About eating animals | 4Columns

We are back with a new issue September 6! Until then, enjoy this archived roundup of reviews that might make you think twice about what’s for dinner…

Sizzling steaks, Sunday roasts, stuffed turkeys… humans are devouring nonhuman animals on a scale never seen before in world history. Consequently, their raising, slaughtering and preparation for consumption has been elevated to inhumane industrial levels. They say you are what you eat – and for the meat-eating majority among us, what we eat is meat born and killed in grief, fear and pain. This week, we highlight four pieces from our archive that offer global perspectives on the consumption of animals and the associated business concerns that surround the practice.

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ANIA SZREMSKI ABOUT filet

The story of a butcher who is obsessed with his craft is told by French author Joy Sorman filetwhich was published earlier this year in English translation by Lara Vergnaud, “is an exceptionally sharp book – saturated with the smells of blood, flesh and fumes in various degrees of freshness and decay, mixed with the smell of stale menthol and acrid Clorox scents,” writes 4Columns Editor in Chief Ania Szremski. “It is just as visually haunting, with its images of animals being shot in the vulnerable forehead with stun guns, hung by their defenseless feet, their throats slit from screaming, their once-protective skin stripped away, their entrails slapped wetly on conveyor belts, their muscles sharply severed from their bones. Those muscles are sliced ​​and pounded and tenderized into jewel-like packages that Sorman describes in puffy paragraphs detailing their shine, textures, and colors as if they were Renaissance paintings no longer recognizable as animals. Inside every sleepy cow with long whips lies the potential for an expertly seared filet mignon, and the author recounts every bloody step of this transformation in words so unflinching and delicious that bile rose in my throat. My point is: filet is an amazing read.”

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MELISSA ANDERSON ABOUT GUNDA

Russian filmmaker Victor Kossakovsky became a vegetarian as a child after witnessing the slaughter of a beloved pig he met during his childhood travels in the countryside. 4Columns Film editor Melissa Anderson explains in her review of his 2021 film portrait of a sow and her brood, GundaThe film “takes up the question posed by John Berger in his still-influential 1977 essay ‘Why Look at Animals?'” Anderson said. “At the most basic level, Gunda underscores one of the essential truths Berger lays out in his treatise: ‘Animals are born, sentient, and mortal.’ By drawing attention to this incontrovertible fact, Kossakovsky’s documentary is a gentle but no less effective polemic, especially for those viewers who view Gunda’s subjects as dinner rather than conscious beings.”

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MEGAN MILKS ON MY HEAVENLY FAVORITE

The second novel by Dutch writer Lucas Rijneveld, My heavenly favoritePublished in English translation by Michele Hutchison, given its Lolita-esque themes, it doesn’t seem to have much to do with the meat industry per se. But it’s no coincidence that Humbert Humbert’s character, Kurt, is a veterinarian visiting a family whose entire dairy herd has died of foot-and-mouth disease—the devastating diseases so common in today’s animal agriculture serve as a grim backdrop for a story about pathological, deranged pedophile obsession. “Breathless, dizzying, hallucinatory, Kurt’s musings meander endlessly, twisting and turning through lust, fantasy, pop poetry, the mundane minutiae of farm life,” writes Megan Milks in her review for 4Columns. “Our vet’s combined obsessions with animal husbandry, prepubescent girl types, and literature make for a strange and disturbing – sometimes even comical – reading experience. ‘I already knew we were unusual and unique,’ he writes, ‘though I thought the word ‘unique’ was as ugly as an irritated bull having the manure washed out from under its feet.'”

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SUKHDEV SANDHU ABOUT COW

Luma in CowCourtesy of Kate Kirkwood.

Damien Hirst’s Mother and child separated (1993) shows a cow and a calf, both cut in half and preserved in glass containers full of formaldehyde. “The work is meant to attract and repel you at the same time,” the artist explained. “I see them as objects of death.” This is what Sukhdev Sandhu emphasizes in his review of the film by English filmmaker Andrea Arnold Cowin which, he argues, she agrees very much with Hirst. Almost every second of the documentary “is laden with the viewer’s expectation of how it will end,” writes Sandhu. “The cow in question is called Luma. She is an English dairy cow. A Holstein-Friesian cow. Does it matter? How many of us can name different breeds of cow? Such is the scale and impersonality of modern agribusiness that perhaps imagining Luma as a unique, specific creature is not only romantic but a kind of Cartoon Network deification. … Yet the end, when it comes, is short, sharp and disturbing.”