Text of Meat

In The Sexual Politics of Meat, Carol J. Adams argues that meat is a text.

Redefining Text

To understand this claim, we need to broaden the definition of text a bit. The author says that anything can be regarded as a text if it satisfies the following three conditions (the author’s reinterpretation of the criteria proposed by Thomas Sebeok):

1. It contains a recognizable message
2. The meaning it contains does not change, so that through repetition the same meaning can be read out again
3. It contains a coherent system of relations

Meat as Text

According to the above criteria, meat is a text. Because…

1. “Meat” contains the message that an animal’s corpse is food and a key source of nutrition (but this is a myth. The Protein Myth)
2. At mealtimes, in advertisements, in conversation, and so on, that meaning is expressed repeatedly without changing
3. Because it constitutes a coherent system made up of food production, attitudes toward animals, and tolerance of animal abuse.

Thomas Sebeok’s Definition

Carol J. Adams’s definition of text is a reinterpretation based on Thomas Sebeok’s essay Poetics in the lion’s den. T. Sebeok’s original definition is as follows.

1. Clear-cut boundaries which isolate the message as such; non-ambiguous formal marks which delimit a finite set of interwoven meaningful elements,
2. Direct, or indirect, permanence through time, giving the possibility of “reading” it again and again as an “immutable synchrony” or an “a-chronic present”; the possibility of repetition can be insured through the material invariability of the message, or through the capacity of exactly memorizing its production,
3. A deep system of relations insuring its surface coherency or, in other words, a structure accounting for its understandability; i.e. the possibility of building up from its elements a network of relations including the totality of the actual terms and their relations.