Meat Love
Amber Husain
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From the publisher
'An exquisitely crafted little hand-grenade lobbed at the gentrification of the carnivorous mind. With breathtaking verve and elegance, Husain traces through phenomena such as #cottagecore influencers, King Charles III's views on harmony, Plato, Pythagoras, horror movies, and celebrity cooks. I am not exaggerating when I say I have thought about Meat Love every day since beginning it. As someone who cut their teeth politically in vegan climate justice circles, I didn’t think any of the arguments in it could possibly surprise me; I was wrong. ‘ Sophie Lewis
'A bracing interrogation of the bourgeois romance with so-called ‘ethical’ meat. What does it mean, Husain asks, that our love of animals is not only compatible with, but culminates in, our consuming their flesh? Her answer disturbs and dazzles.' Amia Srinivasan
In an era of climate catastrophe and corporate agribusiness, meat has been decisively made over. Urbanites across the West are called upon to look at the animals we eat, and by looking, learn to treat them with love. We are asked to tenderise our carnal desire for flesh and dignify our relationship with the land. Yet can our appetite for meat be redeemed by this new way of seeing? Can an ‘ethical’ approach to the farming, sale, and consumption of meat really save both the planet and our souls?
Revisiting John Berger’s writings on animals and class, Meat Love restores a materialist lens to the politics of carnivorous desire. In this vital essay, Amber Husain deconstructs the beauty, tragedy, and mystery with which our images of meat are embellished, drawing on a range of visual sources from contemporary art and film to Instagram and advertising. Probing the nature of ‘love’ in contemporary human-animal relations, it casts a critical eye on the visual culture of meat as it gentrifies and mutates, informing, for better or for worse, who we become as political subjects.