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Tender is the Flesh with Kayla
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In this episode, Carly is joined by food systems writer Kayla to discuss Augustina Bazterrica’s 2017 novel, Tender Is The Flesh. Tender Is The Flesh tells the story of Marcos, a high level worker at a slaughterhouse that processes humans for meat in a post-animal world. You do not have to have read the book to get a lot out of this discussion—we dive into the parallels to real world food systems, ethics, and the way we use language to obfuscate our actions and ease our own minds.
You can find more from Kayla on instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/oyveyitskay?igsh=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ==
Or sign up for her newsletter on substack:
https://substack.com/@oyveyitskay
Intro Music: Body in the trunk by Victor_Natas -- https://freesound.org/s/717975/ -- License: Attribution 4.0
Outro Music: drum loop x5 by theoctopus559 -- https://freesound.org/s/622897/ -- License: Attribution 4.0
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Transcript
Introduction and Hosts' Backgrounds
00:00:00
Speaker
Hopefully cursing is cool. Yeah, yeah, totally fine. That was fucked up world. I don't know how else to put it out.
00:00:31
Speaker
Welcome to What Haunts You, a podcast about the stories that haunt our dreams. I'm your host, Carly, and today I have my friend Kayla with me to talk about a book that we both kind of didn't like, but also kind of like talking about. um So do you want to introduce yourself and ah kind of tell people why this book is of interest to you and where they can find you?
00:00:51
Speaker
Absolutely. So Kayla. internet knows WayVayIt'sK.com. I write about food systems. I've studied food systems. I've researched food systems. And I have been ah vegan, still am a vegan, for over 10 years at this point.
00:01:09
Speaker
been coming up 11-ish. And I like to think really deeply about food. And I like to hear other people talk about food.
Overview of 'Tender is the Flesh'
00:01:18
Speaker
And so reading this book was an experience, as somebody who will I hope will also say is not into horror movies.
00:01:26
Speaker
Generally, but Carly knew that before I came on. So I'm guessing that's okay at this point. So I'm excited to get into it more. And also, I did not eat before this because I can't think about this.
00:01:38
Speaker
lot of times I've actually eaten. Yeah, I think that is, i think that's pretty understandable. And yeah, I think that one of my favorite things about horror is the conversation starter that it can be.
00:01:50
Speaker
And so yeah, I think I'm like prepared for focusing more on the themes and focusing more on kind of what the book is doing and how we're reacting to it than actually getting into like the tropes and things like that, which I don't think apply quite as much to this book anyway. but We're going to be talking about the book Tender is the Flesh.
00:02:10
Speaker
And I should have the author's name in front of me and I don't. i' justina buster This book is ah pretty rough one. i think this is a book that a lot of people are interested in, but that a lot of people probably don't want to read for reasons that I think are understandable.
00:02:27
Speaker
So I think our plan is to kind of walk through the plot a little bit and kind of get into the themes that come up. And then after we're kind of get to the end, we'll zoom out and just kind of talk about the world that the book is creating and the questions that it's, I think, posing to the readers. Does that Sound good?
00:02:47
Speaker
Sounds great.
00:02:51
Speaker
he's living during a time that is pretty fraught i would say even compared to even compared to our times which are already pretty fraught and he's living after what's called the transition which is the time where the world shifted from eating animal meat to eating human meat.
00:03:08
Speaker
This happened due to a supposed virus that was infecting the animals of the world. And so he is working at a processing plant. His wife left him after his son died, and he is responsible for paying for his father's care in his like hospice care nursing home.
00:03:26
Speaker
So we have this man who's kind of down on his luck, but also like participating in this in this system. was raised in it too. His father was also in the pre-transition animal meat industry. So I think it's, it's intergenerational for him, second generation at this point too.
00:03:44
Speaker
I do think that's like significant to some of the choices that he makes. It's also probably why his father had such a rough time with the transition was like, he, he was in that world and then his world was like taken away and we're or at least like version two of it came around and it was, it was too much.
Dystopian World and Government Manipulation
00:04:02
Speaker
Right. Totally. We even have..............................
00:04:34
Speaker
Absolutely. Also, maybe to throw out some trigger warnings, because this is a very graphic book.
00:04:56
Speaker
Passages carefully where I'm, I'm representing accurately how horrible it is without having some of the more graphic scenes and descriptions that I think are just not not totally necessary to people who are curious about the book and don't want to read it for those exact reasons. Yeah, and I did good It's hard these quotes at this point. so it's a lot of intention and care into that. yeah So when the transition happened, the government basically stepped in and killed all of the animals and like even then kind of had
00:05:31
Speaker
people killing their own pets. And we see Marcos reflecting on this and he's thinking he'd had to slaughter them knowing, suspecting that the virus was a lie invented by global powers and legitimized by the government and media.
00:05:46
Speaker
I'm never totally clear in the story to what extent the virus is real. i feel like I keep going back and forth about that, but ultimately he is not convinced that his pets are a threat and he goes through with this anyway.
00:06:00
Speaker
It seems like in a lot of it, we don't know also what the government is doing versus what the industry is doing. And that maybe the virus is like a made up way to get control and just like shift into this post purge world.
Societal Views on Consumption and Class Differences
00:06:18
Speaker
It doesn't seem like he is a conspiracy theorist in the same way that like people are in real life questioning diseases that lead to global pandemics. There is a quote even later on about that. You can't trust the government because all they want to do is control you.
00:06:31
Speaker
yeah Yeah. So it's it's very interesting. And I think also how people reacted to the virus when it came to their companion animals in a different way than the wild animals that were out there or farmed animals is pretty interesting too, because he says that people, some people supposedly, right, physically believe it, died rather than have to kill their companion animals, you know?
00:06:56
Speaker
And I think that that says a lot about Even the differentiation that we have in real life between animals we deem as like wild or like for farming versus animals that we keep in our homes. And I think domestication is ah huge theme of this book.
00:07:12
Speaker
And it starts out by introducing it through companion animals or corpette. Yeah, for sure. And I think in the book too, there's a lot of talk about the taboo of eating meat that they refer to it as meat with a first and last name, right? Meaning not meat made through these processing plants or like these quote unquote legit, like this is obviously not how I feel, but legitimate ways.
00:07:39
Speaker
And I think that reminds me too, a lot of like domesticated animals and pets and how, right, our pets have I think first and last names, like maybe, you know, I think some people might debate about the last name part, but right. Our pets are animals with names and we do, I mean, I think not everyone, right. But I think like as a society, we do view them as somehow distinct from other animals, even animals that are just as like intelligent and aware as the pets that we have Yeah. That's speciesism T, and think interesting though,
00:08:14
Speaker
that idea of like the meet with a first and last name changes with class and status because there is a type of like ultra wealthy, we hunt people for sport that they want to pick like people of recognition, which seems more cruel or is we're made to think is more cruel than just random quote, you know, not,
00:08:41
Speaker
people from heads, right? They call the them heads when they go to the plant, which is very similar to the industry and in real life. And like, there is a distinction between heads that are not known and heads of people who are recognizable. And like that there is more status to kill them.
00:08:57
Speaker
It's very much like game animals. We have all these distinctions in real life that also appear in the book to imply these the different kind of status to to their to their killing, to the hunting, to the sport.
00:09:10
Speaker
that very much like real life. So it's it's only unacceptable until you have enough money where it becomes cool. Not just acceptable, but like very cool. Yeah.
00:09:20
Speaker
I think this is I'm realizing that this is totally a book that I would be curious to read, not a sequel to, but somebody in another city somewhere at the same time. And just like, what are, what are other people going through as this is happening?
00:09:36
Speaker
I mean, I think the first time I read this book, I kind of, as soon as I knew the premise, knew where it would start. And right, it always starts with marginalized people. It starts the way everything else does.
00:09:49
Speaker
There are two quotes that stand out to me as exemplifying the kind of exact way I would picture this to happen if it were to happen in reality. There's a quote
Real-World Parallels and Ethical Dilemmas
00:10:00
Speaker
that says, the press documented a case of two unemployed Bolivians who had been attacked dismembered and barbecued by a group of neighbors.
00:10:09
Speaker
And then just following that, it says, and this is the part that I think stands out to me is really kind of summing up the way marginalized folks are kind of treated like treated and discarded.
00:10:20
Speaker
And it says, in some countries, immigrants began to disappear in large numbers. Immigrants, the marginalized, the poor. They were persecuted and eventually slaughtered.
00:10:31
Speaker
Legalization occurred when the governments gave into pressure from a big money industry that had come to a halt. They adapted the processing plans and regulations. Not long after, they began to breed people as animals to supply the massive demand for meat.
00:10:47
Speaker
It's, there is no distance, even in this, it's like supposed to be a dystopia. And yet that's like exactly what happens in our world, maybe to not this degree, but the food industry was literally created government and private industry hand in hand.
00:11:05
Speaker
And so, so much of our regulations today are like what the government could get through with as much cooperation or as little resistance from the food and farming industries.
00:11:18
Speaker
And so to me, this is like not that hard to imagine that the industry goes, hey, we've stopped making money because of this crazy pandemic thing that is happening.
00:11:29
Speaker
And that's not okay. So we need to make it better. Our answer is to both deregulate and change the regulations in favor of us.
00:11:40
Speaker
And it's not about ethics. There's no what's best for for people. It's what's best for the industry. And that's like especially poignant given the deregulation that we're seeing, even in the news this week, today, end of February, with what the Trump administration is doing in the meatpacking industry. And it's going to hurt workers and it's going to hurt public health. And it's just, it hits so close to home.
00:12:05
Speaker
Yeah, it really does. And it hit close to home already the first time I read it, but I will say Some of the recent ah government changes definitely make it even more hard to read and hard to sit with, but also like maybe more important.
00:12:21
Speaker
And we're going to stay mostly focused on the agricultural, like like factory farm. We're going to stay on the food for most of this conversation. But I think in this moment, I'm also kind of just realizing how much this makes me think of the prison system.
00:12:37
Speaker
less about the you know the breeding, but just that it's like these huge swaths of people just kind of disappear into the system. and it's always people who basically have no resources and no help and that it's more rare for somebody to end up in a situation where they are subjected to that fate.
00:12:58
Speaker
And there are even people in this book who are subjected to that fate for committing crimes. But... I think only the well-off people need to commit a crime for that to happen to them.
00:13:10
Speaker
Or like a severe enough crime, I guess I would say. And I think too, not just the carceral system, but what fascism has looked like historically, which is truly the rounding up of the marginalized and the persecution.
00:13:26
Speaker
And then this government shift where they try to make what seems like the craziest thing that could happen in the world, not crazy. You're crazy if you think it's crazy, or you're crazy if you talk about it being crazy, which is you're not supposed to talk about it in this in this dystopia. You're not allowed to say certain words.
00:13:45
Speaker
It's frowned upon, and it could end up in what they call, at least Marco's calls, like assassination. He could essentially be killed if he says the wrong word as somebody who's high up in one of these plants.
00:13:57
Speaker
And this This also, like the agricultural industry, is also always related to the carceral system because so much is criminalized when it comes to revealing truth or trying to bring transparency to the industry in real life.
00:14:17
Speaker
And that happens with whistleblowers, that happens with people who try to film, it happens with people who don't know they're not allowed to film near a farm and do and end up being arrested. It's just... again, not not too much distance with our reality, which just couple repetitive, but...
00:14:33
Speaker
ah to I think the words are going to come up a lot. I think that's a big part of even what our main character, Marcos, is thinking about. And we have kind of his internal dialogue, and we even learn how he thinks about some of this stuff. And there is the part where he's thinking the government, his government, decided to rebrand the product.
00:14:56
Speaker
They gave human meat the name special meat. Instead of just meat, now there's special tenderloin, special cutlets, special kidneys. He doesn't call it special meat. He uses technical words to refer to what is a human but will never be a person to what is always a product.
00:15:12
Speaker
biggest quotes of the book. Totally. It is so much about how we use language to create distance, right? And that is something we do in real life too, right? Like we don't call...
00:15:27
Speaker
like food
Language and Cognitive Dissonance in Food Consumption
00:15:28
Speaker
dishes, I guess chicken, but most food dishes, we have, you like you I guess I would say euphemisms that we use for names, right? Even you think about steak. We don't say I'm eating cow for dinner. Typically we say I'm eating steak for dinner.
00:15:43
Speaker
That's not universally true, right? But I think also it kind of becomes more true the more intelligent we perceive the animal to be, I think. Because I think if you go to a restaurant, you order shrimp,
00:15:55
Speaker
And I think that's kind of like, I think people think of shellfish as like bugs. And as you get to something like pigs and cows, which are much more complex animals, which doesn't say whether like they're less deserving of being eaten, but they're just, they have more complex brains. And I think we see them as having more feelings, which I think is a big part of it for humans too, where we need to create that distance and language is the only real way to do it if you're going to keep eating it.
00:16:23
Speaker
Yeah, thank you. I actually appreciate that as a, yeah, I appreciate you saying mom, when she was very, very young, like probably five or six years old, was offered by ah family member tuna fish. And that was the first time that she had heard it not just phrased as tuna.
00:16:41
Speaker
And she, to this day, like has this memory of being like, tuna is a fish and never eat has never eaten fish since in her life. she She eats certain animals, but not not all of them. And i thought that has really stuck with me as somebody who also went and vegetarian at a fairly young age because of things that I saw that were like connected to me um in ways that hadn't been connected before. And I think the language does have a lot to do with that. You're talking about the restaurants and the words that we use. And it's not, you're not eating a baby cow, you're eating veal. And there is a status with veal.
00:17:13
Speaker
But if you were going to say that you were going to eat a baby animal, I think that the connotation in that would be really different thing with lamb you know and and what this book tries to do is make the alternative special right it's not it's not bad it's it's special there's a ah huge connotation with how with that skewing positively but people i think do something very similar where you know if you're ordering milk in a coffee shop you'll hear somebody be like i just want normal milk
00:17:45
Speaker
You're like, cool. What's normal milk? Like, okay, you probably mean cow's milk, like cow dairy milk. But is that 2%, 1% whole, like you saying, just want the normal thing, which is typically the tone of the people who say that.
00:18:00
Speaker
And it's like, okay, but what's normal to you is not normal factually. It's just it's whatever you make it. And these qualifiers exist in food so much. and it's it's It's especially regulated. And it's either industry terminology, which also creates distance. Right. We don't say like congealed tissue. we say gelatin.
00:18:21
Speaker
Right. we We call it collagen, which is a technical and a biological term, but it also doesn't really imply body parts. right We have all of these different words that aren't incorrect, but they do. They all create that distance, even if they help to specify things. like We call things confectioner's shellac, which can typically be made by like a crushed up exoskeletons of bugs. and it's There's a lot in there that unless you know...
00:18:47
Speaker
what it sounds like or what to look for that you wouldn't otherwise, because we don't educate around these words. We just use them enough that either you don't ask questions or you don't want ask questions. Yeah.
00:18:58
Speaker
And some people don't mind it. Some people, when you confront it with that is they're okay with it. And as somebody you're saying, people don't typically say, know, the animals that they're eating. And that's something over the past few years I have tried to do is because I have to qualify everything that I eat.
00:19:13
Speaker
is a vegan this, or a plant-based this, or a soy this. Like, if it's soy milk, then you're drinking cow's milk. If it's not a bad thing, then I can say And that maybe isn't normal to lot of people, but I'm trying to make it normal for myself because words do have these the ability to just like shape and shift what we perceive and also what we do.
00:19:38
Speaker
And I think if that can make the connection for somebody, I'm not trying to get somebody to not drink cow's milk, I just want to make that connection so that maybe somebody can have that reaction like my mom did and make the connection. And if they want to change their actions, their choices, they can.
00:19:52
Speaker
We can't do that unless we start with that kind of education and connection, my opinion. Yeah. And I think that it does take those moments. And I think it takes, this sounds weird, but I think that it sort of takes doing it mindfully to really decide if you want to do it.
00:20:08
Speaker
or at least approaching it mindfully to decide if you want to and if you really want to do it. And you're someone who I've talked to about like my own kind of journey around animal products.
00:20:19
Speaker
And i think that i of I've always really appreciated the way that you approach it, because i do think that you do a really good job of being really clear about what your stance is and what your I guess, like perspective, or i don't want to say argument, because that sounds argumentative, but like what your point is, right, but in a way that it feels like an open door instead of a closed door, which I don't think everybody is always successful at, not just with veganism, but just kind of in the world.
00:20:51
Speaker
And I think that there are going be moments that are I think going to hit that way for people, I do think it's worth doing that, even though I'm sure it's uncomfortable for other people and probably uncomfortable for you on some level, knowing that, you know, people may have weird reactions to that. But I also think that language is powerful. That's why it's such a big part of the book. And that's why even the main character is so hyper aware of it all the time.
00:21:17
Speaker
i think it's not just because of the punishments he would face, but because he's really is aware of like the mechanism of action of these words. Yeah, absolutely.
00:21:30
Speaker
And I do appreciate that. I think studying nutrition communications is helpful. You learn, you know, what things people react to and don't react to it's, it's a lot, but I think it's also a,
00:21:42
Speaker
you know, being Jewish, I don't believe in proselytizing. And I think once I made that connection fairly early on in my veganism, was like, oh, I don't have to be the pushier vegan of like, I'm trying to get you to do this.
00:21:54
Speaker
But I am like, you're right, I am somebody who's proud of the stance that I have and confident enough in my choices, not in a way that I don't want to learn more. But I think about this a lot. And It's easier to have that conversation.
00:22:07
Speaker
I think it's easier to engage with this kind of material too when you don't have like an end goal beyond having a conversation or making the connection. And my biggest goal with, you know, what I do professionally is I want people to make informed choices.
00:22:21
Speaker
If you have the information, right? If we had more transparent industries and you were okay with how everything was going, you know, then you get to make the choices that you make. And that's not something that I'm interested in changing, but I am interested in hearing why, like very genuinely without being like, I want to hear why so I can make you do something different. It's just, I'm so curious how people think and talk and engage around this. And so I think that this book is a great opportunity for that, even from the main character and how he changes over time, even in his very cyclical journey. I mean, we're doing some spoilers
00:22:59
Speaker
buters are okay. Yeah, we're going to cover that. We're going to talk about the ending. So we're we're good. but like you know he comes full circle and and he doesn't eat meat after the loss of his child. Eventually at the end of the book, it's insinuated that he's probably going to be eating meat again.
00:23:13
Speaker
Human meat or not non-human meat. That's interesting. I don't know if I read it that way. and i read it more as a self-preservation thing, but I think that's valid. i think that that I do think that that's totally possible that he could kind of fall back into complacency after what happened. So i I'm going to turn that over in my head, I guess, until we get to the end. curious let's Yeah,
00:23:36
Speaker
I think one of the things I appreciate about the narration of this book so much is that even though we see him participating in this system, we see the distress that it causes him and we see his judgment of the system alongside his perceived inability to step out of it or do anything about it.
00:23:55
Speaker
And this is where we get a lot of his thoughts about the words. And the first time that we really see him in the processing plant that he works at, there's this passage that says, another day of slaughtering humans.
00:24:08
Speaker
No one calls them that, he thinks, as he lights a cigarette. He doesn't call them that when he has to explain the meat cycle to a new employee. They could arrest him for it or even send him to the municipal slaughterhouse and process him.
Protagonist's Internal Conflict and Complicity
00:24:21
Speaker
Assassinate him would be the correct term, but it can't be used. While he removes his soaked shirt, he tries to clear the persistent idea that this is what they are, humans bred as animals for consumption.
00:24:32
Speaker
His brain warns him that there are words that cover up the world. There are words that are convenient, hygienic, legal. And I think that last bit, especially, that there are words that cover up the world is...
00:24:46
Speaker
so much of the book's thesis. I don't think it's the only one, but I do think it's a big part of it. And so, yeah, where if you don't want to hear us talking about words, you're probably listening to the wrong episode.
00:24:57
Speaker
But it's such a big piece of how do we live like this? And I think that's kind of the question that our main character is examining the whole time is like, how do I live like this?
00:25:09
Speaker
And we don't really see him resolve that question, particularly in a satisfying way. But I think his inability to resolve it, I think also does highlight how difficult to resolve it could be under those types of circumstances.
00:25:25
Speaker
Yeah, I think it also changes. I don't know if he, I agree that we don't get a satisfying resolution in almost any sense this of this book. I don't, definitely not something where the plot, like you can follow it and be like, yeah, this is, yeah, I guess satisfying.
00:25:40
Speaker
But I think what you mentioned too about his role in it He even at one point says, i know I don't have the exact quote in front of me, how he he would never kill, but he instructs other people.
00:25:54
Speaker
He trains other people. He recruits them to do to do the killing, to do the slaughtering. And he doesn't shy away from his role in that, but it still seems like it's, I gotta do what I gotta do.
00:26:06
Speaker
And some parts of me sees him as the character, as a like, oh, I'm a good boy. right I'm one of the good ones because I know that the system is bad. i'm not just one of the other people on the line who like clearly doesn't mind, wants to stay in the job of stunning and killing, does not want to move up the ladder, does not want to be taken out of the slaughter line. you know And he sees himself as, to me, kind of above that.
00:26:34
Speaker
But he's also aware that he's instructing them and he's part of it. He's integral to the killing. He's so close. to that self-actualization. But to me, he he he stays in the not-all-men type of vibe where it's like, but not me.
00:26:49
Speaker
Even if it's not explicitly, he thinks he is better, but he's not innocent. It's kind of the same intellectualization that I think a lot of people go to therapy with, being like, well, I know that I do this, but knowing that and doing the work to change that aren't the same thing.
00:27:03
Speaker
It's like, great, you know it. What are you doing about And I think especially when we're people who are higher up in systems, okay, you know it's bad, if you don't do anything about it, right, are you more innocent?
00:27:15
Speaker
is it Is it better or worse? Who is more responsible? I think those are like also questions and, you know, moral qualms that this book does a great job of bringing up and making you confront through his eyes.
00:27:28
Speaker
Yeah. I definitely see the I'm one of the good ones angle on him for sure. And I do agree. and I think that one of the things about books and movies that I like so much is that it will take a character like this that would be really hard for me to empathize with if I met them in real life and put me in their head and make and like really push me to empathize with them despite the choices that I see them making.
00:27:55
Speaker
Ultimately, up until the last page of the book, I feel more sorry for him than angry at him. And I think that when I push myself in real life to think about people who are complacent and therefore complicit,
00:28:09
Speaker
I also feel mostly sorry for them when I allow myself, not allow myself even, when I have the strength and emotional range to do that, which isn't all the time, especially if it's something that I feel more affected by.
00:28:22
Speaker
the author does such a good job of alternating between what Marcos is going through and what Marcos is complicit in and contributing to. By the time, so I'm just going to spoil the ending because I don't really know how to say this without.
00:28:36
Speaker
So he is eventually gifted a female head. So a a woman who is not, not allowed to be a woman, a person. And at the very end, he does kill her. And by the time he kills her, I'm actually genuinely surprised, even though I sort of think there's no other way that things could have ended.
00:28:55
Speaker
One of them was going to die. Ultimately, that doesn't make it okay. I kind of think it should have been him. But those were the only two endings that there could have been. And so it was interesting because i did feel so empathetic towards him and so bad for him because the hatred and judgment that he throws at other people, i feel like you see it creeping around at himself too. And you see it in like the bitterness and the dissociation and his kind of selfishness,
00:29:20
Speaker
selfishness I think selfishness for sure. But I think it's a weird kind of selfishness that he... doesn't even really get to feel like it benefits him. Yeah. I mean, I think that that is a super fair assessment.
00:29:33
Speaker
And I wonder too, the cycle in the book, right? He and his wife lose a child who had been born and the wife goes away, right? And the only time, it seems like his distress is,
00:29:50
Speaker
gets more distressing, you know, he loses his father. The father in the facility eventually passes away, and has to deal with that. So now his wife is gone, his father is gone, he's creating more distance with his sister.
00:30:05
Speaker
He gets more erratic and chaotic through the book, but I also think that the ending, when I say comes full circle, is, you know, he stops eating meat when his son dies, and look his wife leaves.
00:30:19
Speaker
But by the end, it comes back and his, I don't kill. I don't want to be part of this. I don't want the FGP. I don't want to, you know, he he slammed his sister for for keeping someone in their house to eat.
00:30:36
Speaker
Then he kind of loses his convictions once he starts getting the stuff back in his life. When he starts getting his, when his wife eventually comes back, when he gets another baby.
00:30:47
Speaker
like that's when he loses his commitment to no meat, no killing very quickly, like instantaneously. And I think that that part to me... it was surprising at first, but in hindsight, I'm like, oh yeah, that seems like it was self-serving.
00:31:03
Speaker
It was depression and things changed. And he acted like a depressed person does when they get confronted with something else and might be become violent or might just change their their values or whatever to to be like, I can fix this now. There's an out in his life. And that brings like once he gets better-ish or his wife gets better,
00:31:25
Speaker
his actions kind of get worse. Yeah. And in killing her, he almost gets this chance to hit the reset button on everything.
00:31:36
Speaker
Yeah. I think that's a great way to put it, but he doesn't just kill her, right? He, he takes her to slaughter himself. That's the part to me where I'm i'm curious and I know getting way off track ahead of it, but I am curious when get there, how you see it as like, not maybe not him eating me meat think it a question mark but I consuming meat is his is his arc but he's very clear that he's not a vegan veganoid they it which like honestly might put in my bio yeah I kind of do love it I I think I mean I can even just answer it now but I think I don't necessarily think he is like explicitly still not eating meat I guess I was thinking about it from more of a self-preservation lens and
00:32:22
Speaker
which is still selfish, but just like a different angle on selfish, essentially, of I need to kill her and I need to provide evidence that I have like processed her properly so that I can move on with my life.
00:32:34
Speaker
I still think it's totally possible that he does end up eating her and going back to eating me. I mean, I think it really could go either way. But i yeah, I think I was reading it more as like part of the reset button. And like if she is not properly taken care of in a way that will be satisfactory to the people who are going to come check this out,
00:32:52
Speaker
then I won't be able to hit the reset button and I won't be able to just kind of move on with my wife and my baby. it's such a different, yeah, love it. mean, it's not a subtle book in a lot of ways, but I think there are a lot of points that are super open into to interpretation.
00:33:06
Speaker
Regardless of if it is to eat or not, he is once again more willing to sacrifice someone else in the most literal sense.
00:33:16
Speaker
Very violently. Yeah.
Desperation and Harsh Realities in Dystopia
00:33:19
Speaker
He does, like you said, I mean, he he isn't the one killing, but he is kind of running the place and he's taking in new people. And we even have the scene where there's the job interview with these two men who come to apply for a job. I don't remember the specific position, but when they're there, essentially Marcos is tasked with walking them through the entire process and they have to see every single step that happens and It's described pretty gruesomely. I don't, this is one of the parts I didn't feel like I needed to particularly have quotes from.
00:33:52
Speaker
But one of them is basically poor, his girlfriend is pregnant, they're desperate to have some money and he knows he can get some money if he can get hired here.
00:34:03
Speaker
And the other one turns out to basically be like a looky-loo who is there to watch the carnage and like take it in.
00:34:13
Speaker
his recording on his phone, like, like really into it. Yeah, way too into it. And so you're thinking about the people that come through there. And it's this combination of probably like desperate and depraved.
00:34:25
Speaker
And some people are more depraved, and some people are more desperate, but it's all people who are not in a good place, ultimately. he said, if you didn't react poorly to this, like something is wrong with you.
00:34:36
Speaker
He's saying that if you are the depraved one, you don't belong in this system, which is like very interesting that even in that point, you could make the distinction to say, no, there's absolutely no way um I this guy. want the one who's like literally almost sick in the corner over it to be here.
00:34:53
Speaker
yeah Yeah. It is interesting. And if you can cherry pick who's in your system, that you would go with the person who doesn't want to be violent to do one of the most violent jobs. And i wonder, I don't know enough about slaughterhouse workers or meatpacking.
00:35:06
Speaker
I know, you know, I know the statistics and things like that. I know generally, but like, I wonder too, how that goes in, you know or in our world too, that, that like hiring process and who, who is involved. And I'm sure that there are a lot of people who fall into desperate and a lot of people who fall into depraved or maybe indifferent.
00:35:27
Speaker
Yeah. I don't know if that's a possible third one or just a subset of the depraved. Yeah. I think it's probably both. right? Like there's the kind of natural indifference of the depraved and there's the forced indifference of the desperate.
00:35:40
Speaker
And if you can't make yourself indifferent, you probably won't last. And if you're desperate, you have to last. And it was a really, I mean, it was like, I thought that was like a really interesting sequence to show. i also was thinking as I was watching it, I don't know so so much about slaughterhouses, meatpacking. Like, I don't know this process that well, but A lot of what was in the book does mirror what I do know about the actual meat industry and like what is done to the animals that are there.
00:36:11
Speaker
it was pretty intense. Like the the process that it walks through it is pretty intense. I think one of the harder like sequences to read in the book. I think that that is one of the most effective things that it does.
00:36:23
Speaker
In the very early on, of the first scenes that you're walked through is Marcos on his like what meat sure I guess, but he doesn't just go to breeding facilities and slaughterhouses. He also goes to a skin factory and like, yes, it seems crazy in this world to be like a skin factory and a person who is, it seems like a psychopath kind of just focused on, on skin and that's his business and everything, but that's just leather.
00:36:51
Speaker
It's just truly, it's the same industry. with a different name. And then it's very similar where they're walking through, um, with the ah the German who is here to potentially become a client of El Gringo, right. Who owns the breeding facility.
00:37:07
Speaker
And there's another kind of, comparison to of okay he marcos and this german are being and i'm not trying to be crass that's just literally kind of what they call yeah being walked through another facility and seeing it from that that direction you know from a client perspective rather than like a potential employee and marcos as a participant versus the one leading the tour and even in that first scene it takes you through right we go to the skin and go to this breeder facility that has the dairy section of this and not just that but like
00:37:41
Speaker
people that they can taste, right? And and the descriptions of the dairy part, right? It's females hooked up to milking equipment, kept in cages, separated from their children.
00:37:53
Speaker
They have to keep them separated from their children so that they are more docile, less willing to fight. They want their child. I think those are very much same concept with slight changes in language because that's exactly what the factory farmed dairy industry does and i thought that that was like it's incredible to have to be walked through the system in this way with the commentary that's there i read an online review already told you this off offline but i read an online review where somebody just kind of said that this book was like those sections and having the cognitive dissonance to just be like well this is just a dystopian world that has
00:38:42
Speaker
right but it's like that is exactly what happens i don't know about the eating parts of people while they're alive have a separate conversation about that later but like how can you read that and not even try like how much are you entrenched in that industry in that propaganda in that mindset if you can't even try to contemplate how this is a mirror to our industry Yeah, I think that that would take so much closed offness to not see it. I mean, and and I think it's kind of funny because to say anything is just a dystopian story that has nothing to do with us is kind of hilarious because what dystopian story isn't an exploration of an extreme version of something that's already happening. That's kind of why that sub genre of things exists.
00:39:34
Speaker
yeah um So I'm like, what are what else are you reading, dude, to that to the person who wrote that? yeah it wasn't like a reddit post this is somebody who reviews horror literature or horror media and i was like really not even what are you doing I didn't read any of the other ones and again it's not my my genre but yeah somebody who is essentially making themselves out to be somebody who reviews this kind of stuff and to not even be able to do that is I think interesting in itself it's not necessarily wrong but it's it is wild to meet the different ways that you can come at this book just based on your own
00:40:09
Speaker
perspectives, life experience, and an ability to engage with intellectual honesty about things that make you uncomfortable.
Animal Harm in Fiction vs. Reality
00:40:16
Speaker
I think that this book really is so demanding that you take it seriously in that way too, that it's really hard to imagine because i do think sometimes when I read or watch things that are this unsettling and let's say surface level unsettling, like even before you start thinking that hard about it, it's like pretty disturbing I think sometimes when you take something like that in, it is harder to see past just the part of you that feels really disturbed into like the nuance of that disturbance. And like if there's more going on than just like, oh, gross, like people, right? People dying.
00:40:52
Speaker
ah Oh, the puppies. Well, and so something, something that I do think is really interesting is that even in the horror genre, and I think this is, this is something that I know to be true for myself. The puppy scenes where the the puppy scene is the hardest scene for me in the entire book somehow.
00:41:08
Speaker
i did not reallyread i could not did reread it. could reread marcos basically goes to this abandoned zoo to unwind. He has memories of his father there from when he was young and his father was still how not just healthy, but with it mentally. Although not happy. words where a they We're empty there.
00:41:26
Speaker
Yeah. He goes there and he sees a group of puppies and he is so excited that he basically says he would like to die for the puppies to have food because he's so happy to see them.
00:41:38
Speaker
And then he returns later on and I'm not, this is another one I did not pull any, any um excerpts for, but he sees like a group of young teenagers or of tweens, like, like young, young boys killing the puppies. And Something that is really interesting to me is that even in the horror genre, animals are often seen as off limits or a step too far. Like if you watch a slasher movie and like a dog dies, you're like, oh my God, that's kind of a lot. Right. But you've just watched like seven people get murdered in like creative and weird ways. literally use that. Does the die before i watch anything? Yeah. Which is
00:42:19
Speaker
but the name is Yes. Yeah, totally. it is interesting. And I guess it's it's so this isn't something I had thought about outside of context here, but in thinking about it in the context of this book.
00:42:32
Speaker
It's interesting how in fiction we are so distraught over the harming of animals. And then like in real life, we become so detached from it. i think ah I think a lot of people are also detached from human suffering, but I think fewer people are detached from human suffering.
00:42:49
Speaker
And it's so interesting how that is like flipped in that way. think it also in real life depends on the animal and that's where this kind of comes back to it i have no i mean if i stopped watching game of thrones because in like the first episode these made up fake wolves were killed and i was like i'm done i can't and then feel bad about myself that i can't engage i'm like i'm not even experiencing it i know this is fictional and i like can't even engage with it because it just it nods at me and it's like physiologically uncomfortable
00:43:23
Speaker
And i try to say that sometimes it's like, I should bear witness to it, but it animal suffering is incredibly difficult.
00:43:42
Speaker
cow. Although, you know, I don't think somebody would enjoy watching a somebody wouldn't enjoy that as entertainment, but we do rodeos and we do you know, we, we might not think of it as a bad thing, but to me watching a cooking show like Chopped, there are animals used as meat and like being broken down, which is a normal part of life. Even that to me is almost as like grotesque as the maiming of dog.
00:44:10
Speaker
And I think that there's another quote in here that encapsulates my own perspective and how I live, which is meat is meat to I understand the societal differences between eating certain species, but if we also have that reaction in certain places. You don't eat certain animals.
00:44:30
Speaker
Those are not animals for food, right? And it's not that they have first and last name. It's just that's, it's just a no-no, right? Yeah. I mean, I have guinea pigs and that's, you know, that those started, those are domesticated because they were food first.
00:44:44
Speaker
Right. I don't want, I'm not trying to sound again, crass, but like, eating a dog, eating a horse, eating a cow, eating a pig to me at this point in my life are equitable.
Resistance to Plant-Based Diets
00:44:55
Speaker
The ways that you do it, I understand, right? And people, it's not necessarily a choice. It's what's ingrained in society. It's what you have access to. It's not judge on a person in particular, but this quote, meat is meat to me.
00:45:09
Speaker
I think that that is like, like I said, the cornerstone of this world. Yeah. And I think, oh I mean, one of the things that I remember thinking the first time that I read it and have been thinking this whole time is that I actually think a lot of the world would be more set up to make this transition than to make a transition away from animal products.
00:45:30
Speaker
people People will do literally anything to avoid sustaining themselves on plants like figuring out different way. And think it's really interesting because this book was fairly recent. It released published in 2020, right? Yeah.
00:45:44
Speaker
there's like a ah brief mention of we tried crops, but we couldn't feed people. Right. don't know hard, how hard you tried or what's going on in this dystopian universe, but there is besides ah with the brief mention of like vegan, vegans, vegan, living beings, whether or not they have all their limbs or whatever, but you're growing a living being.
00:46:14
Speaker
Like we're in a ah point in society where we can literally grow meat in Petri dishes, not at scale, not great yet. But like, I wonder why the author didn't go that direction of like, oh, we tried this or whatever.
00:46:26
Speaker
it was just, this is the way we're going to go into fully raising, breeding. Yeah. I do think that's really an interesting thing to think about. And I think as someone who has so many struggles with food,
00:46:42
Speaker
I have such a desire for like lab grown meat that is never alive like that to be available. And as a person who does try to think about the state of the world and like the things that are going on, I am also constantly wondering if that funding and time and energy and resources was put into real alternatives. you mean Non-meat, plant-based or other sorts of things. um Yeah, like like real alternatives to meat because lab-grown meat ultimately is meat.
00:47:22
Speaker
And so, yeah, it is it is something that's really interesting.
00:47:27
Speaker
Right. the government. And I'm also the first to say that I would feel differently about eating it, but it's just interesting. i think it speaks to the desperation to hold on to those products and like hold on to normal like what we see as normal in the face of all these problems. Because if we were more willing to loosen our grip, maybe not even let go all the way, but just loosen our grip on it.
00:47:51
Speaker
those resources might be put into other things that could make more of a difference. And that's already very telling. Yeah. And I think the industry, the alternative protein industry does engage with that lot.
00:48:03
Speaker
And think that there is room in that world, separate conversation for another time, but like, is it both and, right? Can we do both? But there is a lot that is going getting the industry started and it could either very much go into the the same unethical system that we have now, or we have an opportunity to change it and be better.
00:48:24
Speaker
And I have zero naivete in which direction going to go, but I'm still heartened by it in that maybe we could reduce, like if we're going to be spending the resources one way or another, maybe we could reduce at least the suffering of the people who work in these slaughterhouses in the industry, we could reduce the zoonotic diseases and the antibiotic resistance that come from raising live animals, and we could then have all of the crops that go to feed the live animals to people.
00:48:53
Speaker
But I also think what you said is really interesting too, because We are also at a point where people not people, governments are criminalizing the alternative protein industry.
00:49:04
Speaker
Like Florida is one of those where you're like not allowed to sell black grown meat. Italy has really strict rules. I think it's been changing recently, but they had at one point a law that was saying like, you will not sell this in this country for this commitment to industry And that's it, right? Commitment to industry. It's very much like in Italy, this is an Italian thing, that this is for our country. it becomes patriotic.
00:49:29
Speaker
It becomes a symbol. And you are trying to undermine everything that we stand for as a country, really, just to preserve this industry, right? They are so committed to not exploring those kinds of alternatives.
00:49:42
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Totally. And I think about even, I mean, I think that's true kind of in America too, broadly, because I think about like, I think I usually see this, like usually, it's usually men saying this, but you see people who are like, I'm going to eat two steaks today so that like a vegan's work means nothing. Yeah.
00:50:04
Speaker
Yeah. Oh, and the carnivore diet right now. Oh my God. There's like so many, there are so many tangents, but I think, ah yeah, I mean, i I do think it's just, it's so interesting That like people are so uncomfortable about it that they can't even just leave it alone. and no Truly what difference does it make for you as like a person who eats meat if someone else is choosing not to do that?
00:50:26
Speaker
There's lot anger. been the, I vegan on the internet for a while. feel like heard it all. like i've heard it all And very thing is because I feel like gotten the point where those things don't bother me.
00:50:41
Speaker
right? It's annoying as shit to sift through those comments or to have people say it out loud and you're like, are you really? That's what you're saying? But I think what's the most interesting to me and looking at this as societal commentary, bringing it back to like the normative stuff of the world is so many different kinds of people have those thoughts.
00:50:59
Speaker
And I think that maybe the internet is responsible for it, but there have been the same reactions to vegans for a very long time or anybody who right is the alternative in the group.
00:51:10
Speaker
And There's enough of a pattern people's reactions to you being the person who says no thank you, even if all you say is no thank you. And how deeply it is woven into the fabric of our society that tends to skew towards anger and violence and vitriol to somebody else who just simply says not for me. Yeah, yeah.
00:51:33
Speaker
And then, I mean, i think this makes me think too about kind of bringing it back to the book of If this is how it is now, with it as complicated as it already is, what do we think the vegans are treated like in this world where it is even more complicated, even more atrocious, like even more fraught with ethical dilemma? Not even, i mean, to call it an ethical dilemma is kind of even generous, but more personal, let's say.
00:52:02
Speaker
Maybe that's the second book in the series, not the sequel you mentioned, but the other person somewhere out there. Maybe the second book is the perspective of somebody who already was a protester just in in how they acted and how they were.
00:52:16
Speaker
you know I'm available if Augustina wants to...
Protests and Dystopian Survival Strategies
00:52:20
Speaker
profile somebody else. Somebody who already stands against it I think it would be very interesting to then see what is available, how it changes.
00:52:29
Speaker
I am so curious, even though I don't necessarily want revisit all parts of these books, it does bring up so many other questions. I want to know what their food system is like this humans raised for meat system. I am so curious how it changed everything else, right? Because everything goes around this industry and I'm wondering what the world, mean, it seems like terrible. People are afraid and to go out without umbrellas in case a bird poops on them, which they could potentially die from. Like it is dystopian, but they still have to to work.
00:53:03
Speaker
still have to take care their kids. They still have to take care of their aging parents. Like there is a lot of reality in there. And I, and I am just so curious to be like, I wonder if there was any other world building that happened when this book was being written that considered,
00:53:18
Speaker
What stores look hear about butchers. and Butcher shops, right? Like what else is there? Yeah.
00:53:29
Speaker
So many, so many questions about the world. And I agree, like it would be really fascinating to get something about someone who is a protester. And it's interesting because they mention, like you said, a veganoids in the book, which I do think is just really kind of funny and kind of weirdly cute.
00:53:46
Speaker
But yeah. They also have the protesters from that church. They have what's called the Church of the Immolation, which is a church that essentially has a volunteer periodically. I don't really remember what the time frame for this is, but periodically they randomly select a member of the church to die at the processing plant.
00:54:06
Speaker
There's a scene where we see this happen and it talks about, you know, the process and it says, he smiles and recites the Church of the Immolation's Creed passionately and with conviction.
00:54:17
Speaker
The human being is the cause of all evil in this world. We are our own virus. For me, part of that rings so true because humans do cause all of this pain and all of this suffering on ourselves, the planet, the animals, everything around us.
00:54:33
Speaker
But the vegans that I would listen to, and I would count you in this group, the vegans that I would listen to, hear from, and like look up to and admire are the ones who see like the human issues. like you You keep referencing the the workers right in real life whose compassion for animals is rooted also in their compassion for people.
00:54:55
Speaker
and just compassion for alive things and like living creatures. And so it's interesting that we get this kind of other side of protest of get like people are awful.
00:55:08
Speaker
And then there's this side that was kind of unexplored of like people are hurting and suffering and we need to figure out a better way. Yeah, i absolutely. It felt a little disjointed to me.
00:55:20
Speaker
Like, there wasn't as much depth there as I would have hoped, but it is so interesting to know that it exists. And I kind of wonder, too, we would put the scavengers... Maybe that would be the perspective to really... If you wanted to really get into the dystopia of the world, to have somebody who's no longer Marco's second-in-command of this place, who has all these privileges, even in this fucked-up world.
00:55:41
Speaker
like What are the grocery stores like? What is it like for the people who... don't have the power who aren't even having the opportunity to sacrifice themselves for money so that their family can live. Like there's not even that level of opportunity. The only opportunity to live clearly, they're not getting enough food somewhere else. There's not people who are able to start gardens or to forage or to find anything else. I don't really also know how agriculture works. If you have no animals, that might be a question of like, why are there no grocery stores or plants around?
00:56:10
Speaker
But if you have no other access and that is your only opportunity. What is the world like through that bles the the what i'm guessing is closer to the ninety nine lens?
00:56:23
Speaker
What I'm guessing is closer to the 99%. Yeah. I feel like I should have a sound effect for when I managed to bring up Stephen King in unrelated episodes because it's probably just all of them. But there's a Stephen King book called The Stand. It's like a thousand something pages long. It's crazy.
00:56:36
Speaker
It's very good. It's an end of the world situation. And there's a short story collection coming out written by different authors Writing about the world, basically. Taking a period of time during what's happening in the sand and exploring other areas of the country or world.
00:56:55
Speaker
and like other characters and just like, what are they doing? What are things like for them? And I feel like that would be something that would be really cool to see for this world where we get a short story about a vegan protest, a veganoid protestor, sorry, a short story about a scavenger, maybe a short story about the partner of someone like Marcos, like who maybe is feeling more conflicted than the person who's actually working there.
00:57:17
Speaker
fgp I don't know. I guess. so yeah I know. Yeah. I would like that, but I don't even know how you would do it. don't either. Because they don't have language. Like, it's like but one of the things. that So the FGPs in this world are their first generation pure and they are the first generation that have been born in the processing plant. So they're not taken from anywhere.
00:57:40
Speaker
They have their vocal cords removed at birth, essentially, so that they never learn language. They are not taught language, obviously, as well. That is, I mean, right, just another way to kind of rob them of their humanity is that they can't they can't communicate.
00:57:54
Speaker
i think they do communicate. communicate They do, yes but but not in the way that people are looking for.
00:58:01
Speaker
And you're mine would not work in your series of short stories. I think that it's really cool to be able to do that. also think in the recent, and maybe this is my own, um mean my own Stephen King is like in the recent Bob's Burgers series, there are episodes that are about like the kind of side characters that are close to the main cast. And love them because I want to know the world.
00:58:23
Speaker
like that kind of media, that kind of genre. Yeah. But I think, too, I'm going back to, like, my, you mentioned, like, my kind of veganism, the people who see it as, like, a people issue, and I would classify that there are vegans who see themselves as saviors, and I am not one of those.
00:58:40
Speaker
And I think a lot of the times, i mean, there's organizations called, like, Vegans for the Voiceless, and i think it's incredibly telling that you would say, not not you, but, like, that you, Ethereal, would say they're voiceless when...
00:58:55
Speaker
even in this, like they're shaking, they're trembling, crying, right. trying to cry out. Even Jasmine, the the person, the FGP who bears Marcos' as child, tries at her, after giving birth to get to her child, even if she doesn't have that language or the awareness of the world or that knowing maybe, like there's just a primal connection there between when it came from, from this birthing being.
00:59:21
Speaker
Yeah. And I think that that, There is so much communication in the description of the, the tours and the slaughterhouse, right? Like they try to get away. And we, we hear the same thing with, with cows. They're scared.
00:59:34
Speaker
yeah new it You can hear testimony from slaughterhouse workers saying they know what's happening and it creates fear and torture. And if you pay attention to them,
00:59:45
Speaker
And you don't think of them as, like people say, cows to slaughter. You think of them as beings who are forced into this with no choice, who know what's coming and have zero way to advocate for themselves or break free.
00:59:57
Speaker
There is so much communication in that. And like in the book, most of the times those animals that try to break free have a worse death. yeah Or they get out and they're a symbol for people.
01:00:09
Speaker
they escaped. Isn't that amazing? They're not living in a sanctuary, but it doesn't change anything. yeah Maybe their meat just tastes worse, like they say. you know just I think that that level of communication too, and the people who don't see it or won't recognize it, was a big part of this this book that loves words and loves loves language. I think that's a real problem with today too.
01:00:31
Speaker
I talk to my dog all the time. Where should
01:00:35
Speaker
pigs do too you learn them it's not verbal communication necessarily although I have a part of eagle and she is constantly whining yeah blank at me it's and I love it but like she talks and she is sassy my dog is very sassy she is such a little brat once you get to know them and once you that like everybody even a non-verbal human communicates in some ways yeah and I think that the the vocal cords being taken out i mean is Yeah, it's it constructs this idea that like they can't talk. And what it really is, like we've prevented them we prevented ourselves from having to listen to them.
01:01:15
Speaker
Right. That's a much better way of saying it, I think. It also speaks to right like the type of communication that we deem worthy. Valuable. Yeah.
01:01:26
Speaker
And even in all the anthropomorphizing that we do with animals, like people even the people who, quote, are vegan for the animals, some of them like won't engage in in
Ethical Implications in Scientific Research
01:01:36
Speaker
that. And maybe one more while I'm up on the soapbox a little bit, like one more thing it makes me think of too is the idea that if you don't eat the meat, lot of people say you're saving animals.
01:01:52
Speaker
If you go vegan, you save this many animals per day, per whatever. I understand how those statistics are crafted. understand how they can be helpful and powerful. But let's like let's look at Marcos, who doesn't eat meat through the whole book, how many animals did he save?
01:02:09
Speaker
Technically he was given one quote animal and then he killed them. Yeah. And, and I think that that too is this idea of innocence, right? People that only have dairy as we see, like there is no separation between the meat part of this industry and the dairy part of this industry and the skin.
01:02:27
Speaker
And it is not inherently better if all of the other actions that you're doing don't actually go towards actively saving, which he had the opportunity to do, and then really fucking didn't, you know?
01:02:44
Speaker
And that's why, too, like, I don't ever say that the only animal I've, quote, saved is my dog. I have no, don't know, I don't see a moral high ground in that because I can't change these systems, and I'm still somewhat of a participant in so many in so many ways. And I think Marcos is, like,
01:03:03
Speaker
just the perfect encapsulation of like just you're not eating it doesn't mean that you are like a savior yeah while we're talking about how all these are so interconnected i'm also thinking about when they go to the research center where there are experiments being done on these humans last time at his is at his limit it's his last time there our first time but his absolutely Yeah. And you can see how fed up he is, honestly, like through this scene that this is one of maybe, I think this maybe appalls him the most out of everything.
01:03:36
Speaker
And the woman who works there, he talks about how in the early days they called her Dr. Mengele. You know, she's doing experiments on humans, but then as the world shifted and it became more normal, she won prizes for her research, which I think is but she Yeah, I try again. This is another one. I i pulled a couple of quotes.
01:03:57
Speaker
I tried to be mindful of which ones because these are not these are not easy by any means to read or hear, but they are the easiest ones, I think.
01:04:08
Speaker
that i could that I could pull to kind of just demonstrate the type of thing that was going on there. And there's a scene where she shows him a cage and tells him that the specto specimen is a heroin addict.
01:04:20
Speaker
They've been supplying him with the drug for years to understand why addiction occurs. When we nullify him, we'll study his brain, she says. Nullify, he thinks. Another word that silences the horror.
01:04:32
Speaker
And then there's another one where it says they go up to a cage where a female appears to be dead and a baby that's two or three years old doesn't stop crying. She explains that they've sedated the mother to study the infant's reaction.
01:04:45
Speaker
What's the point? Isn't it obvious how the infant is going to react is Marcos's question. I think about some of the, you know, like I studied psychology, obviously, and I'm sure you've heard of, you know, some of the experiments that have been done.
01:05:01
Speaker
This one isn't even like as bad as some of them, but this was the one that came to mind is the monkeys with the cloth mother and the wire mother. And there's a study of baby monkeys who are taken away from their mothers.
01:05:13
Speaker
They are given a wire, um a monkey figure made out of wire that has milk and then a cloth monkey that is soft and cuddly that doesn't have milk to see it what they would prefer.
01:05:26
Speaker
And of course, they would still drink the milk, but they would spend basically the rest of their time with the cloth mother because the cloth mother could provide them comfort. What Marcos asks this woman is exactly how I feel about that experiment of like, what is the point?
01:05:39
Speaker
Like, isn't it obvious that this young creature would want comfort all the time as much as possible? It's a baby. And like I said, these are the easier to stomach examples of the experiments that were done. And i I would go so far as to say that the worst ones probably do resemble the worst things that are happening to animals in labs right now.
01:05:59
Speaker
I mean, i mean absolutely it's this need to prove Whether it's safety to prove something as fact, monkeys, when you know, people, whatever, will go towards the warmth.
01:06:13
Speaker
Whether there it's people who are like, wow, but cows get really upset you take away their baby. That's why we have to calm the mothers and do certain things, and there's terror there. when the cow, when the calf is removed from the mother so that the mother can be milked, right? Like it's, it's stuff that, yeah, we, we know it, but what does it help? And the same with like, okay, so we know that lab rats have pathways for addiction.
01:06:38
Speaker
Great. Don't know why we need, like, we could assume that if you give an addictive substance to somebody, to some being, guessing it would be addictive and yes, it's maybe there's some scientific benefit to it, but there's a lot of stuff that we study on animals first that are a requirement, even though it doesn't really help us super long-term.
01:06:57
Speaker
And one of the things that we just banned is a red dye that like is potentially carcinogenic because it can cause cancer in rats when they are exposed to a great amount to it. And here's the problem. It's like, we're not rats.
01:07:12
Speaker
Yeah. And we're not having it like injected into our bloodstreams at these insanely concentrated amounts. Like i think we're kind of in different regions of like the conversation around relationship to food, but like there's overlap.
01:07:26
Speaker
At what point can we use modeling and would that not be more helpful? Even nutrition research in humans, although it has its start and still is, can be really ethically dicey. I would say at least the foundation of it all is is extremely ethically dicey, but even in that, like Even in twin studies and experiments, like we cannot control all of the factors. And so you can prove it within the laboratory setting. You can prove it with modeling.
01:07:51
Speaker
You can prove it in longitudinal studies. That does not make it universally applicable. That's why like we we challenge that in so many ways. We challenge that with BMI, right? Where it's like, that's a static metric. We know it's a static metric. The issues of it have been proven since it was first used.
01:08:09
Speaker
And yet I learned it in grad school just a couple of years ago because it's what the best we've got so that we're not just using like anthropomorphic measurements and things that are like not ethical at all.
01:08:21
Speaker
I love science. I studied science. I went into debt over science and especially nutrition science. It's confusing how much value we put into this just to come up with statistics and things that get taken into headlines and don't necessarily help advance us in ways that are meaningful because we're not advancing some of it is incredible right some of it is life-saving I'm not discounting it completely but like at what point are we just doing it to be cruel or even just to be right right about it in such a specific only this particular context with these settings with this margin of error with this level of
01:09:02
Speaker
Yeah. Well, and i think I think the interesting thing, too, this actually even brings me to like another quote from the book. He asks this researcher, isn't it strange that no one's found a cure? What with laboratories that are so advanced that they're able to carry out cutting edge experiments?
01:09:16
Speaker
right And he's talking about this virus that supposedly exists and how, why aren't we working on that? like You have this fancy ass lab, you have all this money, you have all these resources. Where's the work on something that could really save a lot of people? And that's obviously questionable because that gets into like the ethics of meat eating again.
01:09:34
Speaker
And so maybe it doesn't save people as much as it would. But also, if this virus is real, why are we working on that? Why are we working on... seeing what a baby will do if it thinks its mother is dead. Like what, how, what value is there in that?
01:09:49
Speaker
And what value are we missing by focusing on that? Absolutely. I think the part before it that I just flipped you pointed out something super interesting is he suspects that the caged animals are a front.
01:10:02
Speaker
As long as someone is studying them and trying to find a cure, the virus is real. Yeah. I think that again, with a lot of things, we can go back to BMI. As long as somebody is studying it and making,
01:10:13
Speaker
Again, something I don't necessarily think of as very scientific and is problematic in lot of ways. long as somebody is studying obesity. Yeah. But it's only real. And so fact that we've manufactured and we keep it real, it's not real in that it tells us truths about the world. It tells us truths about all of the things that we've constructed to go into it. And then we can use it to do what?
01:10:33
Speaker
Not uplift people. not protect people, not make scientific advancements, right? We've created industries around this thing now. We've created, ah we've manufactured a lot around it.
01:10:46
Speaker
And like, isn't it crazy that no one's found a cure, quote unquote, to this thing that's not real and doesn't need to be cured, maybe? How long are we going to go down this pathway until we we can accept what people are telling us, which is,
01:10:59
Speaker
This isn't fucking real. And no matter how many times you study it, you know, how many, how much resources you put toward it, maybe, isn't it just maybe crazy? Yeah. That this is, we're doing exactly this, that this is a front.
01:11:12
Speaker
And as long as we're studying it, we're keeping it And I think there's a bit of probably less so with this crazy researcher lady who is pretty seems pretty horrid and like pretty violent. But I think more more broadly, there's also some sunk cost fallacy in there. Right. of I've already poured these resources and I've already put this time and energy in. And if I decide that this is no longer worth my time, I will have wasted my time. God forbid you should waste your time.
01:11:40
Speaker
Right. And like, that sucks. That certainly would suck to realize for sure. Not to not to say that wouldn't be distressing, but does that make it worth it? I would personally say no. i think probably some people wouldn't even be willing to ask that question though. Going back the animal industry, you going realize that you've done, what you've created, you know, this, this, this, gotten this point where we're so efficient, but now we're having to kill birds by the millions because of bird flu. we're having people people who how many more
01:12:12
Speaker
Yeah. As soon we start saying this is right? Because... now just how the world works
01:12:26
Speaker
seemingly yeah soon as we start saying this is how the world works we know we're in bad territory we know we're in dangerous territory right because over
01:12:39
Speaker
Yeah. And so we're like walking through all of these scenarios. And, you know, you also mentioned the hunting. i think the last thing that we can talk about world building wise, and then we can kind of get into the relationship with his FGP, Jasmine, is the only other location we get insight into, which is the game reserve, where people who owe money can essentially be assigned to but I think they volunteer, but we'll volunteer under duress, not literally volunteer, but they owe money and they're able to, instead of paying the money, be there for a certain number of days. And if they survive, they get to go home.
01:13:17
Speaker
Debt-free. Debt-free. And, you know, curious how many of them survive, but there's an interesting exchange here where Marcos asks one of the people working there, so they're willing to die because they owe money?
01:13:28
Speaker
and the guy says, there are people willing to do atrocious things for a lot less. like hunting someone who's famous and eating them. Right. And that there's the things people do out of desperation. And then there are the things people do out of, I guess, again, going back to the idea of like being like the depraved, right, the depravity. And how do we even get there? I think it's so hard to understand, like, what could make someone be interested in doing that.
01:13:54
Speaker
yeah And I feel that way about big game hunters in real life. Like I don't really understand. don't really understand that. I think there must be something about like dominance in there and power.
01:14:07
Speaker
i i don't, I don't know, but it's, it's a very hard thing for me to wrap my brain around. Hunting for sport and also hunting. Another word that gives you separation is what it really is, is for sport.
01:14:17
Speaker
Killing. Hunting, understand it's the act of doing it, but but you're, what a successful hunt is murder. Yeah. And I even think about like where where we kind of like use the term hunting from of like hunting and gathering and how like I would argue almost that hunting for sport doesn't exist.
01:14:36
Speaker
And that it is hunting if you are going to use the animal in whatever ways that makes sense. Again, a whole like loaded ethical question there. But I would say that maybe there is no hunting for sport because maybe that's not what hunting it actually is.
01:14:51
Speaker
And that we are kind of all kidding ourselves when we call it that in the same way you said, right? The real word is killing first sport absolutely. i i could see that. I agree with that Yeah.
01:15:04
Speaker
yeah it is really dark and I do, I appreciate you returning to such heavy material to talk about it with me because i like, I really wanted to talk about it and you were the first person I thought of like, and not just cause you had already read
Media Reflections on Cultural Values
01:15:18
Speaker
it. Cause I think I could probably twist some arms to get people to read it if I wanted to, but I just like really, we did talk about it a little, but I really was excited to like dive into the weeds of it with you. thank yeah, unaccustomed to darkness.
01:15:36
Speaker
Yeah, I think part of your like work that you do and just kind of the like the things I understand about you as a person are like a willingness to sit with the reality and the reality usually is kind of dark. We live in a pretty dark time.
01:16:00
Speaker
Yeah, like I like Bob's Burgers. I like these cartoons that are able to encapsulate these kinds of really heavy and fucked up and gross and sad things and, like, make you deal with it in a way that I think if you were looking at non-animated humans wouldn't Like, I don't think I could watch BoJack Horseman, like, a live version of it. It's, like, it's horrible, right?
01:16:22
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. But also in a lot of those media, like, sure, it seems like it's a cartoon, but it deals with a lot of these these issues, too. i mean, like, in the first season of Bob's Burgers, i mean, take a shot every time I say it, I don't care.
01:16:36
Speaker
There's an episode where they confront, ah a vegan activist confronts Bob with a cow. Yeah. They also have their their little cannibalism thing in the first episode. Yeah, eat your meat, right?
01:16:47
Speaker
And, you know, that's why I like it, too. And then I'm have to bring this up is the the chicken for a days episode of Bojack Horseman because it is truly like interconnected my mind of like Marcos if he was in an animated series and as a horse that was, has a lot problems.
01:17:08
Speaker
In it, there's a chicken company and that's like a recurring thing throughout the show, Chicken for Days. And it's, nobody knows chicken like chicken. So it's chicken farmers farming chickens.
01:17:19
Speaker
But obviously the chicken farmers are at a different level of chicken than the chickens being farmed. But their whole thing is the same kind of pastoral marketing that we see in Tender is the Flesh and and a lot of other stuff, which is like,
01:17:30
Speaker
you know, happy cows make the best milk or like chickens, no chickens. So like we should be the ones that farm it. Talk about being like the person at the top in the system responsible, like, you know, for, it for it all. And in it, right. One of the chickens breaks out of the truck and transport or whatever, and finds another one of the characters and the whole show is them trying to rescue the chicken and then being like, well, we're going to bring her to this chicken place because this chicken farm is better than the standard.
01:18:01
Speaker
And then they quickly realize, like, oh, it is not. That is just at face value. And then they try to break out the chicken. And it it is so interesting because they house it. They hide her from the authorities. They give her a name. They give her clothes.
01:18:15
Speaker
And it it is, like, the chicken for days of it all is, like, the media grappling with this idea of, like, the happy farming nonsense that is does pure greenwashing, pure humane washing.
01:18:29
Speaker
And I like that there's media that can that can make us do that and sit with it in ways that, again, I think if you were just watching it, and maybe like the person who reviewed this saying that this book wasn't substantive, right like you don't really pay attention to it. These are just funny episodes.
01:18:46
Speaker
But if you look at it, again, it could not be a bigger mirror. Totally. And I like that people are creative enough to like deal with that. They don't make you feel better about it.
01:19:00
Speaker
No. There's a silly ending or whatever because these are like shenanigans in TV shows but what they get you to think about if you choose to pay attention to it you know is not it's not easy.
01:19:13
Speaker
Yeah for sure and I think it's important and that's the thing i I think that like there are so many different avenues towards it right and I think horror is one that is like a preferred one for me but I I think there are a lot of other places that these conversations come up in important ways.
01:19:28
Speaker
And it is worth taking the time to think about them that way. And I think that something that I know is true for me that I think isn't true for everybody is that when I watch horror and read horror, it moves feelings around.
01:19:45
Speaker
It doesn't make them go away, which I think wouldn't... it's not how people work anyway, but it just moves them around, which gives me more perspective and like makes my brain work more and also makes me, I think, process some of the feelings and kind of move through them so that I can actually think about stuff.
01:20:07
Speaker
we need I mean, time where books getting banned and getting limited and what we can say, what can write about, what the news report Like,
01:20:18
Speaker
I don't know, right? There's a thing about art flourishing in the darkest times, and it's also that like maybe the darkest themes can flourish through art. yeah And that we need it in order to process it in the way that people can do it and captivate us in a way that may be entertaining or just illuminating or like powerful.
01:20:36
Speaker
mean, that is the beauty of of creators, of of people who really know how to take the world and all of its horrors and package it in a way that like you can consume it and know and yeah and talk about it like consume it hours.
Ethical and Legal Ramifications in Dystopian Society
01:20:57
Speaker
Yeah. And we've gotten so far into this without even really talking about Jasmine, right? Like there was so much to explore. And so as all of this is happening and all of these like topics are being discussed, he has this ah FGP female that he calls Jasmine.
01:21:14
Speaker
He names her and
01:21:18
Speaker
Yeah, after a few days he names her. He starts to kind of care for her the way you would a pet, not the way you would a child or a person. She inside animal. not an right And eventually he crosses the line and he sexually assaults her. I don't remember it being particularly graphic, but it's clear what's happening.
01:21:37
Speaker
it's clear his perspective, don't he of particularly graphic. Yeah, also appreciate it not being particularly graphic, though. there are other parts in it that absolutely, yeah, 100%, yeah, continue. Yeah, and there is a flash forward in time um at one point where ah she is now like very, very pregnant, very far along, and he's kind of preparing for the day that she goes into labor and gets all these things ready because he knows he can't really get any help because this is so very illegal, what he's done.
01:22:14
Speaker
And when she's very pregnant, an inspector comes to his home because these head are kept very thorough track of. um This is a really kind of diligent process on the part of the industry and and the government, I think like so like jointly together, the industry and the government.
01:22:31
Speaker
And Marcos, because of his position, is able to pull strings and is able to essentially not have a real inspection and just have some papers signed and call it a day. When the inspector is leaving, Marcos thinks to himself, he smiles in a way that's artificial, tense.
01:22:50
Speaker
It's a smile that hides several questions and one threat. What are you doing with the female? Are you enjoying her? And enjoy is the kind of common euphemism for assaulting the head. And it goes on to say, are we talking illegal use of another's property? Just you wait until El Gorto Pineda isn't around anymore.
01:23:08
Speaker
Just you wait with your special privileges. You're going to pay. And then as he's leaving... The inspector, who seems to be like young and kind of new to his job, looks at Marcos and says, this job would be pretty easy if everyone could just sign and not do anything else, don't you think?
01:23:28
Speaker
So he is he has him like read to rights and just like feels powerless to do anything about it system does not work or it works how it was supposed to but... not working Right, right. Nobody is, nobody's benefiting from that system, that from that system other than Marcos.
01:23:48
Speaker
Eventually she does go into labor and there are problems evident and he's done enough research to know that there are problems. And i believe his wife is a nurse and he calls her and basically is like, I need you to come over here and like have your nurse hat on and not worry about asking me questions.
01:24:05
Speaker
Not seeing other for like months like not having interaction, not really talking, like her not being at the home He's like, no questions. you need to come You need now. need
01:24:18
Speaker
need you professional. Yeah. It's a crazy ask. It's crazy that she shows up and does it. It's unbelievable. And you can only imagine what she must have been thinking she was like was in store for her. But she does show up and she does successfully deliver this child, this child who she's looking at and he's and he's looking at and they're like, this could be our child.
01:24:41
Speaker
We lost a child and this could kind of be our new child. unfortunately. It is. Yeah, it is his child. But I think. Yes, totally. Not only his, because it is Jasmine's. And like you mentioned before, she's she's trying to get the baby back. She's trying to hold the baby. She's trying. She's she is trying to cry out for her child, even though she can't.
01:25:05
Speaker
And that is when he kills her. and And this is the last page, literally the last page of the book is he kills her and his wife actually says, i maybe be the most shock, one of the more shocking parts of the book where his wife says to him why she could have given us more children that she would want to keep her and use her to to breed because they've been um unable to have children.
01:25:30
Speaker
agrees that it's like super unexpected and weird, but don't really know her. so much and to me this is very much cecilia the wife sees jasmine the a person who just gave birth not a person
01:25:58
Speaker
I think she was grossed out. I think she realizes that it's just horrifying and shocking, especially since it means that her husband has done this like vile act, but at the same time, like Jasmine is an it.
01:26:10
Speaker
She has no problem picking up the baby. She's not mad it that the that the birthing person just lost their life. She's mad that he took away future opportunities for production. And like, that's what people do with it. A lot of people do but animal Yeah, I think what surprised me was almost that she would be able to see the baby as a person, but not see the mother as a person. I think that's what's so interesting to me.
01:26:37
Speaker
And where where the unexpectedness came in was like, you are not able to see the humanity in the person who just delivered this baby, who you helped, hands-on helped, delivered this baby. But you see this baby and see that it's a human baby and that it could be a person and you're going to take it and raise it, which is just fascinating, like cognitive dissonance.
01:26:57
Speaker
Yeah, and I would push on that a little bit to say, too, that we do that with animals, right? Like a baby animal is different. I mean, biologically, through nature, through evolution, it's supposed to feel different, right?
01:27:10
Speaker
And it's apparently for us, too, it's, you know, especially if you are the birthing person, you are supposed to see babies and feel a connection to them, supposedly, right, that is primal. Yeah. i want Beyond the conscious want.
01:27:25
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. And I think that that maybe without knowing to Celia, right, putting words into her and her mouth, like, she might be able to do that is because a baby is different. And even for animals, right, like, it's, that's one explanation. The other thing, too, is this person is obviously broken by the death of the the baby she birthed.
01:27:47
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. what seems like that they they need, like she needs And as somebody who has never given birth, hasn't been pregnant, I don't understand necessarily like what that would be like, but I can imagine, right, that it could feel like, we don't get depth into this, right? This is just like the first moment, that the first moment could feel like this could fix it.
01:28:08
Speaker
Right, that reset button again. It's like exactly that reset button and they both kind of have that realization. They have to have it together. and I think if he had like presented it to her later or told her later, it likely wouldn't.
01:28:21
Speaker
But if she is there and in this, they can make that kind of like, oh, we need we need this to be that. Yeah. Can't go any further or else it'll not be the solution.
01:28:33
Speaker
you know I think there's a couple of different options there, for the ending is like... Yeah. And I think I am going to read the last little bit. It's it's very sad, um but I think it is...
01:28:46
Speaker
worth, I think it's worth reading as just, this is where the book leaves you. As he drags the body of the female to the barn to slaughter it, he says to Cecilia, his voice radiant, so pure it wounds.
01:28:59
Speaker
She had the human look of a domesticated animal. And that like, I just like felt my chest just get tight reading that. Like I, my eyes are like getting watery. It's just, it's really, he's so rapidly regresses in his in his unpacking of this issue and i think for a book all about words the key to me in this as i love a good literary analysis is she was jasmine she was jasmine she's now the body of the female right if we want to talk about the weight given to that word
01:29:40
Speaker
And what it does in our society, again, in real world, like the female, what that carries, the connotations, who is given that the female, right?
01:29:52
Speaker
and And not in like the female girl boss sense, but in that like reactionary world we're seeing today, the clamoring to what that word can mean and what it can do and the power that has to depersonalize. Mm-hmm.
01:30:06
Speaker
Right. And it's, I mean, this is a conversation around sexism even, right? is is female as a noun. Yeah. Being dehumanizing, like in a fundamental way. Not a female.
01:30:17
Speaker
The female.
01:30:20
Speaker
And not even the female body where female becomes the descriptor where it would make more some amount of sense, but the body of the female, right? The female. Yeah.
01:30:31
Speaker
to Which is the part to me that I guess is why I went toward maybe he will, in my head, the full circle of I don't eat meat after baby is gone.
01:30:41
Speaker
get baby back. I will eat meat now. yeah The slaughter to me versus killing her. Yeah. Like he kills her, but what they say, and again, the the distance that we get in that language is that the book starts with, right? Is it not slaughtered?
01:31:00
Speaker
is a very constructed word. Totally. The same with culling, the same with these agricultural terms, and, like, I think that that, again, to be dismissive of, like, the power of this book, because you don't think the plot is strong enough when, like, this entire sentence, like, says so much, and it's, I mean, I could turn this over in my head. I'm curious if you thoughts, like, the human look of a domesticated animal also really interests me because it, I guess, it's anthropomorphizing, it's distinguishing
01:31:30
Speaker
farming Like this this whole set, like there's so much and it's like she, the author made sure that throughout the book, you're paying attention to the words and then you can read that and be super disappointed or read this sentence and be like, this is the ending I need to take away with myself. It's like, pay attention to how quickly these words change and what they carry.
01:31:52
Speaker
Totally. Yeah. And I think it's a very chewy sentence because it's about this person, right? It's about this world. And then the human look of a domesticated animal. And it's like, this literally is a human.
01:32:05
Speaker
So there's that layer. And then there's like the layer of how we do see humanity and anthropomorphize, like typically more so with domesticated animals. who has afforded humanity Yeah. And it's interesting because we have this, we have this at the end and at the very beginning is where we have a quote where in his his inner dialogue is, he wishes he could say atrocity, inclemency, excess, sadism to Signora Remia.
Personal Reflections and Ethical Eating
01:32:33
Speaker
He wishes these words could rip open the man's smiles, perforate the regulated silence, compress the air until it chokes both of them, but he remains silent and smiles. Yeah. And we go from this really acute awareness to how disgusting this all is to the human look of a domesticated animal and what a drop that is.
01:32:57
Speaker
Especially too, that he, throughout the book says he was forced to, to slaughter, right? He had to slaughter them knowing this, he had to slaughter the pets, but you had to slaughter, but this is, nobody is making you slaughter this being.
01:33:12
Speaker
It's now his choice. I mean, it truly, it wraps up, it's almost like the perfect ending, but only you are choosing to pay, like maybe this is the horror genre of it all, if you can overlook the fact of like what just happened and focus on the words and how quickly they change. Yeah.
01:33:31
Speaker
It's really a very specific kind of nerds. These are the people who like loved 10th grade English lit or whatever. Yeah. read into like what color the sky was, you know, like.
01:33:42
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah, but the book invites us to do that, I think. Like, I think it's explicitly asking us to do that. And so I think, don't want to be like, we're right to be doing that, but like, we're kind of right to be doing that.
01:33:56
Speaker
always right, that's easy. so's Fair enough, me too. But I think that we've spent a lot of the time talking about systems and language and all of these things.
01:34:07
Speaker
But there is one sentence from the beginning of the book that I think sinks in for me. in a more tangible and like personal way, there's a moment where he thinks there are times when one has to bear the weight of the world.
01:34:23
Speaker
And I think that for me, that is maybe the biggest takeaway, at least that I can put into, that's the biggest actionable takeaway where similarly to what you've been saying, I can't save the animals that are subject to these things.
01:34:43
Speaker
And that shouldn't stop me from acting like I could and making those decisions and taking on the weight of those systems, not as a way to hurt myself or blame myself, but as a way to make different decisions. And I do think when we have the willingness and I think also the humility to, like he says, bear the weight of the world, we make different choices.
01:35:08
Speaker
I can see why it hits so deeply. I feel like that's very much along the lines of being a killjoy, which is also what I identify as. yeah Feminist literature sense of like, I am the person at the table who is going to be the different.
01:35:23
Speaker
I'm always going to that person. Right. I'm not a minority in a lot of ways. And in some ways I am. And make my existence makes people confront things. And it's not.
01:35:35
Speaker
against them it just is how I function the alt how anybody functions when when you're not the dominant and you make people question normative and then like we said the reaction is typically not support and excitement right you are in in the few who tends to see you know what I see without being me and
01:36:00
Speaker
I feel like that is, it's true. I don't, I also feel like I can't not feel the weight of the world. And maybe, maybe it's selfish, maybe it's how I am. But that is like, I, in those decisions, I also feel like I'm, I feel the weight of the world, which is why i make that conscious choice every day, right? I could easily stray, but I feel like I am one of those people that you know, feels the weight of the world. And much like, you know, in Marcos and versus his sister, like my brother is very different. We were raised the same way. We're very different people.
01:36:33
Speaker
And I almost am jealous at times that he doesn't seem to be a person who feels the weight of the world in the same way as I do that makes it crushing, that makes me have to go through these things that are hard.
01:36:45
Speaker
Yeah. It is. It's hard. It can suck a lot of times. And I would choose it every time. Yeah, i I saw this is like a little whatever, but I actually saw Wicked last night. um I saw the play the play. I've seen the movie also five billion times because I love it. but But I'm thinking of the scene where they are rescuing the little lion cub and she's like, don't you think I know that it would be much easier if I didn't care so much?
01:37:12
Speaker
And I think like you and I are both the type of people who that resonates with, but then also have that sense of like if everyone cared a little more it wouldn't be quite so heavy so I can't put it down yeah absolutely and i mean that book i mean that's a whole other genre about like what it makes you confront with the animals but yeah yeah is I to a point I do choose it because could feel the weight of the world and not change my actions but I I think I just who I am innately because been doing this from a very young age I've been the
01:37:49
Speaker
been the odd one out in eating since you know from a young age but in a way that like it doesn't bother me it bothers me when it bothers other people and that like don't want to be inconvenient but like it never I never waver in my stance I evolve it it grows with me but I never am seeking a way out yeah like you have there there are roots there right that the plant kind of goes through its phases and like does different things over its lifespan. Right. But your, your roots are pretty deep in this. And i don't know. I mean, i I, guess like for this, this is a good moment as any to just say like, I really admire that about you.
01:38:27
Speaker
And I really appreciate that you have been like willing to serve as a sounding board for some of my own like journey with this topic because it makes it easier. You know, i think you've given me ideas, you've given me things to think about, and you've let me complain about foods that I've tried that didn't work. And I just really admire all of this stuff about you. And I i think you are such a good example for me and for whoever.
01:38:56
Speaker
I'm not great at compliments, but feels really amazing to hear it anyways, even if the discomfort of something being just genuinely nice to me and reflect it back to. And I think we also share a mutual friend who i've had very similar conversations with and they like very similarly, I don't remember the term, like a vegan, a non-vegan advocate.
01:39:17
Speaker
I say vegan curious. That's what I say. Yeah, I love that. but even I think loves is a little bit more active than like ah like a non-vegan vegan... I should look it up. Anyway, it's like somebody who likes it, isn't that, but like believes in and wants to lift it up or whatever.
01:39:33
Speaker
And, you know, I think there's a lot of people any community, not vegan or not vegan, that don't care. Yeah.
01:39:44
Speaker
Or do care. And I think there's plenty of vegans who don't really care. is fine, right? They don't have to, they don't necessarily feel the weight of the world. They have their own motivations. They're choosing in different ways.
01:39:55
Speaker
We all have our exceptions. We all have our ways to make it workable for us. And so I think that that too is like, and like you said earlier, like we had more people who cared enough to try and act and to recognize that like anything is better than nothing, even if we're not right. Like rose colored glasses, seeing that like we are saving whatever, like it's just,
01:40:19
Speaker
I frequently say this. I believe that my veganism is selfish because when I take in this stuff, the only thing that keeps me going is that I am not directly doing that. It's very self-serving.
01:40:30
Speaker
My roots in it were not, I had no knowledge of the the, like, I didn't know a single other vegan. I had never read vegan literature. didn't know the lifestyle aspects. Like, you know, it was just like, want to see if I can do this.
01:40:43
Speaker
There was an elimination diet. It wasn't great. But now I say that it is selfish in a way of like, There's not a lot in the world that helps me feel like I can move forward. And it's something where it does give me the pathway to move forward.
01:40:56
Speaker
don't really care. you don't call me vegan, lowercase v, capital V, veganoid, the term doesn't bother me. it's the pra I call it a practice. And it doesn't have to be... Your practice doesn't have to look like mine. I'm not interested in policing what you eat. interested in chin policing other people's veganism.
01:41:13
Speaker
yeah I'm interested in finding a way to help me move through the world. and I think you're doing the same thing. Right. And it's like, whatever we can do. And there's a lot of things in the world that I don't do this with, but this is my grounding, like the best way I know how, and to let it change and to let it grow and to see it as mine and not something I'm doing to someone else or for someone else.
01:41:38
Speaker
It's ultimately how I can read this and go about, go about my day. I don't know how I could go from this. Again, maybe that's why i'm born of it to, cooking animals for dinner. Like I don't, I don't know how to make that shift and a lot of
Impact of the Book on Personal Choices
01:41:52
Speaker
people do.
01:41:52
Speaker
And maybe it's easier in some ways or harder than others, but I am, I guess, curious for anybody who listens to this, who else I've loved hearing your perspective. I am curious, vegan or not vegan, vegetarian, whatever, like how you, if you change anything upon reading this, even if it's just a mindset shift or the words that you say, I'm curious what this evokes in people enough to add.
01:42:16
Speaker
know Yeah, I think I was already on board when I read this, truthfully. um i do think that this would have been really impactful for me, though. I mean, I think I was already kind of trying to make shifts and identify where where to start, because I think you got to start with things that feel the most sustainable, right? Like there's there's got to be some strategy there.
01:42:38
Speaker
But I do think that this book has a lot of potential to create that shift for people, which is why I think it's so good, even though it's so bad. um And I think I would be really curious.
01:42:53
Speaker
and And I can say like for myself, i I do still eat meat. I probably will not be eating meat today. um After this conversation, I don't think I would be able to. And I do think that there is a simultaneous active distancing and active acknowledging when I do eat animal products.
01:43:11
Speaker
um I think especially meat, but i think i think I think talking to you always is a good reminder of the interconnectedness of all of of those systems, which I do really appreciate you kind of reminding me of.
01:43:23
Speaker
But I try to kind of take a moment and like mentally acknowledge what is happening. And then I think I have to also put it down because I have to eat.
01:43:34
Speaker
This is also why I am trying to see where, I mean, i i've you know I've said to you, I think people who know me know I have a lot of trouble with food. i don't really imagine. honestly hope this changes, but it's very hard for me to envision a life for myself where I am taking the right care of myself without animal products.
01:43:53
Speaker
But... I am hopeful also that like that could change as I continue to make changes. And I think the biggest thing for me is thinking dialectically about it, not thinking black and white about it. And that it isn't like I have to be a capital V vegan or i can just not think about it. It's like I can figure out what I can do.
01:44:13
Speaker
I think also as we change, other change becomes possible. So I hope i hope that and i I think that I will actually probably get closer to that than I picture myself getting.
01:44:25
Speaker
But I hold space for myself and that I don't have to do it perfectly for it to matter, both for myself and my own feelings and for like, you know, I think also like encouraging other people to think about it too. So I don't know.
01:44:41
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. And this is, you know, one of my favorite things to talk about about horror is ultimately what is it talking to me about? Like, what is it? What is it wanting me to think about behind all of the blood and guts here?
01:44:57
Speaker
gets super subtle but apparently a lot of people who maybe aren't as engaged beforehand right who aren't at that place of you of questioning or me of being entrenched in it for a really long time it's it's wild to me that you can read this and not even have that thought process going but I know that that's how I'm also not telling people how they can need to survive right yeah it's highly personal and and though this is a dystopia it's really not that different from ours and there's some stuff that like You're part of the system and you've got to figure out the best way you know how to be in that system.
01:45:30
Speaker
Or at least be honest with yourself and recognize like what it is that you do and you're responsible for and figure out ways, maybe not going in the direction of Marcos, but the direction Marcos could have gone.
Closing Remarks
01:46:00
Speaker
Thanks for listening to this episode of What Haunts You. And thanks again to Kayla for revisiting this very uncomfortable book for the sake of good conversation. Don't forget, you can find Kayla for more information on veganism and food systems on Instagram or Blue Sky at Oy Veyets K. And the link to her sub stack will be in the show description.
01:46:22
Speaker
Next time on What Haunts You, we're going to keep moving through our Horror Through the Decades series. We're going to get into the horror films of the 1940s and 1950s and start exploring the impact of World War II on the films of the time.
01:46:35
Speaker
That episode will, of course, have some heavy content in it, but I think it's going to be a really interesting one.
01:46:42
Speaker
We're living in our own pretty crazy times right now. And like we talked about about the book today, many of us do feel the weight of the world on our shoulders during times like this. But remember, it's a little lighter when we carry that weight together.
01:46:56
Speaker
So until next time, take care of yourselves and take care of each other. Have a good day.