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INTRODUCTION
One of my recent culinary fascinations comes in the form of Beyond
Sausage®—a sausage made of plants. With a caped super-cow as its logo,
Beyond Meat® claim:
We started with simple questions. Why do you need an animal to create meat?
Why can’t you build meat directly from plants? That’s our company’s mission.
We hope our plant-based meats allow you and your family to eat more, not less,
of the traditional dishes you love. Together, we can truly bring exciting change
to the plate—and beyond. GO BEYOND! (As seen on Beyond Sausage® pack-
aging, and on the company website)
I have been studying how new scientific concepts emerge from everyday
ones. I have proposed this happens by “finding” and “founding” every-
day concepts into scientific contexts and practices thereby producing new
“founded” concepts that often keep their everyday names but can work as
scientific (Efstathiou 2009, 2012, 2016; Efstathiou et al. 2019). This type of
creative meaning-making is arguably also happening with ideas of “meat”
(and “milk,” “mince,” etc.) within food science and technology. Companies
like Impossible Burger®, Beyond Meat®, or, cultured meat company, Just
Meat® are founding everyday ideas of “meat” into novel food biotechnol-
ogy contexts, by activities ranging from imitating the molecular properties
Chapter 9
Meat We Don’t Greet
How “Sausages” Can Free Pigs or
How Effacing Livestock Makes
Room for Emancipation
Sophia Efstathiou
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of (animal-based) meat or growing tissue in a lab, to vision statements and
marketing. Though the result here is not found science but found food.
As exciting and relevant as these innovation contexts are I begin this story
one step back. Before looking at how meat concepts get found and founded
into food biotech, I explore how they might get loose from animals: How do
current practices of meat production leave room to think of meat as indepen-
dent from animals?
I propose that the intensification of meat production is ironically what
makes meat concepts available to be populated by plants. I argue that what
I call “technologies of effacement” facilitate the intensification of animal
farming and slaughter by blocking face-to-face encounters between animals
and people (Levinas 1969; Efstathiou 2018, 2019). My previous ethno-
graphic work on animal research identifies technologies of effacement as
including (a) architectures and the built environment, (b) entry and exit rules,
(c) special garments, (d) naming and labeling procedures, and (e) protocols
for handling animals (Efstathiou 2018, 2019). Building on ethnographic
research by Dawn Coppin (2003) and Nöellie Vialles (1994), in the United
States and France respectively, I propose that (a) Confined Animal Feeding
Operation (CAFO) buildings, gestation, and farrowing crates; (b) rules for
entering and exiting the slaughterhouse; (c) white slaughterhouse garments;
(d) unique identification systems; and (e) “trapping” animals before stun-
ning can all operate as technologies of effacement. Though developed to
serve other manifest aims, like hygiene, expediency, or safety, these tech-
nologies operate to sustain routine, inviting one to look at animals as tokens
of a known type while blocking encounters between humans and animals
(and also among animals) as radically different, morally significant Others
(Levinas 1969).
The abundance of meat and animal products in global Western and
Northern contexts thus relies on blocking face-to-face encounters, generat-
ing what I call an “original ignorance,” perhaps a willful one, about “whom”
meat comes from. Others have problematized the disappearance of the animal
during intensified meat production (Vialles 1994) and provision (Bjørkdahl
and Syse 2016; Syse 2017; Syse and Bjørkdahl 2020)—a reality that is likely
implicated in what psychologists have identified as “the meat paradox,” that
is, wanting to eat, but not wanting to hurt, animals (Loughnan et al. 2010;
Volden and Wethal, this volume). In this analysis “original ignorance,” the
ignorance (willful or not) of the origins of (often technologically) produced
artifacts, is seen as an opportunity: for escape, if not for revolt.
As Linsey McGoey argues, ignorance and ambiguity can challenge the
dogmatic impositions of others leaving room for emancipation (2012, 2019).
Leaving the animals and the humans working to turn them into food out of
the public eye offers up a chance to escape: to dislocate, along with joints,
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the meaning of meat from the very animals whose flesh, blood, and organs
are supposed to make it up.
Inventions like the “sausage” thus offer a conceptual opening for industri-
alized food processing and provision to get out of the business of slaughtering
animals, and to move back, or beyond, to plants. And with the effacement of
the slaughtered and the slaughterer, this makes all the more sense as ethical.
This chapter has two main sections: “Technological Intensification and
Effacement” and “Ignorance and Emancipation.” Though structured in
sequence to tell a story these processes are overlapping and incomplete.
Effacement is never total and neither is ignorance, while emancipation is
still more aspiration than reality. Still, I think that intensification, efface-
ment, ignorance, and emancipation all feature in the story that takes us from
the grass to the meat, and from the meat we don’t greet to its lab-based
alternative.
TECHNOLOGICAL INTENSIFICATION
AND EFFACEMENT
First Encounters and Separation
I first met a cow in the summer of 2020. I grew up in Athens in the 1980s—a
period of high urban consumerism, pre-financial crisis. I was a meat eater,
my sister and I riding our bikes round and round our apartment block, until
we got home and ordered pizza with “everything” or just “ham and cheese”
from the pizzeria downstairs. Meeting this cow then, several decades later, in
Inderøy, a rural part of Norway, while researching meat and climate change
was quite a journey. This cow was an “alpha” cow—and I was scared of her.
She was huge. An imposing animal, whose head when I put my hand on her
could have definitely pushed me over. But I had to step in because she left her
group, instead resting, or feeding their calves under a shade, to come forward
and check out my dog. My heart skipped a beat. Poor Pavlo, he cowered
down in the grass making himself small so she could sniff him and decide
he was harmless. Both he and I were out of our league. I was thankful, and
proud, to receive her approval.
How could it be that I, a chubby urban kid, was consuming the flesh of
an animal like her for decades without lifting a finger—let alone skipping a
heartbeat? That is an achievement of modern animal agriculture.
The “domestication” of animals for food originated independently in dif-
ferent parts of the world, most likely by herding wild animals and selectively
breeding them into more manageable herds. Some of the earliest evidence
of such activities is found in the Middle East, dating between 14,500 and
12,000 years ago. Fast forward to the current landscape of what geographer
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Tony Weis calls “islands of concentrated livestock within seas of grain and
oilseed monocultures” (Weis 2013, 8): A lot has changed. However what
Nöellie Vialles flags as a key shift in modern animal agriculture is separating
slaughter—in space—from towns, and—in language—from killing.
Vialles’s ethnography, Animal to Edible (1994), is a seminal study of
slaughterhouses in the 1980s, in the French region of Adour. Because of the
moment it captures of increasing intensification, with mechanization sub-
stituting skills, and because of its evocative theoretical insights, this book
informs a lot of my analysis.
Slaughterhouses move away from town centers starting in the late eigh-
teenth century (1994, 20–21). Private slaughter is prohibited in the early
nineteenth century in France, “clearing” the butcher—and the street where
he works—from the blood of the animals and the sight of violence (Vialles
1994, 17). By the mid-nineteenth century this separation becomes definitive
of the abattoir. The very first edition of Émile Littré’s dictionary of French
in 1863 defines it as “place set aside for the slaughter of animals such as
bullocks, calves, sheep, etc. that are used for human consumption. Abattoirs
are located outside the surrounding walls of towns” (quoted in Vialles 1994,
15).
The word “abattoir” dates from 1806, derived from the verb abattre mean-
ing to bring down something standing, and used originally to describe felling
trees before applied to “putting down” army horses, and then other animals
(Vialles 1994, 22–23). The places originally called tueries [tuer = to murder]
or écorcheries [écorcher = to flay] get thus named abattoirs: set apart, and
transforming animals from standing to recumbent. This cut, between the kill-
ing of the animal and its butchering, is one of the first big “scissions” that
modern practices make to distance animals’ death from the table:
From this point on, slaughtering was required to be industrial, that is large scale
and anonymous; it must be non-violent (ideally: painless); and it must be invis-
ible (ideally: non-existent). (Vialles 1994, 22)
This evocative conclusion drawn by Vialles resonates with my proposal.
Meat replacements promise to fulfill this ideal future of meat coming from
painless and nonexistent slaughter. Perhaps one could stop here. Already in
Vialles’s analysis the “logic” of the intensified meat industry dissolving itself
is visible.
However this is not the case until and unless meat replacements and/or
alternative ways of making meat succeed. And alternatives arise also with a
wish to relate to animals differently.1
What follows explores how intensified animal farming and slaughter block
human-animal encounters, feeding into a loss of meaning and “original
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ignorance” that meat replacements come to fill in. But first, let us consider
how and why encountering another being can be argued to be morally
significant.
Levinas and the Ethics of the Face
Emmanuel Levinas (b. 1906–1995) was a French philosopher of Jewish
Lithuanian origin. During World War II, Levinas was a prisoner of war, held
in a forced labor camp in Germany. During that period, Levinas and his fel-
low prisoners made a friend: a dog they named Bobby. Levinas writes about
how the gaze of “so-called free” German guards or citizens “stripped” them
of their “human skin” reducing them to “a gang of apes” (1990, 152–153).
Instead, Bobby came to meet the prisoners every morning and greeted them
jumping happily every time they returned to the camp, recognizing them as
(his) people (Levinas 1990, 153).
For Levinas, ethics is not premised on similarity, a shared family, nation,
or species. Rather what binds us morally is a radical alterity, the “inner
being,” or “secrecy,” we hold for each other (1969, 57–58). This secrecy
escapes explanation. Being is not a matter of epistemology, but ethics. And
ethics becomes accomplished when one pauses one’s spontaneity to respond
to the Other:
The strangeness of the Other, his irreducibility to the I, to my thoughts and my
possessions, is precisely accomplished as a calling into question of my sponta-
neity, as ethics. (Levinas 1969, 43)
Ethics is a pause or a questioning of one’s spontaneity. This happens in
encountering the Other through their “face”:
The way in which the other presents himself, exceeding the idea of the other in
me, we here name face. This mode does not consist in figuring as a theme under
my gaze, in spreading itself forth as a set of qualities forming an image. The face
of the Other at each moment destroys and overflows the plastic image it leaves
me, the idea existing to my own measure and to the measure of its ideatum—the
adequate idea. It does not manifest itself by these qualities, but kath’auto [i.e.,
in person, per se]. It expresses itself. (Levinas 1969, 50–51)
The face is peculiar: on the one hand it is “superficial.” It leaves a plastic
image to sense or look at. Yet it is boundless. The face overflows any image
it leaves, opening a window into the inner life of the Other, which though
remains secret. The face acts as a mode, a way, or potential, for encountering
the Other according to themselves, per se. This is the opposite of how social
AQ: Please
confirm if
the italicized
terms in
the extract
beginning
‘The way
in which
…’ are your
emphasis or
as given in
the original
by indicating
‘Emphasis
mine’ or
‘Emphasis in
original.’
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theorist Erving Goffman defines a “personal front” (Goffman 1990, 34): the
face is not a sign vehicle for others to interpret or expect, but what destroys
expectations.
I follow the work in Atterton and Wright (2019) in extending Levinasian
ethics to nonhumans. Levinas emphasizes the importance of the eyes and
the body in expressing as the face: “The eyes break through the mask—the
language of the eyes, impossible to dissemble. The eye does not shine; it
speaks” (Levinas 1969, 66). And further: “And the whole body—a hand or a
curve of the shoulder—can express as the face” (Levinas 1969, 262). I thus
here define animals’ “face” as the modes through which an animal exudes
their “inner being” or “secrecy” that may be expressed in the body, eyes,
movements, or other sensescapes (voice, touch, smell, etc.) but that is not
reducible to these.
Further, having a ‘face’ is not sufficient for facing. As we see in the
example of Levinas and his Nazi guards, humans who could face him, do
not. It is then important to attend to what conditions facing or—reversely—
effacing the Other: blocking, erasing, or otherwise negating their face.
By blocking face-to-face encounters and speeding up work, I suggest that
“technologies of effacement” facilitate and shape the ethos of intensified
industrial labor—perhaps generally—but especially in intensified meat
production.
Technologies of Effacement in Intensive Animal Farming
and Slaughtering
I have analyzed the normative challenges that researchers face in experiment-
ing with other animals, as partly accounted for by the operation of technolo-
gies of effacement in the lab (Efstathiou 2018, 2019). These are techniques,
tools, or procedures developed to “rationalize” engagements with others,
while at the same time blocking a direct experience of the Other through their
face, for example, by modifying sensory-symbolic, visual, olfactory, tactile,
sonic, or other features the Other presents with. These technologies often
script encounters between humans and animals, as encounters with what is
already known as opposed to secret (Efstathiou 2019, 150). Five types of
technology of effacement operate to structure human-animal encounters in
the lab and seem to also operate in intensified farming and slaughter: (a)
built environments and architecture, (b) entry and exit procedures and spe-
cial garments;, (c) animal handling protocols, (d) naming and identification
techniques (Efstathiou 2019, 150). I here discuss production not provision,
as I focus on encountering a living Other, though arguably a dead other also
has a face.
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Architectures and Built Environments
Architecture and the built environment is one of the key ways to manage
encounters between animals and people. I survey here CAFO building plans,
as well as animal confinement technologies within CAFOs.
CAFO BUILDINGS
Following in the trend described by Vialles (1994), farming too has become
invisible. One of the telltale signs of intensified animal farming is the
absence of animals outside. The transition from “extensive” to “intensive”
farming is marked by the development of large and technologically sophis-
ticated built enclosures characterized—depending on their animal popula-
tion and their density—as CAFOs. Capital-intensive CAFO buildings are
designed to keep livestock inside year round, providing artificial light, air
ventilation, and temperature-controlled conditions with no outside access
and no windows for outsiders looking in. These usually unmarked and
secured spaces make it almost impossible to physically encounter livestock
animals if one is not part of the operation. But also for humans employed in
a CAFO human-animal encounters become rare as the proportions of ani-
mals to humans increase, and the occasions for interaction diminish, taken
over by automatic systems for feeding and watering animals, cameras for
monitoring them, and dispensing medications. The CAFO building itself
then secludes a general public from meeting animals, while minimizing
human-animal encounters also within the farm. To illustrate these points I
consider mega-hog farm development in the United States, following Dawn
Coppin (2003).
Up to approximately the 1970s in the United States, most hogs lived in
open farmland or dirt lots, with little protection from the weather. Farmers in
the 1950s might have sent them to “finishing” facilities owned by companies
like Cargill,2 to get fattened up before sale. There, animals would be more
confined but still have access to an open laying facility and open air (Coppin
2003, 599). This all changed in the 1970s and 1980s with the development
of new technologies for total confinement, medication, reproduction, nutri-
tion, and waste management (Coppin 2003, 599). Architectural innovations
coevolved with pig breeding and consumer preferences. Pigs in industrial
farming were bred to go down from 1.5 inches of back fat—which kept them
warm during winters outside—to just a third of an inch, to match consumer
demand for leaner meat (Coppin 2003, 603). Also lighter skin breeds, initially
bred to distinguish domesticated pigs from their wild relatives, were sensitive
to sunburn making sun exposure without shelter also problematic.
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Confinement was coupled with concentration, small pig farms getting
replaced by ones housing thousands of pigs. In 1967 the United States had
over one million pig farms, that are now down to about 60,000 farms, while
the number of hogs per farm increased more than fivefold (Coppin 2003,
601).3 At the same time, family-owned farms got contracted by bigger now
global conglomerates (Chemnitz and Becheva 2014, 12–13).
This sheer increase in the proportion of animals to humans per CAFO
makes it hard for human-animal encounters to happen—let alone to offer
occasions for humans and animals to face each other, as morally significant
Others. But of further import are built enclosures that further script who the
human encounters if such encounters do take place.
The “assembling” of the pig, from fetus to a slaughter weight, takes place
in purpose-built spaces. After pigs are inseminated (most commonly artifi-
cially), the pregnant sow will be kept in an individual “gestation” crate for
almost four months, and then a few days before she is due to give birth moved
to another individual “farrowing” crate where she will stay for another two
weeks suckling her piglets. The piglets will then be moved to a “nursery” for
a month, then to a “growing” building, and then to a “finishing” one, where
they will stay until they are five or six months old, when they will be loaded
off to slaughter (Coppin 2003, 600).
Encountering an individual pig in a farm happens through architected path-
ways. The human gaze gets ordered by spatial enclosures to meet individuals
of an animal type, or even a meat preparation stage—instead of facing radi-
cally different Others. Instead of allowing pigs to mix in a herd, achieving
different relations to each other, but mandating the human carer to encounter
animals individually and negotiate their social dynamics, spatial enclosures
and specialized monitoring technology automatically deliver the care that
each animal group is assumed to need, expediting work at the same time as
blocking face-to-face encounters. Especially relevant here are confinement
technologies that at once rationalize work and restrict a pig’s body and face.
CONFINEMENT CRATES
The individual “gestation” crates sows kept in in the United States are stan-
dardly 2 meters long by 60 centimeters wide, providing no option for the pig
to turn around. The sow will be kept there throughout her pregnancy—esti-
mated at three months, three weeks, and three days. The farrowing crate is
slightly wider, giving her some space to lie down but again not turn around,
for fear of either turning away from her piglets, or crushing them. In some
cases sows are strapped down to crate floor to make them continuously avail-
able for piglets suckle, but that seems to reduce their milk production (Coppin
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2003, 604—see image on p. 606). The crates are not an environment that
the sows prefer. Crates have plastic flooring with slits, through which sows’
excrement is collected underneath in a “lagoon” and the floor is kept bare so
that the excrement can fall through despite pigs’ preference for solid floor-
ing and for so-called environmental “enrichment” materials—“rich” only by
comparison to bare human architectures: hay or toys. Sows will give on aver-
age 5 to 8 litters in their farm lifetime, and 2.5 litters a year. Thus for about
10 months a year, the sow will be confined in a space above her excrement,
where she cannot move freely, let alone express species-specific behaviors
like digging, playing, bathing, or nesting. This is also the beginning of pig-
lets’ lives, unable to reach more than a teat of their mother.
These confinement stalls prima facie provide individual care for the sow
and her piglets. Gestation crates’ manifest function is to immobilize a sow
and to ensure that she is getting enough nutrition, vitamins, medicine, and
water, with no competition from other pen mates while pregnant. Similarly
farrowing crates manifestly provide for the mother and allow for breastfeed-
ing, with the added function of ensuring that the sow’s body does not crush
any piglets with its substantial weight. Confinement technologies pay each
sow individual attention. However, attention is not paid to her as a “secret”
animal Other, but rather to her as a meat-maker. The crated sow is encoun-
tered as a piglet grower and a milk-dispenser: the gestation crate holds her
womb in place, so the future piglet—and future meat—is not miscarried,
and the farrowing crate makes her teats available to the piglets—in cases of
restraint, continuously.
By blocking animals’ bodies from full expression confinement technolo-
gies block their face. Yet, effacement is never total. The eyes still speak, the
sow has a voice, and she bites the bars of her crate. Still, facing her becomes
hard. The crates and automated systems for monitoring them expedite meat-
growing, minimizing the chance that a human will come face-to-face with a
sow, bar an emergency. Note also that confinement crates also block animals
from encountering each other. The crated sow then gets doubly effaced, from
humans, and from others in her social group, including her piglets.4
Entry and Exit Procedures and Special Garments
During my work in an animal lab in Norway, I observed that procedures for
entering and exiting the lab, and specifically the taking off of one’s clothes
(cute shirts, favorite jewellery, or other personal items) and rituals like wash-
ing of one’s hands, before one dons the uniform and personal protective
equipment of the lab, were important stages in blocking the face, and coming
to assume the position, or professional “front” (Goffman 1990, 34), of the
laboratory researcher. These rituals and garments operated as technologies
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of effacement by separating performances in the lab from “everyday” ones
while also physically modifying people’s faces and body: protective caps col-
lecting hair and semi-covering ears, face masks muffling voices, protective
goggles shielding eyes, rubber gloves sheathing hands. These preparations
provided new surfaces with which humans and animals encountered each
other, in and for research.
Vialles mentions the “standard whites” used in the slaughterhouse, consist-
ing of “rubber boots, cotton jacket and trousers, plastic apron and disposable
cap” (1994, 101). Besides providing a uniform that symbolizes the special
role one assumes as a slaughterer, white has a distinct symbolic and practi-
cal function. White fits a logic of hygiene. Though it looks like the color
that can get dirtiest fastest, white is ironically most resistant to dirt as it can
be washed at high temperatures and bleached. As a color that is no color it
cannot get lost. White also fits a logic of innocence: medical doctors, high
clergy, and brides are all known to dress in white. White complements the
imagined red of blood. Following Vialles, white garments also operate to
negate the blood of death also in the slaughterhouse: “The colour of blood
has been everywhere outsted by white: white walls, white accessories, white
clothing, from head to foot” (1994, 66). White uniforms thus work to erase
encounters with the bleeding Other, practically and symbolically by evoking
the clean and innocent.5
Entry and exit procedures are also crucial for slaughterhouse work.
Consider the strict division between the “clean sector” in the “front” of the
building and the “dirty sector” in the “back” (Vialles 1994, 35–36). The front
of the slaughterhouse or the clean entrance is where people encounter meat.
Instead, animals are off-loaded in the back of the building through the “dirty”
entrance to the dirty sector, where also renderers’ vans are loaded with what
are considered waste products from the slaughtering process. Things in the
“back” happen first, but by calling the front the “front,” one assumes the gaze
of someone meeting the meat first, never greeting the animal. Instead the ani-
mal gets “brought in” through the back door, symbolically and literally. Clean
and dirty sectors are never to meet. The vans that service them never cross the
middle (Vialles 1994, 36). In between the slaughter hall provides an ambigu-
ous middle, where the animal exists and doesn’t, a space of transfiguration
that also performs this literal and symbolic cut between the animal and the
meat, the dirty past, and the future animal-free meat one wishes to encounter.
Already the cut made in language between animals as carriers of dirt and
pollution, yet of their own flesh as clean raises a paradox: removing the “ani-
mal” from the meat is what makes it clean—and yet the animal must, as part
of itself, as its own meat, already be clean. These conflicts in how to encoun-
ter animals in these spaces are aggravated with technological intensification.
Founding the animal as edible is a process effacing the animal. It involves
AQ: Please
confirm if
‘outsted’ can
be changed
to ‘ousted’ in
the quotation
beginning
‘The colour
of blood …’
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immobilizing, stunning, suspending, and bleeding a living animal, then flay-
ing him, cutting off his “extremities” (head, legs, sometimes tail), and cutting
into (or punching through for sheep) the body to separate it from its skin (or
scalded and de-haired in the case of pigs), eviscerating or gutting the animal
and washing his insides, sometimes splitting his carcass in two (for pigs and
large bovines), and weighing it, all to get to the meat (Vialles 1994, 41). This
is what Vialles calls “de-animalising” the animal (1994, 49, 71), what I see
as transfigurations needed to found an animal as food, and what also involves
effacing him. These processes erase the animal’s “face,” literally by chop-
ping off his head, almost immobilizing his body (movements will still occur
when the animal is suspended and bleeding), and progressively silencing him,
preventing an encounter with the animal as an Other, beyond the properties of
his fascia. Taking the ground off one’s feet is a key symbolic transformation
of the animal to the edible, found, picked up, and on its way to meet a butcher
(boucher) and a mouth (bouche).
Importantly, the division of clean and dirty sectors is a division of labor
which blocks workers from facing animals, and from facing killing. A person
working in either sector is not going to meet the same animal alive and as
meat. Rather, one is stationed at, working and met with a stage in an animal’s
processing into a sellable carcass. This is important, because even when
working to slaughter animals, one may be shielded from facing them, and
from the full impact of one’s actions.
Animal Handling Protocols
The introduction of technologies and built structures for guiding animals in
a single file through a “race” to immobilize them before stunning contrib-
uted immensely to speeding up slaughter, resulting in fewer injuries and
more intact carcasses, faster. Refining these technologies means livestock
are slaughtered in the thousands every second, and billions annually mak-
ing meat appear in the plenty.6 I will focus on the stunning pen or “trap”
(piege) in French. Stunning is a standard protocol and guaranteed encounter
between a living animal and a human. The trap I argue is a key technology
of effacement, blocking facing the moment before killing, promising its
“painlessness.”
Trapping a docile animal is analyzed by Vialles as the opposite of hunting
a wild one: the hunted animal is often recognized for its individuality and
skills, its plans or priorities, it may even be given a name by the hunter (1994,
113). Like in the instance of making the animal a pet, hunting recognizes an
equal footing between the human and the animal (Vialles 1994, 113). Already
hunting animals by trapping is designed to efface the individual animal (and
human), designed with a certain species, environment, and hunter in mind.
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Traps operate as technologies of effacement also in the slaughterhouse. In
the absence of traps, and in the case of large bovines, humans would have
to throw their bodies onto the animal, pulling to restrain it by a rope around
his horns or neck, or tying this to a hook in the floor, while someone drives a
poleax to the bovine’s forehead—now replaced by a captive bolt gun (Vialles
1994, 121). The trap is instead placed in the animal’s path. Tricking the ani-
mal to walk into it, the animal gets immobilized before an encounter with a
human, so that the slaughterer can shoot the bolt gun at a better stabilized
target.
Even in this encounter one could face the animal in question, perhaps
witness their surprise or struggle and pause or be moved by it. But in come
the speed and “rationalization” of the work. Following guidelines, and with
struggle removed, the human eyes will locate the right point to shoot on the
animal’s forehead versus meet his eyes (EC 2018b). As Vialles notes, in pri-
vate slaughter, “a contract” might be made between the animal and human for
the first to provide their flesh for the latter to eat in exchange for food, shelter,
and protection, while the slaughter itself would be an activity celebrated with
others, as the killing of the animal. Industrialized slaughtering challenges the
terms of that contract, as the person killing the animal has no connection to it:
“I tell people I’m a hired killer,” slaughterers will say jokingly “I’m paid to
kill.” If there is still a contract here it is of a quite different kind, involving the
animal purely as an object, just like the victim of a criminal “contract.” (Vialles
1994, 119)
Here the lack of connection to the animal and the peculiarity of killing
someone one does not know are negotiated by the slaughterers by joking.7
Effacement works both ways: by killing someone one doesn’t wish to kill one
becomes a “hired” or “contracted” killer, masking their “face” vis-à-vis the
Other, behind their professional front.
Effacement becomes especially morally problematic at the point of mur-
der. Levinas says discussing murder,
The alterity that is expressed in the face provides the unique “matter” possible
for total negation. I can wish to kill only an existent absolutely independent,
which exceeds my powers infinitely, and therefore does not oppose them but
paralyzes the very power of power. The Other is the sole being I can wish to
kill. (1969, 198)
The effacement of animals as morally significant Others creates a problem. If,
following Levinas, the Other is the sole being one can wish to kill, then the
killing of these faceless animals becomes something one cannot wish to do.
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No slaughterer can wish to kill these animals—and no consumer. And yet we
do kill animals and allow them to be killed.
People who do not want to kill, kill animals who do not want to die, for
people who do not want to hurt anyone, but who want to eat a lot of meat
cheaply.
I consider one more technology of effacement before discussing the pos-
sible unintended benefits of effacing.
Identification and Labeling Techniques
Current systems for identifying animals can also contribute to efface them.
Consider, for example, the Trade Control and Expert System (TRACES)
developed by the EU. TRACES tracks the locations and movements of
European livestock using unique identification numbers issued to them on
birth, replicated as barcodes on their ear tags, and as passport numbers stored
in national and international digital registries. TRACES aims to record infor-
mation on animal travel to enable tracing the sources and pathways of pos-
sible disease or infection outbreaks among livestock.
These tools individuate an animal. Yet, they also typify them. Animal
identification numbers are unique, but they are also the same: all numbers.
Previous systems for identification on the bodies of animals, for example, by
systems of cuts on animals’ ears or branding, would at least beg one to look
at the animal body—even if these signs are diagrammatic and operating in a
similar manner as numbers to pinpoint individuals in a sequence. As a result,
individuation tools such as identification tools and labeling techniques script
human and animal encounters away from facing, and toward counting and
measuring the Other, as one of the same.
Added Faces
Often the loss or blocking of the animal and human face will be supplemented
by imagery that adds a face to it. Consider the cartoon animation produced
to communicate the TRACES livestock identification system (European
Commission, undated). The video playfully names one bull “Chuck” and one
cow “Anna” showing them travel the world with their unique passports, until
they meet and heart bubbles emerge. The personification of the animal is here
working as what I call an “added face” (Efstathiou 2019, 156–157).
Added faces hope to work as faces, creating the sense of individuality that
one might expect from a face. They are encountered with all kinds of technol-
ogy of effacement. One can see them as animal images in institutional walls,
“personalized” uniforms or—once it comes to food provision—as animal
depictions on product boxes. A typical image is one of animals grazing freely,
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with a farmer on their side, or the image I saw recently on the side of the
Norwegian milk company Tine®’s bus, inscribed with “Maybe the world’s
finest milk—on its way to you—Tussi, Turi and Tina,” picturing three goats,
two of them blurred in the background, but one featured with a close-up on
her face. Added faces make faceless or effaced produce and labor possible to
encounter again under some guise of “normality.”
Added faces may be found in practices contrasting intensified farming and
slaughter, what Bjørkdahl and Syse call “meat nostalgia” in consumption and
marketing (2016). Consider, for example, Norwegian Michelin star awarded
restaurant Credo. Customers of that restaurant are presented with an image
of the named animal whose milk or flesh they are about to consume. This
approach attempts to connect to the animal and recognize the work involved
to get a meal to the table, a trend that Syse identifies with other young—pre-
dominantly—male chefs (Syse 2017). These changes may be pointing to
alternative ways of making meat, though arguably in these encounters the
animals are already found as food, rather than encountered as radically dif-
ferent Others who pause one’s spontaneity.
Does Effacement Matter?
I have so far proposed that human-animal encounters in intensified animal
farming and slaughter rely on technologies of effacement, blocking encoun-
ters between humans and animals as Others with a face. In the void of the
ethics of the encounter, springs up industrial work ethos—so-called hired
killing (Vialles 1994, 119). Another way to think of this transformation is that
ethics gets taken over by epistemology: instead of facing radically different
individuals one uses them as already known and knowable types (for profit).
But are such technologies of effacement really that important? Isn’t de-
animalizing already embedded in our language? After all, what is the point
of intermediary concepts of animal products like “meat,” “beef,” “pork,”
“milk,” “egg whites” if not to already provide a way to avoid explicitly refer-
ring to the animals they would have originated from? These are not “animal
flesh,” not “cow flesh,” not “pig flesh,” not “a mother cow’s breast secre-
tions,” not “secretions from a chicken’s ovum.” Perhaps these terms fulfill
the transformation needed in order to consume—respectfully—a living Other
(Bjørkdahl and Syse 2016). Though note that no such distancing is afforded
to chicken or to fish who we are allowed to eat as they come, despite the
popular chicken “nuggets” and fish “fingers.”
Arguably these concepts have functioned to shield the eater from the fact
of choosing to kill and consume a—usually—healthy, young, living animal,
its babies, or its babies’ food. Perhaps they shield consumers of the so-called
meat paradox: loving animals and loving meat (Loughnan et al. 2010; Volden
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and Wethal, this volume). But an important element in the intensification
of agriculture is that these terms come to stand in completely for animals,
who come to disappear from sight literally through the confined and secured
spaces of the CAFO and the slaughterhouse, but also in and through the sped-
up temporalities and reduced room that (human and nonhuman) animals’
expressive bodies and relationships are allowed to take. Blocking the face
amounts to blocking pauses, enforcing routine and speeding up production
that will make more and more animals disappear and more and more meat
appear, faster, closer, and more cheaply.8
The effacement of humans and animals within intensified production sys-
tems thus contributes causally to the omnipresence of animal products. The
forms and textures and tastes that animal flesh and animal secretions come
to take become what many humans in the global West and North are first
familiar with, and love. Indeed with some more work and technology and
some more ignorance these forms might prove sufficient to take animals out
of the equation completely.
IGNORANCE AND EMANCIPATION
One of the important points Vialles raises, and which is also argued in Coppin
(2003), is the transformation of slaughtering practices from public and cel-
ebrated to private and shameful:
Nowadays, slaughtering has become an invisible, exiled, almost clandestine
activity. We know it goes on, of course, but it is an abstract kind of knowledge.
We have no wish to eat corpses (we are carnivores, not carrion-eaters), so ani-
mals have to be slaughtered. But we demand an ellipsis between animal and
meat. (1994, 5)
In this ellipsis (what means “lack,” in Greek) there is a space for some eman-
cipative thinking to flourish.
I here propose that, ironically, ignorance offers a key for moving away
from—at least—intensified modes of making meat from animals. Blocking
humans from facing animals keeps animal-based products familiar and their
origin ambiguous. And here also comes, ironically, a possible way out: the
possibility that we keep our “traditions” and keep cooking with meat, and prod-
ucts “we love,” just substituting their ingredients with plant-based materials,
and adding a face to them. After all, wouldn’t plant-based products be better
fronted by happy animals? Enter the Beyond Meat® “super-cow”9 (figure 9.1).
The super-cow of Beyond Meat® symbolizes a power that livestock
have lost: staying alive. By putting an ellipsis between the animal and the
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food product, concepts like the “burger,” or “sausage,” or “milk” operate as
bridging concepts, helping hold their animal origins ambiguous, but familiar
enough for other “super-materials” to enter the picture. And yet the burger
in its current meaning would not have been possible without cows dying.
Picture here the billions of animals that throughout the development of inten-
sified agriculture and slaughter have been “sacrificed” and transfigured into
more and more processed food products with increasing speed and dropping
prices, coming to spread and populate “traditional dishes” everywhere: taking
on a life of their own, while the animal disappears. “Burgers,” “sausages,”
“nuggets,” “scallops,” “pulled pork,” and “milk” as concepts and forms come
to save their animal mothers and fathers by making them redundant. It would
sound like science fiction, if it weren’t true.
This phenomenon of becoming and being more familiar with the outcome
of a causal process, as opposed to its original causes or sources, is common
in industrialized worlds. One way to identify it is as an “original ignorance”
playing on the concept of an “original sin”—embodied in the Christian tradi-
tion by biting into the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge. Original igno-
rance is a lack of knowledge of things’ origins or their history. This captures
the experience of knowing burgers a lot more and better than cows, but it is
a general phenomenon. For example, I encountered a “stile” (a constructed
gate for humans—and not animals—to enter and exit fields) after years of
going through “turnstiles” (on the train, subway, etc.), even though the lat-
ter surely derived from the first. Similarly, I remember visiting the botanical
gardens of the Huntington Library only to suddenly smell my childhood soap:
I looked down and saw a strange little flower. Being more at home with the
derivatives of often industrial or technical processes whose “original” sources
Figure 9.1 Meat Without Meat.
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Meat We Don’t Greet
become strange is what I propose to call “original ignorance.” Perhaps origi-
nal ignorance is also a sin. But perhaps it leaves room for reinvention or even
atonement.
Linsey McGoey’s work inspires me here (2012, 2019). Following feminist
philosopher Eve Sedgwick, she notes that deliberate ambiguity and ignorance
can act as a “rebuke” of oppressive and inadequate classificatory ordering
systems (McGoey 2012, 6–7). Similarly, the ambiguity of meat concepts and
the original ignorance of consumers make space for meat to resist its animal
origins. By holding a space of deliberate ambiguity concepts like “meat,”
“sausage,” or “burger” rebuke their expected classification as animal-based.
Combined, effacement, original ignorance, and ambiguity bend the prover-
bial crate bars for animals to escape their meat identities—and meat its (dirty)
animal past.10
CONCLUSION
A lot of writing on the ethics of animal agriculture starts from a position of
authority, or privilege, assumed to be had by humans. Instead I draw atten-
tion to human-animal encounters as occasions for radically different Others to
meet and face each other. These encounters will all be unique. Yet I proposed
that what I dub “technologies of effacement” are a significant part of intensi-
fied farming and slaughtering practices, operating to shape such encounters
into encounters between meat professionals and livestock.
I started with the following question: How do current practices of meat
production leave room to think of meat as independent from animals?
To an analysis of the de-animalization of the animal provided by Vialles
(1994), I added his “effacement.” I proposed that technologies of efface-
ment are intimately involved in intensifying animal rearing and slaughter,
making it faster and streamlined, while removing opportunities for humans
and animals to pause their spontaneities and face each other, as morally
significant Others. I identified CAFO architectures and confinement crates,
slaughterhouse garments and entry and exit rules, protocols for stunning and
identification and labeling as functioning to block the “face” of animals and
humans.
Is facing a moral “solution” to animal agriculture? There is no ethics recipe
here for how to respond to the Other. What I offer are some ways to explore
what conditions encounters as ethics, and why intensification may ironically
dissolve itself.
The deliberate ambiguity of intermediary terms like “sausage,” “milk,”
or “burger” coupled with an original ignorance of the animal and familiarity
with animal products offers a space for emancipative action. Thus sausages,
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made plentiful and familiar in part by effacing the pig, come “back” as plant-
based superheroes, breaking free their pen-mates from the hog farm.
As McGoey suggests, “Presumptions of equality demand not outrage at
inequality but constant verifications of equality itself, as a practice rather
than a reward or goal” (2012, 10). Maybe, like Carol Adams does (2018), this
could mean introducing vegan burgers to meat eaters, or city kids to cows.
NOTES
1. Bjørkdahl and Syse analyze this shift in sensibilities and ethics about animals
as a move from anthropocentrism to “biocentrism” (2016, 222–228).
2. Cargill founded in 1865 is the third biggest meat industry globally in sales,
with a reported 114.6 billion USD revenues in the first quarter of 2020. https://www
.forbes .com /companies /cargill/.
3. The largest pig farm is currently constructed in China, using vertical housing
similar to apartment buildings to house 84,000 sows and their offspring, producing
over two million pigs per year (https://www .reuters .com /article /us -china -swinefever
-muyuanfoods -change -s -idUSKBN28H0MU). For an estimate of pig farms in the
United States see https://www .porkcares .org /americas -pig -farmers /our -farms/.
4. Organizations concerned with animal welfare want to ban gestation and far-
rowing crates. This is the case for gestation crates in some regions, like Sweden, the
UK, and nine U.S. states, but not for farrowing crates.
5. Note that recent EU recommendations advise personnel tasked with stunning
to wear dark clothes (EC 2018a). Perhaps this soothes the animals, matching clothing
used in livestock facilities that animals are familiar with.
6. Watch the seconds pass on this evocative Animal Kill Clock measuring the
thousands of animals killed in the United States every second. https://animalclock .org.
7. Humor offers a way to express difficult emotions or tension in a manner that
generates camaraderie more easily than anger or sadness. It is easier to laugh than to
cry together.
8. Current meat pricing schemes exclude the environmental costs of intensified
enterprises.
9. The iconography might be depicting a bull, a masculinized superhero, but it should
be a cow, as the meat and dairy industry relies on primarily females’ reproductive labor.
10. Note also the evocative claim in Van der Weele and Driessen (2019) that
“normal” meat becomes further ambiguous, generating moral ambivalence, with the
continued innovation of new meats.
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AQ: Please
provide page
range for the
ref. Syse and
Bjørkdahl
(2021).
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