Is there a connection between principled vegetarianism and ghoulishness? An obscure example is the vegan grindcore band
Carcass (defunct many moons ago I think). And as an obscure example perhaps it’s inadmissable. But no, I present Carcass here as the apogee of this disposition and the perfect illustration of this idea, the idea that whatever it is that leads people to become principled vegetarians has, for some at least, got something to do with a preoccupation with, or a fear of or fascination with, the macabre and the grisly and the anatomical.I haven’t thought it through yet, but I’m fairly sure there’s at least a kernel of truth here. It’s certainly true that these vegetarians and vegans often reveal disgust at the practice of eating meat and the very mechanics of its production, and in the dark imaginings and struggles of teenagers it’s not surprising that this could morph into a kind of fixation. I have heard them use the phrase “rotting flesh” to describe meat, as if this were an argument in itself. Now this is also becoming generally widespread. More and more I see the self-disgust of meat-eaters who presume that the production of meat is inherently wrong and revolting.
Last year I went to see a very bad comedian, Danny Bhoy, a Scot, mocking the Scottish diet. He spent several minutes talking about black puddings, “scabs basically”. The very idea that blood is used as a food was being treated as odd. But
Black pudding has been around for hundreds of years and throughout Europe (and probably elsewhere as far as I know), so it seems odd to single it out for criticism. Is it partly the influence of the Gothic, mainly in horror films?The spiked crew go on about the objectification of humanity, which probably has some truth in it. We are encouraged to see people not as active autonomous subjects with world-changing potential, but as hapless suffering reluctant hunks of meat. Perhaps this is partly what is manifest in TV documentary titles such as “The Boy Whose Skin Fell Off”.
I still have my Carcass LP, Necroticism – Descanting The Insalubrious. Looking at the titles, eg. “Symposium of Sickness”, “Pedigree Butchery”, “Lavaging Expectorate of Lysergide Composition”, and the album title itself, two things are apparent:
- A fondness for Latin, evocative of the world of medicine
- Sensationalism, as in the use of butchery, an essentially innocent word which now has bad overtones, again maybe owing to horror fiction, and maybe also the reporting of murders in sensationalist newspapers
We also see these preoccupations reflected in contemporary art, as in the painting shown above, Three Oncologists by Ken Currie, from 2002 (Scottish National Portrait Galley).