The Worst Is Yet to Come by Peter Fleming

Author:Peter Fleming
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Watkins Media

CHAPTER SEVEN

HELL WOULDN’T EVEN HAVE US

I stood naked in front of the bathroom mirror. Jesus Christ, what happened? My body had not only visibly aged, but become grotesque too. I looked like a distorted Francis Bacon painting. Fat and pale, with tinges of bluish pink.

As I turned away in disgust, I remembered the swollen, unhappy people I’d seen after first arriving in England a decade before. Somehow, I had become one of them, working too much and not exercising.

I decided to visit my doctor for a check-up and he took a blood pressure reading. “Mmmm, that can’t be right”. He took another, “Impressive”, he muttered.

He gave me that look you never want to see from a health professional, something like, “I don’t know why you are wasting time talking to me, you should call an ambulance.”

Getting back home I opened the fridge to inspect what I was eating. A lot of crap. Sodium levels that ought to be illegal. And a huge amount of meat.

*********

Animal flesh is everywhere. The culture of neoliberal capitalism is obsessed with it. And this preoccupation is taking on an increasingly hideous tone.

A news report recently ran an item about tainted dog food.1 The family pets were suddenly falling ill. Owners suspected something amiss with the canned meat. In some cases pieces of plastic and steel were found. Dennis Pedretti, a former rendering plant manager was asked about it, said: “Well, you have sheep heads come through, they have an ear tag. They go into the pit”.

In fact, all sorts of rubbish ends up being processed. Pedretti described how rendering works. Offal and off-cuts unfit for human consumption are transported from the abattoir to the plant: “It’s ground up and crushed up and then goes through the cooking process, so the ear tags, with the heat, effectively melt”.

Then, “the dollar takes over”. The goal is to process large quantities of offal as cheaply as possible: “Who gives a stuff about your dog at the end of the day?”

Pedretti recalled a disturbing incident. One day two live chickens came through the plant, completely plucked, “they’d been through the whole process of being de-plucked, they’d missed the decapitation, they must have ducked at the right time”.

In this example we truly see mankind’s relationship to nature reach a dirty nadir. Hermetic, mechanised and completely abstruse. It’s been observed that people and animals regard each other across a gulf of mutual incomprehension. But matters are clearly worse here. Within the wreckage of an “extreme present”, where the negative dialectic has become a psychotic clown, this incomprehension takes on graver verities. Some label this the Anthropocene, an epoch where the richness of non-human life becomes a reflection of our own madness. Life on Earth is now a manmade event. Thus, its decline will also entail ours, making us a sunset species at best.

Mass industrial farming is a by-product of the neoliberal fantasy that society should be converted into a giant supermarket. In the US, farmed animals (including chickens, pigs, cattle, turkey and goats) account for about 95% of all meat consumed.

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