Meat Love: On the Gentrification of Carnivorous Hunger

‘You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat: So I did sit and eat.’–George Herbert, ‘Love (III)’In an era of climate catastrophe and corporate agribusiness, sumptuous representations of animal meat increasingly go hand in hand with romantic portrayals of animal life. Revisiting John Berger’s writing on animals, agriculture, and anti-capitalist struggle in Why Look at Animals? (1977), Amber Husain asks how we are drawn to look at dead meat with eyes befitting of life itself, and what happens to us when we do. How is it that desire for slabs, hunks, racks, and rashers of purpose-bred death can be made to swell not despite but in proportion with attachment to its living source?Meat Love is an exploration of our taste for meat and its enduring appeal to the political left as well as the right. Ranging from advertising to art, from Instagram to the blockchain, Meat Love deconstructs the beauty, tragedy, and mystery with which our images of meat are embellished, as well as the political conditions in which the romanticisation of carnivorous hunger can flourish.