Carol J. Adams’ seminal book The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory (Continuum, 1990) was perhaps the first work of theory that drew an explicit link between industrial animal agriculture and human violence, particularly gendered violence. Charlotte Shane and Amber Husain both continue to write about the implication of the ordinary carnivore in systems of oppression, Shane in her newsletter and essays, and Husain in Meat Love: An Ideology of the Flesh (MACK, 2023), a book-length essay that examines the bourgeois infatuation with the idea and aesthetics of “ethical” meat. For this issue, TANK invited Husain and Shane to correspond on the nature of evil as it relates to industrial agriculture, contemporary violence in Gaza, and the conceptual systems that seek to universalise and naturalise atrocity.

Amber Husain  I wish there was just one “problem of evil” we could solve in this conversation but, given that narratives of evil take so many forms, most of them no longer theological, I want to start by asking: what are your problems of evil?

Charlotte Shane  I was probably due for a period of theological reckoning last year for a variety of reasons, including – but not limited to – climate crises and entering my forties. But witnessing the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the faith evinced by Palestinian Muslims accelerated that drive, which is a short explanation for why I now read the Bible almost every day. Scripture’s rhetorical pitch comforts me; I’ve not yet found any other literature with a tone that matches the moment. It’s a corrective for an age that does not take evil seriously. Or let me specify: I’m talking about the Western world, the industrialised countries, the imperial core. This is a Godless realm in which questions of good and evil – even that framing itself – are treated as obsolete in part because they’re bound up in religion, and therefore, allegedly without resonance in modern life. Meanwhile, ethics has been reduced to the positing of emotionally vacant thought problems and regarded as the domain of tech guys and New York Times columnists.

I myself use the word evil most often to characterise something as “nasty” or “mean-spirited.” If I were to attempt a description of actual cataclysmic evil, like the massacre of innocents, “evil” wouldn’t feel strong enough, not even as a starting point. I would use other words. But all vocabulary fails to convey the power of real evil. That’s one of evil’s intrinsic challenges, and maybe why we abandon the notion so readily to re-code situations in politically intelligible terms (i.e. “exploitative” or “oppressive”) which then make them feel more manageable, I guess, or more bearable. Which is also to say actionable, vanquishable.

AH I hear (and probably deploy) that softer usage of “evil” a lot, but sometimes in the very same breath (or at least the same conversation) as the invocation of what you call “real evil”. I think one of my problems of evil is that we seem to use this same word to describe both the stuff that a person is actively drawn to as well as the things – most presently, genocide – that would utterly horrify that person. I’ve heard the same person say they hate Netanyahu because of all the evil he’s orchestrated, but that they love Rachel Cusk because of all the evil in her writing about other people’s arm flab – a totally compatible set of statements, but with two very different resonances for “evil”.

With respect to the evil of industrial animal butchery and the enjoyment of its products, I feel like a lot of conversation has historically tended to circle around a kind of problem for evil (as a concept). I’m talking about the idea that people can know something is wretched but also not really know it – not really confront or acknowledge it. If a ton of people think that industrial meat-making is egregious but still don’t really experience meat that way, then – people ask – is it accurate or helpful to call their part in it evil? Now, though, it seems like we’re generally past the point of not knowing. What disturbs me most currently is less some collective state of ignorance than the fact that there seems to be a whole load of otherwise ethically-minded people who are actually into the aura of evil that hangs around meat; the evil is part of the appeal, not a “problem” in and of itself. I’m thinking of that studied, Anthony Bourdain-inspired pleasure in swallowing meat that only increases the more it looks or feels like eating the animal alive – the more bloody, stinky, gamey or intact the edible flesh. The evil of meat becomes part of carnivores’ minor self-mythology as reckless or cynical or whatever.

There’s clearly a certain amount of evil that people are prepared not just to accept, but to embrace, like maybe a bit of evil is necessary for a richer kind of life. Do you think that’s true? And if so, what’s the threshold where it tips from desire to disgust, if we agree that such a threshold exists?

CS  Words certainly fail to capture the horror that is factory farming, which is why footage of those spaces is suppressed, criminalised, prioritised by activists, and assiduously avoided by meat eaters. Did you happen to see those Australian MPs walking out of the pig welfare inquiry before the animal liberationists’ opening statement, which included recordings? The first person to leave did so with the words, “I think it’s outrageous that we’re presenting this material and I don’t want to be here to condone it.” She wanted to make sure that was on the record, her cowardice and hypocrisy, as if it were some great principle that will inspire future generations.

As you mentioned, people “know” industrialised animal farming is an atrocity; I think few people in the United States would say their meat and dairy is obtained ethically or sustainably, and an even smaller number would be correct. But how does that knowledge function? It seems to have no mitigating effect on their behaviour; perhaps, as you noted, it even reinforces it. There’s always the meat-eater who has to antagonise every vegetarian they meet, or write “mmm, delicious” comments on social media posts of, say, a cute cow, though I think of those people as making a show to cover up terrible insecurity – and therefore may be more sensitive than people who shrug and take that attitude of, “Yeah, well… Gotta eat.” I think most omnivores don’t even have to move away from disgust; I think desire is all they feel, without even recognising it as such. The practice of eating industrial meat is taken for granted – the barbarity of it but simultaneously (what they would call) the necessity.

If I were to attempt a description of actual cataclysmic evil, like the massacre of innocents, “evil” wouldn’t feel strong enough, not even as a starting point. But all vocabulary fails to convey the power of real evil

AH It’s true. I wonder if the evils that feel acceptable, meat eating included, are those that threaten our faith in some semblance of a social order, however impoverished. It seems relatively unthreatening to our sense of “humanity” for writers to dramatise their internal misanthropy, so we can even enjoy that kind of transgression of moral cleanliness. The same can’t be said of ethnic cleansing, at least not for the majority of people who have been asked about it recently in the UK.

With industrial animal slaughter, perhaps the issue is that people just don’t think of animals as part of society. And what’s more, they don’t see how routinely exercising brutal dominion over an animal underclass might also threaten whatever capacity for justice there is in human society. Or at least they don’t feel or believe it. I’m really struck by what you say in your essay about Jonathan Safran Foer: that every time we choose solidarity or effort when it comes to veganism, “we’re making headway towards a new habit, a self-reinforcing orientation that alters the fabric of who we are and how we live.” I strongly suspect that a big cultural shift in the way we eat would be to move the goalpost for desirable evil, but what do you think?

CS I suspect that less volatile meat-eaters, to the extent they think about the animals they eat at all, tell themselves something like because life feeds on life, and because any meat they eat will have been a living animal’s flesh at some point, it doesn’t matter how that particular animal lived or died. Their fate would be food no matter what, and death is always unpretty, so why get worked up about it? And this position is the rational, adult stance. Socially speaking, vegans are the immature and unserious ones. We’re hippies, idealistic children who don’t understand the world, can’t face the facts of life, etcetera.

I think people also use this stance to justify the continued exclusion of animals from society, as you put it. It’s too risky to admit the integrity or value of the resources we commodify; we have to see animals as “other” to eat them, period. I don’t think that’s true, actually – that either non-human animals remain excluded from moral consideration, or else every human alive becomes a vegetarian. (Plenty of cultural practices disprove it, for one thing.) But clearly that type of delineation is essential for establishing and perpetuating systems of hellish violence.

Last year, early into the attacks on Gaza, I sometimes saw people who were horrified by Israel’s brutality say, “we don’t even treat animals this way!” Did you come across any of that sentiment? It shocked me to think anyone believed that animals are somehow a protected class, that there are any lines drawn around how they can or can’t be treated. Could they really know so little about how animals are handled, spoken of, thought of, killed? Do they not know animals are test subjects for the military? And what of the fact that all animals in Gaza are subjected to the same destruction? Non-human animals are being shot, starved, displaced, and bombed, too. But have I taken us too far afield? I feel like there’s so much to be said – another piece of evidence that words are insufficient!

AH No, I think those kinds of statements are so telling in that they both feign ignorance, as you say, of how animals are shot, starved, displaced, while also revealing an assumption that the appropriate way to treat animals would still be… hideously.

And what you say about the path to that assumption certainly seems to fit what I’ve observed. People need to aestheticise their evil (so it doesn’t feel “real”), whether by revelling in it or making it seem like some kind of tragic necessity. I’ve written a bit about that narrative of meat-eating as some kind of enlightened gesture toward Knowledge of Humanity, my response to which was to try and de-universalise the discussion, to reframe it less in terms of mankind than in terms of societies and class.

I do think there’s value in using political concepts and language here rather than just imagining some kind of fundamental evil. If we think about meat-making as the ultimate expression of class violence – a devaluation of life in the interests of profit – it still leaves the problem of meat a pretty overwhelming one (like OK, cool, we’ll just get rid of class violence/capitalism), but that’s a lot more manageable than “human nature”, which seems like a concept designed to institutionalise atrocity. It’s hard to imagine morality, moral judgement, moral condemnation inspiring anyone to see the world differently. But then when you talk about political language as its own de-fanging of evil – another route to taking it less seriously – it does make me wonder if it’s enough just to politicise the issue. Like, people are so used to being told they’re complicit in bourgeois capitalist violence. Maybe we do still need the fear of God!

CS “People are so used to being told they’re complicit in bourgeois capitalist violence” made me laugh. We are so used to it, and I’m not sure how far it penetrates anymore, especially when it’s someone else telling you as opposed to you really feeling it yourself. So that realisation gives you pause about your habits (of consumption, thought, etcetera). For a time, it seemed trendy to deny that such complicity was actively adopted. By which I mean, people shared (truthful!) memes about how “carbon footprint” was invented by BP’s advertising firm, and recycling was a scam, and the dominant attitude became we don’t need to change, corporations need to change. Of course we inherit these systems the minute we’re born, and they run in the background of our lives all the time, but that doesn’t mean they’re beyond our influence or control or responsibility. I’ve started to see more pushback to that on social media, which heartens me, even when it’s only a reply that asks who we think corporations are making products for and selling commodities to. There are few pleasures more tempting than self-exoneration, but may I humbly suggest we connect a few dots?

Do you think the big question underlying our conversation so far is how to create change? Not how we implement it or even choose which change(s) we implement, but how to make another person desire change, desire it enough to participate in it, to do it? It seems impossible to avoid when the topic is something as nakedly depraved and unsustainable as present-day animal agriculture. As you said earlier, people can interpret their behaviour as bad or even evil without it creating that motivation, and as you explore in Meat Love, people can also conceive of their animal killing and eating as not just morally neutral but beneficent. So where does that leave us?

AH  Coupled with your description of the violence in Gaza as hellish, it makes me think of Gillian Rose’s instruction to “keep your mind in hell and despair not” – that is, find a way to make sense of and act against atrocity without ignoring the fact that it is hellish. Like, maybe we need to find a language that historicises and politicises meat so that we can comprehend what to do about it on a social scale, while somehow staying alert to the incomprehensible depth of our own evil? I’m trying to imagine that would look like…

Gillian Rose, Love’s Work (NYRB Classics, 2011; first published by Chatto & Windus, 1995)

CS You’ve got me wondering if history is currently the least leveraged tool for addressing a host of evil issues, and if it could be the most powerful because it’s so underutilised. Speaking about history perhaps feels less hectoring, less blamey, than a political approach and therefore less likely to incite extreme defensiveness? Or maybe history better lends itself to those aforementioned lightbulb moments when you truly integrate knowledge – i.e. have an insight – versus acquire it intellectually, at a superficial level. I’m thinking specifically of how Joshua Specht’s Red Meat Republic introduced me to this (American) context of how turning cows into “mobile property” facilitated further violence against Native peoples; unfenced cattle wandered into Indian territory where someone might take possession of and/or kill them, and then the “owner” would show up and declare there’d been a crime that warranted reprisal. I’d already been vegan for ages when I read this, but it’s one of those details that sticks in my mind as a knot of colonisation, property, and the commodification of living beings.

I’ve also been wondering, in light of your response, if returning to ancient notions of good and evil is in some ways the ultimate form of historicising. Maybe that’s corny, but most religions, I think, recognise evil not only as a force we encounter outside of ourselves, embodied by other people (i.e. our enemies) but a force that acts within us. It demands vigilance, that we make an effort to resist it. And we’re obligated to resist. This notion is a bitter pill to swallow but especially so now, when there is so much egregious, relentless evil on display from those in power. Surely my own bad impulses and practices should not be my first priority. But another word for evil can be error. It’s not only about the harm others inflict on us or even the harm we inflict on others but the harm we inflict on ourselves by acting against the good. What do you think – any hope for traction there?



Joshua Specht, Red Meat Republic: A Hoof-to-Table History of How Beef Changed America (Princeton University Press, 2019)

AH I think so, but I’m not sure I can imagine separating that harm from politics. I struggle not to think of evil as political violence and “the good” as its opposite. Or to think of the despotic or disinterested tendencies within us as potentially the most soul-corroding.

Re: traction, I recently read a depressing piece by the art and social historian T.J. Clark, where he talks about mechanised mass death as though this feature of modernity takes us truly beyond good and evil. He’s talking about the difference between the Homeric vision of war – as an arena of heightened human drama and (im)morality – and the continuum of unreal horror we’ve instituted today. Clark thinks that when we try and represent modern horror as evil – showing video clips of atrocities as though these were discrete moments of depravity rather than a constant of everyday life – we’re just ladling out “Pseudo-Good” and “Pseudo-Evil” – “things good citizens might ‘protest’ about, and be able to affect”.

I agree up to the point where this departure from Trad Evil seems to imply the impossibility of dissent. Does modern evil not just call for different demands when we protest? It’s true that every protest I go on at the moment involves an element of shaming politicians, but we’re also calling for an overhaul of modern institutions, calling to decolonise, end apartheid, take apart any kind of structure that might culminate in genocide. If evil is whatever might be worthy of protest, I’m not sure that militarily or otherwise industrialised death is actually beyond evil. A more totalising, organised form of evil, maybe, but doesn’t that just mean we have to protest better?
CS It’s never occurred to me that the most widespread forms of violence could or would exit the realm of evil by virtue of their monstrous efficiency, and I don’t even know if I can follow the logic behind that (probably due to my having no classical education) but I see the point about how many dense webs of horror we’ve spun, and how plucking out those discrete moments might then seem almost arbitrary. That’s one of the ways the horror machine keeps running, right? Bureaucracy, entanglement, many foot soldiers at many levels, and most of them maintaining they have no choice in the matter, no agency and therefore no responsibility.

It seems like Clark is shrugging off an imperative to engage with any of it intentionally, or do you think I’m reading it wrong? I feel like he lapses rather quickly into cynicism and fatalism, but maybe that’s the response of someone fooling herself about how much her own efforts and reactions matter. When he mentions seeing a child with their legs blown away on TV, he asks himself what he felt at the sight and also “what the newscast expected me to feel.” That sort of media criticism has its place, but to me the more urgent question is: What do you expect of yourself? What do you want to do about it? Many people, I think we have seen with devastating clarity, are happy to answer, “Nothing.” Do you know that phrase “many struggles, one fight?” It’s what came to mind when you were describing the multifarious quality of contemporary protests. One of the struggles is probably against apathy and complacency. I guess that’s what used to be called consciousness raising.

This is potentially an unfair question, but do you think evil acts would largely be eliminated if we got rid of the coercive systems that require them? Or do you think there is something in human nature fated to construct systems that manufacture evil?

AH I can’t imagine any kind of revolution that would eliminate evil itself, but I’m not sure we need such a very high bar to make political change worthwhile. Who wants to live in a world where evil is so banal, so impersonal, so psychically unmanageable? One of the problems, as you suggest, is that we don’t seem to be aware of what we do want, which may well involve accepting a degree of inevitable evil. I think what you say about media criticism is so, so true – how what starts as a healthy suspicion comes to edge out any kind of political imagination. It feels as if the left has been trained so hard to be wary of our own emotions – to avoid feeling how our enemies want us to – that most of us haven’t thought all that much about how we want ourselves to feel, or what kinds of feeling would actually be useful for political struggle. I feel like it’s most of what I try to write about these days – the struggle to work out how consciousness gets raised, how people come to believe that something is worth doing. Probably not just by reading books or “in conversations” about it, but maybe by seeing the possibilities floated in books and magazines play out in their actual lives, in a way that makes them want to build movements or organise themselves. Like, it might not change the world just to notice how much more you care about pigs when you cease to think of their back fat as breakfast, but might it be the thing that inspires you towards more world-changing pursuits? What do you think? Do we need to be engaged in eliminating evil to care about it at all?

CS  I love that question. I think the answer is an unequivocal yes. You know Martin Niemöller’s poem, “First they came…”? It makes me think not only about the way fascism expands – how injustice compounds itself insatiably, no matter how many bodies pile up or how many cages are built – nor only about the ultimately personal consequence of moral negligence, but about how resistance needs to be a practice. Resistance is not, unfortunately, something you can do once and be done, or something you can be ready to do if you just wait for the moment when you’re the precise target. (Also, it’s not something you can effectively do if you keep designating certain beings, including non-human animals, as outside of moral consideration and therefore prime candidates for exploitation.) There are always endangered lives worth fighting for, and the more you collaborate, the better you get at recognising the strands of the web. Or maybe I should say that once you see one fight, you have a better chance at seeing the many struggles. I see this in the way some NYC cat rescue groups, for instance, end up radicalising people around housing, because so many animals are abandoned when families are evicted; or about private equity in healthcare, because vet care suffers the same problems as human medicine – astronomical price tags, closures of clinics – when it’s turned into an object of capital.

You can start almost anywhere to understand why our world is the way it is, which (I think?) entails seeing how it could be different. But you have to start.  .

Charlotte Shane’s latest book An Honest Woman: A Memoir of Love and Sex Work (2024) is published by Simon & Schuster. Amber Husain’s book Tell Me How You Eat is forthcoming from Hutchinson Heinemann.