Book Extract | Since the 18th Century, the British Have Eaten Meat on a Grand Scale

The other dimension of slow nutritional violence is famine. Today, the view of famine as an “entitlement crisis” has become commonplace. Famine is not caused by an absolute shortage of food but by a lack of purchasing power — by structural powerlessness and economic dislocation, which are the natural consequence of the slow development of food systems. By controlling resource frontiers and agro-food systems, Britain began to direct, allocate and consume vast quantities of food of both plant and animal origin. It could withhold food from the starving, or provide it on stipulated terms. The famines in Ireland (1845–1850) and India (1876–1878, 1896–1902, 1943–1945) were the results of “slow violence.” The crises were initially triggered by plant disease or climatic catastrophe, striking populations living in extreme economic precariousness. The British seized on these crises as opportunities to further marketise, de-peasantise and depopulate these fragmented zones, absorbing them into their agro-food systems. Hobson observed that food imports allowed some nations to “evade (their own) population problem” by “aggravating the population problems elsewhere.” In effect, famine was outsourced. Conservative estimates put the death toll from famine in nineteenth-century Ireland and India at approximately 13 million. Britain’s grip on the global food system also bred its own problems. In 1898, Rear Admiral Beresford argued that mass imports had created a vulnerability “precisely where our system is at its most powerful.” During the two world wars, Britain abandoned economic liberalism, and readjusted its control over global and domestic agro-food systems through a range of technical means, including reviving domestic agriculture and rationing, deploying convoy systems, and arming merchant vessels. From the British perspective, this effort was highly successful: neither of the two wars brought the threat of famine to Britain. In the First World War, it marshalled its control over agro-food systems, intelligence networks and logistical transport to impose a blockade that killed approximately 800,000 Germans and 400,000 Austro-Hungarians — evidently one of the reasons for the Central Powers’ collapse. Hitler’s vision of dominating Eastern Europe and Ukraine and carrying out racial extermination was rooted precisely in his dread of encountering famine in the future.

Control over agro-food systems also entailed the restructuring of power relations across the “commodity frontier“, typically achieved through purchase, occupation, conquest or treaty. Australia’s land, for instance, was appropriated by declaring or assuming a legal vacuum of authority — what was termed terra nullius. Europeans justified their claim to a given tract of land on a variety of grounds, sometimes even contradictory ones, not least the thought of Locke: those who had improved “unassisted nature” had fundamentally enhanced productivity and created value, and thereby acquired ownership of the land. In Australia, finding no farms, British colonists declared the local peoples — who practised hunting and gathering — to be at the lowest level of socio-economic development, meaning that the Aboriginal inhabitants were barely distinguishable from animals or plants. Ownership was inseparable from productive use: mere occupation did not constitute possession. This view solidified gradually in the nineteenth century, though it never achieved complete dominance. The imposition of private property rights was essential to the improvement of land and the accumulation of agricultural surplus. This was starkly evident in the colonists’ forced killing and displacement of indigenous peoples: the Highland Clearances provided an early blueprint. In fact, many Highlanders emigrated to Australia, where they displaced local Aboriginal peoples deemed unproductive. The Tasmanian Aboriginals were rapidly exterminated by colonists, then supplanted by flocks of sheep; many perished in camps on Flinders Island, ostensibly established to provide shelter and missionary work. The establishment of royal tea plantations by colonists in Assam was accompanied by violent military conquest. In 1885, the Métis resistance in Canada was crushed by the North-West Expedition; in the early 1870s, the gauchos of Argentina were conquered by the Buenos Aires government. Indigenous Patagonians were driven to designated settlements and forbidden from maintaining their former way of life. The gaucho way of life began to disintegrate in the 1870s, hemmed in by fences and barbed wire. The gauchos had to submit to capitalist agriculture that required little labour, ultimately reduced to drudgery.

Human violence against animals, however, took a swifter, more mechanised form. Before 1800, slaughter was a small-scale, everyday, even sociable activity, yielding relatively modest quantities of meat and other animal products. Yet as demand for meat grew, the traditional systems of slaughter hit a bottleneck. In the end, industrialised slaughter was chosen, isolating the killing of animals from human communities and scaling it up to unprecedented and ever more extraordinary levels. The slaughterhouse system was pioneered in France, expanded in Germany, and reached its apotheosis in the great abattoirs of the New World and Australia. These complex systems enacted a triple separation and concealment: first, slaughter was cut off entirely from society, albeit gradually; second, within the slaughterhouse, killing was separated from non-killing activities; and finally, the animals themselves were confined in lairages set apart from the killing zones. Meat consumption and meat production were severed both spatially and perceptually, and slaughter became an anonymous, invisible process. As Rebecca Woods observes, relocating slaughter to the distant “commodity frontier” was the most effective stratagem of misdirection. “Slaughter… was moved to the outer edges of empire, truly to the end of the earth.” The deepest violence within the agro-food system became largely imperceptible — a truth equally evident in the global rise of chicken consumption in the twentieth century.