United Poultry Concerns - [link removed]
26 November 2019

Protecting Purity from Pollution, or Protecting Pollution from Purity?

The Golden Age, Garden of Eden, and Thanksgiving Myth of Origin

By Karen Davis PhD, President, United Poultry Concerns
This article was first published Nov. 26, 2019 on the Animals 24-7 website:
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"The question before us is, which images of the universe, of power,
of animals, of ourselves, will we represent in our food?"
- Carol J. Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat, p. 202.



How Will a "Myth of Origin" Be Used?

People look to the mythic past for prototypes in order to propagate some plan or
hope for the present and future, to protect existing traditions and outlooks, or
to advance new practices and prospects from elements within the myths that have
not yet been exploited. This is the true use of the Golden Age and the Garden of
Eden and other myths of origin, including the American myth of Thanksgiving.

Myths of origin act as informing principles of existence. In this sense they can
promote ethical insight and change, or they can be invoked ironically to protect
the "fallen world" from the infiltration of ethical progress. This is how they
have mainly been used with respect to how we view and treat the other members of
the animal kingdom to which we ourselves belong.


"Traditions" Evolve and Change

How a myth of origin will be used is primarily a matter of desire and will, or
in a word, motivation, because people in reality constantly change their
traditions to conform to whatever else they believe or identify with.

The American Thanksgiving, which is rooted in ancient harvest festival
traditions, has been "recreated" many times over; fabricated, as James W. Loewen
shows in his chapter, "The Truth about the First Thanksgiving" in his book Lies
My Teacher Told Me.

Arguably, says Elizabeth Pleck in Celebrating the Family, vegetarians who spend
hours preparing a tofu turkey or a chestnut casserole from scratch express the
spirit of Thanksgiving more authentically than the turkey takeout people do,
while taking the American tradition of the pioneer to a new level of adventure
and nurture.


Turning Flesh into Fruit

Substitution of new materials for previously used ones to celebrate a tradition
is an integral part of tradition. In the religious realm, if we can substitute
animal flesh for human flesh, and bread and wine for "all flesh" and the
shedding of innocent blood in communion services, and can view these changes as
advances of civilization, not as inferior substitutes for genuine religious
experience, then we are ready to go forward in our everyday lives on ground that
is already laid.

Could the religions of the world ever reach the point of respecting "all flesh,"
not in false ceremonies of compassion, but in actual fact? For if God can become
flesh, then flesh can become fruit.

Technologically, this transformation, this substitution, has already occurred,
People have demanded it, and technology can meet the demand.

If the Peaceable Kingdom is a genuine desire and a practicable prospect, faux
meat is the food to which dead meat has aspired, and the animal-free meat makers
are as deserving as anyone of the Nobel Prize for Peace.


Disgust at the Thought of Meat

In the past, says Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, author of The Evolving Self and
Creativity, "our limbic system learned to produce disgust at the smell of rotten
meat. Now we might be learning to experience disgust at the thought of eating
meat in the first place - thanks to values that are the result of
consciousness."

The cultural turkey in America is a model figure that allows us to examine our
attitudes and the values they imply, like the values implicit in creating
laughingstocks and innocent victims in order to feel thankful, and the values of
a nation that ritually constitutes itself by consuming an animal - one,
moreover, that it despises and mocks as part of a patriotic celebration
memorializing the wholesome virtues of family life.

In The "Thanksgiving" Turkey: Object of Sentimentality, Sarcasm, and Sacrifice,
I draw attention to the moral ecology surrounding the Thanksgiving turkey, the
miasma arising from the traditional holiday meal. The ritual taunting of the
sacrificial bird conducted by the media each year - what if this mean-spirited
foreplay and blood sacrifice were taken away?

What elements of Thanksgiving would remain?


Decomposing Turkey Ghosts

Hunters claim that the killing they do is incidental to their joy of being in
the woods, and turkey eaters claim that the carnage they inflict is incidental
to their appetite for togetherness.

Yet the carnage perpetrated by both is the one thing in the midst of other
changes on which these people stand firm, as if Plymouth Rock amounted in the
final analysis to little more than a pile of meat, just as the symbol of
happiness is portrayed in the final epiphany of Scrooge in Charles Dickens' A
Christmas Carol, published in 1843. There, under the aspect of the Ghost of
Christmas Present, Scrooge mounts a pile of flesh as a foretaste of his imminent
social redemption and return to life's pleasures:

"Heaped up on the floor, to form a kind of throne, were turkeys, geese, game,
poultry, brawn, great joints of meat, suckling-pigs, [and] long wreaths of
sausages."

Scrooge's first charitable act following his nightmares is to purchase "the
prize Turkey" hanging upside down at the butcher shop.


Free All Spirits from Inflicted Suffering

It is time for the Ghosts of Christmas Past and Present to include the ghosts of
all those turkeys who were murdered for the meals of "Scrooge." It is time for
all future turkey ghosts to be freed from haunting the table.

Slowly this pile of avian ghosts may be rotting away. As the present century
proceeds in America, the conflict between vegans and flesh eaters, between the
animal rights people and the rest of society, crystalizes at Thanksgiving.

As the single most visible animal symbol in America, the de facto symbol of the
nation, the turkey focuses our conflict and marks its progress in a holiday in
which personal values and cultural ideals come together, or clash, most notably.



References

Carol J. Adams. The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical
Theory. New York: Continuum, 1990. New edition published by Bloomsbury
Revelations, 2015.
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Mihály Csíkszentmihályi. "It's All in Your Head." Washington Post Book World,
May 16, 1999, 3.

Karen Davis. More Than a Meal: The Turkey in History, Myth, Ritual, and Reality.
New York: Lantern Books, 2001.

Charles Dickens. A Christmas Carol and Other Haunting Tales. New York: New York
Public Library-Doubleday, 1998. First published 1843. See Karen Davis, More Than
a Meal, 59-60.

James W. Loewen. Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History
Textbook Got Wrong. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995. New revised edition
published by The Free Press, 2018.
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Elizabeth H. Pleck. Celebrating the Family: Ethnicity, Consumer Culture, and
Family Rituals. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000.


See Also:

Turkeys: Sympathy, Sensibility, and Sentience:
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The "Thanksgiving" Turkey: Object of Sentimentality, Sarcasm, and Sacrifice:
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Cutie, My Precious Turkey, Was a True Joy to Me:
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Peeper: A Story of Unending Love:
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KAREN DAVIS, PhD is the President and Founder of United Poultry Concerns, a
nonprofit organization that promotes the compassionate and respectful treatment
of domestic fowl including a sanctuary for chickens in Virginia. Inducted into
the National Animal Rights Hall of Fame for Outstanding Contributions to Animal
Liberation, Karen is the author of numerous books, essays, articles and
campaigns. Her latest book is For the Birds: From Exploitation to Liberation:
Essays on Chickens, Turkeys, and Other Domesticated Fowl (Lantern Books, 2019).
To order Karen's books, visit UPC Books:
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--
United Poultry Concerns is a nonprofit organization that promotes
the compassionate and respectful treatment of domestic fowl.
Don't just switch from beef to chicken. Go Vegan.
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