When Amber Husain was 26, she was preparing a piece of chicken for a friend to eat and was overcome by an unfamiliar feeling. A lifelong meat-eater, suddenly she was disgusted by what was in front of her. “I was just handling it and it felt so weird and horrible,” she says. Living with her vegan partner, she had been cooking meat far less often but had not totally given it up, believing that to do so was “little more than a salve for the naively guilty consumer”. Looking at it now though she “felt really strange … It completely transformed what I was able to confront in terms of the political reality of where meat comes from.”
Husain says she realised at that moment that for all the meat she had consumed in her life, she had never really seen it. She was, now, “relearning meat as a corpse”.
In her new book, Meat Love: An Ideology of the Flesh, Husain explores people’s continuing attachment to eating meat. Satirical in tone, she sets out to understand how the middle classes have come to “critique the worst violence against animals and critique climate change” while still eating meat.
Food production is a major cause of global greenhouse gas emissions and meat accounts for nearly 60% of the industry’s share. Though meat consumption has decreased, in 2019 people in the UK still ate on average 86 grams a day. Environmental activists such as the group Animal Rebellion have called for an end to animal exploitation and a shift to a plant-based diet, while the writer George Monbiot has taken aim at the trend for “organic, pasture-fed beef and lamb”, describing it as “the world’s most damaging farm product”.
Husain takes a slightly different approach, more interested in how people can love animals while simultaneously loving the meat from those animals.
The answer is what she calls Meat Love. There has been a shift, according to Husain: climate catastrophe and changing gender politics mean that a macho eroticisation of meat is no longer acceptable in socially conscious middle-class circles. In its place, people romanticise meat – how it is made and how it is eaten. Meat Love tells the world that there is an ethical and caring way of eating animals. You just have to do it right.
To make this argument, she examines the cultural conditions that “nourish” Meat Love via some of its figureheads, such as Instagram farmers, chefs and food writers. Think Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and the Red Shepherdess.
This “middle-class visual culture and rhetoric” offers a “self-congratulatory account of why meat eating is not just an OK thing to do but is almost ethical, honourable or virtuous”, Husain says. Often promoting small-scale local farming, proponents present meat as being “compatible with love”; lovingly raising an animal before killing it and cherishing nature by consuming pigs and cows. This masks, she says, “a relationship of complete domination, where we suppose that our care for animals justifies us in helping ourselves to their flesh”.
Meat Love is all around us, Husain argues. Go to any supermarket across the country and you will see it in action: as in images of a pastoral idyll plastered across shrink-wrapped organic pork cutlets. It is pictures of “animals roaming in the beautiful countryside and the happy chickens with the happy eggs”, Husain says.
When she stopped eating meat (she is now a vegan), Husain assumed her “similarly middle-class friends” and family might respond by unburdening themselves of their own guilt about eating animals. Instead, people around her were committed to defending their choice and getting angry at hers. Husain admits to previously being annoyed by vegetarianism and veganism, cringing now as she recalls complaining that one non-meat-eating friend coming for dinner meant cooking something completely different for everyone.
Husain acknowledges that people who “aren’t the greatest beneficiaries of capitalism” may understandably feel entitled to whatever pleasure they have left. She is also clear that “the choice to not eat meat is not available to everyone” for economic reasons. Her explicit focus is on people who do have the luxury of choice but still tie themselves in knots to defend meat eating.
The book has three chapters, each titled with one word, which wryly examine the different ways Meat Love mystifies and idealises meat eating. There is Tragedy, in which people’s exploitative relationship with animals is presented as a tragic necessity, a primal urge that can be satisfied in a kind and ethical way. Then Harmony, the idea that it is natural to eat meat as part of a symbiotic relationship with nature; humans nurture and must also kill animals. And finally Beauty, which is the celebration of “luxury meat” consumption in high-end restaurants, where eating animals is treated as a sophisticated hobby. Meat becomes “a precious jewel, a beautiful thing to be savoured, as though the wealthy might starve without it”, she says.
Husain says there is no redemption to be found in meat from small-scale farms, which will always be niche under capitalism, skewed as it is towards economies of scale and ensuring meat is profitable, and driven by enormous subsidies.
Husain says “eating animals predates capitalism but it has systematised the way we devalue animal life”. Meat is such a huge part of humanity’s food system not simply because of natural compulsion or necessity but, she argues, because “capitalism as a system functions by establishing which lives are worth more and which lives are more disposable and exploiting the latter … meat is the furthest extension of that logic: a life is so worthless that we can create that life, treat it like it’s less than life, end it and eat it”.
Ultimately, Husain argues that Meat Love narrows the political imagination by presupposing that nothing much can be done about inequality, exploitation and extraction beyond being “a little bit more merciful in the way we destroy the planet and life on it”.
When I ask if she thinks everyone should stop eating meat, she does not give a straightforward answer. Instead she settles on it being necessary that those who can do so, but that this is, on its own, insufficient. “Voting with our forks” is not the solution, she says. Just as “animals can’t just choose not to cooperate with human agriculture … abattoir workers and factory farmers can’t just choose to get better jobs and poor people can’t simply choose to change their diets”.
If avoiding meat and dairy is the single biggest way you can reduce your impact on Earth, where does that leave us then? The final pages of Meat Love offer a more comprehensive and complex response. Where the former government food tsar Henry Dimbleby encourages people to eat less meat for the sake of the climate, Husain has a more expansive idea. “There is little to be gained from framing our resistance to human-animal domination as a matter of self-denial,” she writes.
Part of the solution is changing the economic system so that food security would be enshrined in “wages, social provision, policy and law” and “animal life would not be cheapened by the profit imperative because there would be no profit imperative”. But Husain recognises even this would not automatically put an end to meat eating. A just society for animals and humans means transforming what culinary pleasure is and questioning whether the “‘needs’ for meat we invoke are actually our own”.
After we speak, I ask her over email exactly what this means. She responds that how we eat can be an important part of politicising us to “desire, imagine and work towards a different economic system” but that this is bigger than food choice. It can mean “reframing the eating of animals … as a contingent necessity rather than a justified entitlement, which might result in minimising, if not eliminating, meat consumption”. That way we can be “a bit less purist about each other’s diets” and hold ourselves and each other “account[able] for how we’re justifying our actions”.
Husain is concerned with what it takes to open up people’s political imaginations in exactly the way she experienced when she suddenly saw the chicken she was cooking differently. Such a change is one of the necessary antidotes to Meat Love. Understanding, she writes, that “the decision to consume another’s flesh will always have as much to do with politics, as much to do with power, as it has to do with love”.
HALIFAX – Nova Scotia Premier Tim Houston says it’s “disgraceful and demeaning” that a Halifax-area school would request that service members not wear military uniforms to its Remembrance Day ceremony.
Houston’s comments were part of a chorus of criticism levelled at the school — Sackville Heights Elementary — whose administration decided to back away from the plan after the outcry.
A November newsletter from the school in Middle Sackville, N.S., invited Armed Forces members to attend its ceremony but asked that all attendees arrive in civilian attire to “maintain a welcoming environment for all.”
Houston, who is currently running for re-election, accused the school’s leaders of “disgracing themselves while demeaning the people who protect our country” in a post on the social media platform X Thursday night.
“If the people behind this decision had a shred of the courage that our veterans have, this cowardly and insulting idea would have been rejected immediately,” Houston’s post read. There were also several calls for resignations within the school’s administration attached to Houston’s post.
In an email to families Thursday night, the school’s principal, Rachael Webster, apologized and welcomed military family members to attend “in the attire that makes them most comfortable.”
“I recognize this request has caused harm and I am deeply sorry,” Webster’s email read, adding later that the school has the “utmost respect for what the uniform represents.”
Webster said the initial request was out of concern for some students who come from countries experiencing conflict and who she said expressed discomfort with images of war, including military uniforms.
Her email said any students who have concerns about seeing Armed Forces members in uniform can be accommodated in a way that makes them feel safe, but she provided no further details in the message.
Webster did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
At a news conference Friday, Houston said he’s glad the initial request was reversed but said he is still concerned.
“I can’t actually fathom how a decision like that was made,” Houston told reporters Friday, adding that he grew up moving between military bases around the country while his father was in the Armed Forces.
“My story of growing up in a military family is not unique in our province. The tradition of service is something so many of us share,” he said.
“Saying ‘lest we forget’ is a solemn promise to the fallen. It’s our commitment to those that continue to serve and our commitment that we will pass on our respects to the next generation.”
Liberal Leader Zach Churchill also said he’s happy with the school’s decision to allow uniformed Armed Forces members to attend the ceremony, but he said he didn’t think it was fair to question the intentions of those behind the original decision.
“We need to have them (uniforms) on display at Remembrance Day,” he said. “Not only are we celebrating (veterans) … we’re also commemorating our dead who gave the greatest sacrifice for our country and for the freedoms we have.”
NDP Leader Claudia Chender said that while Remembrance Day is an important occasion to honour veterans and current service members’ sacrifices, she said she hopes Houston wasn’t taking advantage of the decision to “play politics with this solemn occasion for his own political gain.”
“I hope Tim Houston reached out to the principal of the school before making a public statement,” she said in a statement.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 8, 2024.
REGINA – Saskatchewan Opposition NDP Leader Carla Beck says she wants to prove to residents her party is the government in waiting as she heads into the incoming legislative session.
Beck held her first caucus meeting with 27 members, nearly double than what she had before the Oct. 28 election but short of the 31 required to form a majority in the 61-seat legislature.
She says her priorities will be health care and cost-of-living issues.
Beck says people need affordability help right now and will press Premier Scott Moe’s Saskatchewan Party government to cut the gas tax and the provincial sales tax on children’s clothing and some grocery items.
Beck’s NDP is Saskatchewan’s largest Opposition in nearly two decades after sweeping Regina and winning all but one seat in Saskatoon.
The Saskatchewan Party won 34 seats, retaining its hold on all of the rural ridings and smaller cities.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 8, 2024.
HALIFAX – Nova Scotia‘s growing population was the subject of debate on Day 12 of the provincial election campaign, with Liberal Leader Zach Churchill arguing immigration levels must be reduced until the province can provide enough housing and health-care services.
Churchill said Thursday a plan by the incumbent Progressive Conservatives to double the province’s population to two million people by the year 2060 is unrealistic and unsustainable.
“That’s a big leap and it’s making life harder for people who live here, (including ) young people looking for a place to live and seniors looking to downsize,” he told a news conference at his campaign headquarters in Halifax.
Anticipating that his call for less immigration might provoke protests from the immigrant community, Churchill was careful to note that he is among the third generation of a family that moved to Nova Scotia from Lebanon.
“I know the value of immigration, the importance of it to our province. We have been built on the backs of an immigrant population. But we just need to do it in a responsible way.”
The Liberal leader said Tim Houston’s Tories, who are seeking a second term in office, have made a mistake by exceeding immigration targets set by the province’s Department of Labour and Immigration. Churchill said a Liberal government would abide by the department’s targets.
In the most recent fiscal year, the government welcomed almost 12,000 immigrants through its nominee program, exceeding the department’s limit by more than 4,000, he said. The numbers aren’t huge, but the increase won’t help ease the province’s shortages in housing and doctors, and the increased strain on its infrastructure, including roads, schools and cellphone networks, Churchill said.
“(The Immigration Department) has done the hard work on this,” he said. “They know where the labour gaps are, and they know what growth is sustainable.”
In response, Houston said his commitment to double the population was a “stretch goal.” And he said the province had long struggled with a declining population before that trend was recently reversed.
“The only immigration that can come into this province at this time is if they are a skilled trade worker or a health-care worker,” Houston said. “The population has grown by two per cent a year, actually quite similar growth to what we experienced under the Liberal government before us.”
Still, Houston said he’s heard Nova Scotians’ concerns about population growth, and he then pivoted to criticize Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for trying to send 6,000 asylum seekers to Nova Scotia, an assertion the federal government has denied.
Churchill said Houston’s claim about asylum seekers was shameful.
“It’s smoke and mirrors,” the Liberal leader said. “He is overshooting his own department’s numbers for sustainable population growth and yet he is trying to blame this on asylum seekers … who aren’t even here.”
In September, federal Immigration Minister Marc Miller said there is no plan to send any asylum seekers to the province without compensation or the consent of the premier. He said the 6,000 number was an “aspirational” figure based on models that reflect each province’s population.
In Halifax, NDP Leader Claudia Chender said it’s clear Nova Scotia needs more doctors, nurses and skilled trades people.
“Immigration has been and always will be a part of the Nova Scotia story, but we need to build as we grow,” Chender said. “This is why we have been pushing the Houston government to build more affordable housing.”
Chender was in a Halifax cafe on Thursday when she promised her party would remove the province’s portion of the harmonized sales tax from all grocery, cellphone and internet bills if elected to govern on Nov. 26. The tax would also be removed from the sale and installation of heat pumps.
“Our focus is on helping people to afford their lives,” Chender told reporters. “We know there are certain things that you can’t live without: food, internet and a phone …. So we know this will have the single biggest impact.”
The party estimates the measure would save the average Nova Scotia family about $1,300 a year.
“That’s a lot more than a one or two per cent HST cut,” Chender said, referring to the Progressive Conservative pledge to reduce the tax by one percentage point and the Liberal promise to trim it by two percentage points.
Elsewhere on the campaign trail, Houston announced that a Progressive Conservative government would make parking free at all Nova Scotia hospitals and health-care centres. The promise was also made by the Liberals in their election platform released Monday.
“Free parking may not seem like a big deal to some, but … the parking, especially for people working at the facilities, can add up to hundreds of dollars,” the premier told a news conference at his campaign headquarters in Halifax.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 7, 2024.
