The Ecophobia Hypothesis by Simon C. Estok

Author:Simon C. Estok
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2018-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

5 Animals, Ecophobia, and Food

Food is a rich site through which to think about a number of things: environment, colonialism, culture, affect, subjectivity, among others.

(Lisa Szabo-Jones 207)

Ecophobia emanates from anxieties about control, and nowhere is worldwide control of the natural environment more evident than in what Tony Weis calls the “meatification” of global diets (4). With astonishing evidence and impeccable logic, Weis argues that detailing the costs of the global livestock industry “might not only provide a means to understand the burden of industrial animal production but also as a lens through which to see the violence of capitalism as world-ecology, a totalizing way of organizing nature” (154). The very concept of the fully industrialized nation has at its core an ethics of meat. Weis explains that “the meatification of diets has long been a marker of class ascension and a dietary aspiration of development, from British lords to US suburbia to China’s burgeoning elites and middle class” (150). The most recent Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) statistics available show that the average American ate 200.6 pounds (91 kilograms) of meat (beef, veal, poultry, pork, and sheep) in 2013, compared with the per capita consumption of 107.6 pounds (48.8 kilograms) in China (see McCarthy). In 1996, the United States consumed 195.7 pounds (89.2 kilograms) per capita, while China consumed 8.4 pounds or 3.8 kilograms (see “Meat Consumption Per Capita”). The American increase is a mere 2.4%, while the Chinese increase is an astounding 1,180.95% jump. Meat consumption in industrialized countries does not promise a good future for the environment.

Meat represents the ecophobic condition at its most global extreme because of the absolute nonchalance toward nature’s non-human bodies that are desecrated in the industrial-meat industry. As the editors of The Guardian somewhat tiredly explain,

links between meat consumption and climate change have been widely known for many years, partly due to deforestation in the Amazon rainforests to make room for livestock. Clearing these forests is estimated to produce a staggering 17% of global greenhouse gas emissions, more than the entire transport sector”.

(see “Meat Consumption Per Capita”)

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