Person 1: Nah, man I just go to fill my belly. Really, bacon is good on anything but on a
burger, mmm, mmm, mmm!
Person 2: But yeah, don’t you kind of go to show off your
wealth, a little bit? That’s why I go –
it shows I’m part of the club.
P1: What? No. What am
I going to cook a burger myself?
P2: Well, by going to the burger barn you show you don’t
have to cook for yourself.
P1: Um, okay, like I’m just going to whip together a triple
bacon cheeseburger?
P2: And it shows your dominance in the food chain – farming
has become an industry that caters to our need for burgers.
P1: Bro, you’re harshing my mellow.
Anyway, something like this is what goes on in so many
facets of life. Do you ever see a luxury
car go by and the driver looks like they think they are in a luxury car commercial,
and you, not at that level of affluence, feel cars should be utilitarian and
not unnecessarily ostentatious? No?,
Just me?
I feel that our relation to cows is one of the cornerstones
of our society, the meaning of which has shifted over the years. Let’s compare eating a hamburger in 1970 to
eating a hamburger today. What do those
different burgers represent? In 1970 it
is a celebration of an American meal hard-earned through the due diligence of
the Cold War. When the person met the
plate in 1970 they have a solid, American job, say in a factory. They celebrate the novelty of driving-through
a place to get the burger, a melding of a quintessential American meal and the
quintessential American pastime, driving.
The concept of factory farming and the effect of farming on the environment
was in its nascence and did not even exist in the back of this diner’s mind.
And today? A lot has
changed since 1970. The environment is
omnipresent in the news – the Kyoto Protocol dates to
1992. People drive more and more of
necessity: homes are located far from shopping and even farther from the
workplace. Now the celebration and
ritual of the fast food meal is a necessity of the time-crunched individual. The concept of nutritional value is something
that is everyone’s minds now too, unlike the past when average American body
type tended more towards the lithe.
Today I think the meat we eat is imbued
with a different spirit then it was in 1970’s.
Along the lines of the differences illustrated above let’s look at more
of what the world of beef consumption says about us.
Life has sacred divisions – the burger-flipping caste is
there to serve me. After all it is a rite of passage all on its own. In America you can start as a fry cook and
work up to CEO. The minimum wage is the
divine allotment to this class. Koan: are
the lives of those who clean other’s houses also too short to clean their own
houses?
The sacred car must be understood as part of the
ritual. This is the hunk of metal/mode
of conveyance that almost everyone takes part in. This is how we interface with drive-throughs,
the sacred vestment that you must be in to receive meat-of-a-thousand-cows
through the small window. A purchase of
drive-through burger says, “I accept the role of the car in American life. I support our procurement of the holy-unguent
of oil – our actions in the Middle East are justly sanctioned. I accept and make holy the debt incurred and
the holy bondage to this debt – everyone is doing it”.
And lastly, beef consumption shows that we have ritualized,
well, ignorance. Is that ignorance when
we now something is detrimental but ignore it? – there is a little bit of
knowledge there. We suppress it. We have created a ritual that lets us partake
in something that on some level we know is bad – but not feel bad about doing
it. This is something smart phone users
must face and suppress when they hear about poor
working conditions in smart phone subcontractor factories. This is now a virtue, the decoupling of how
we view ourselves and the real way that we act in the world. This is the craze for authenticity, a need
generated in world where action and intent have been separated.
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