Because most people need a book on how animal agriculture has and continues to brainwash us

I couldn’t resist reading a book with a title like Meatsplaining: The Animal Agriculture Industry and the Rhetoric of Denial. Edited by Jason Hannan, this is the second of four books in the Animal Politics series published by Sydney University Press from 2019 to 2021.

Like some books I’ve reviewed here, this book is a collection of essays about the rhetorical strategies employed by the animal agriculture industry throughout modern history.

The introduction sets the scene with animals being described as slaves and products in a system—which they are. Hannon asks what animal agriculture’s response is to the moral, environmental, and biomedical threat we face, and likens the meat industry’s “meatsplaining” to “mansplaining.”

Here are some highlights I enjoyed:

• Norie Ross Singer points to how ABC’s reference to lean finely textured beef (LFTB) as “pink slime” in 2012 resulted in a huge PR crisis for Beef Products Inc. (BPI), which attempted to green-and blue wash its product.
• Daniel Lees Fryer dismantles a 12-second egg ad from 2017 and introduces the term “vegaphobia” (a series of derogatory discourses that ridicule veganism), which was coined in 2011 in the UK.
• Saara Kupsala talks about an influencer tour of a Finnish chicken farm in 2016 and how it made farming more relatable, but that the tour did not include the chickens subsequently being killed in a slaughterhouse.
• Kelsey Speakman breaks down Canada Beef’s propaganda and marketing tactics, which are rooted in colonialism and capitalism.
• Barbara Willard shares how the meat and dairy industries constantly attempt to de-legitimize USDA Dietary Guidelines every time it promotes a plant-based diet.
• Eliza Waters and Gonzalo Villanueva talk about how the Australian meat export industry is tied to colonization and how meat has always been a symbol of economic modernization and luxury, similar to wine and cars.
• Lisa Barca examines the use of the term “vegan” in mainstream media and how it carries negative connotations. Most media reporters don’t understand the difference between vegetarianism and veganism, and bias is always present. For example, a health columnist for The New York Times failed to finish the documentary What the Health because she didn’t believe the medical statements that were being made.
• Margaret Robinson explores the Mi’kmaq legends as the basis of a vegan Indigenous diet through a postcolonial ecofeminist lens.
• C. Vail Fletcher and Alexa M. Dare explore how to centre animals in debates about animal welfare (vs. human) rights.
• Anita Krajnc shares 10 strategies used by the Animal Save Movement to grow globally.

This is a college-level book, so it might be too dense for the average reader, but I appreciate all the efforts the contributors took to present their arguments and all the credible references included in the book—because all the animal lovers wanna believe the vegans are full of BS, right?

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