Making Sense of Food Animals

This book addresses the persistence of meat consumption and the use of animals as food in spite of significant challenges to their environmental and ethical legitimacy. Drawing on Foucaults regime of power/knowledge/pleasure, and theorizations of the gaze, it identifies what contributes to the persistent edibility of food animals even, and particularly, as this edibility is increasingly critiqued. Beginning with the question of how animals, and their bodies, are variously mapped by humans according to their use value, it gradually unpacks the roots of our domination of food animals a domination distinguished by the literal embodiment of the other. The logics of this embodied domination are approached in three inter-related parts that explore, respectively, how knowledge, sensory and emotional associations, and visibility work together to render animals bodies as edible flesh. The book concludes by exploring how to more effectively challenge the entitled gaze that maintainsfood animals as persistently edible.