larousse. But I did begin to see parallels between ancient practices and modern values. As Tom said in the walk-in, "You can tell a lot about a culture by the way it cuts up its animal." And we can think about the state of meat processing today in light of these histories.

In Egypt, sacrifice brought royalty closer to the divine. Take, for example, this zealous charge by Thutmose III in his Coronation Inscription: "... that I might supply with food his altars upon earth; that I might make to flourish for him the sacred slaughtering-block with great slaughters in his temple, consisting of oxen and calves without limit" (J.H. Breasted, Ancient Records of Egypt; Part Two, § 149). Without limit! Ancient political sovereignty gorged on meat. For centuries, meat was the essential foodstuff to invigorate marching armies. And just as an Egyptian ruler had to prove his power in meat, so do our politicians, as we saw in last week's post. This is the context in which right-wing radio show host Michael Savage called Obama the "Tofu Messiah."

It was the Romans who outsourced slaughter. The higher classes disdained the "gross practice" of butchery, and a class of butchers took up the lowly job. Even though these butchers provided the essential service of preparing the sacrificial carcasses, their work was considered uncivilized and degrading. In return for tainting themselves with the flesh of animals, the butcher halls were made as monumental as the Aqueducts and Baths. This was a life in paradox.

And something of the Roman paradox remains. We depend on meat, but we want its journey to our plate to be out of sight, out of mind. We extend the process by which it gets to us to the point of near total ignorance. I recently read that chopsticks were first used in the eleventh century B.C. because a Chinese rule of etiquette banned knives from the table since they reminded diners of the slaughter of the animal. Today we continue to pass the death of domesticated animals down the line. Most butchers no longer kill the animals they prepare – that's done at slaughterhouses. PETA would have us go so far as to no longer kill, and therefore raise, animals at all. They recently announced that they would give one million dollars to anyone who could grow meat in a petri dish that could be sold at competitive prices by the year 2012. Any takers?


Leah Campbell

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