Seeing ecophobia on a vegan plate

There has been a sudden growth in the vegan industry, with meatless burgers garnering a profoundly positive consumer response and even people such as Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jackie Chan supportively entering the conversation. In some ways, companies such as Beyond MeatTM and Impossible FoodsTM and films such as The Game Changers are succeeding in doing what many political vegetarians and vegans, academics, and activists have long failed to do: to have a real effect on the animal agriculture business. Perhaps this is something to celebrate, especially since (despite the arguments, protests, and even veg-friendly businesses having steadily increased) the numbers of animals involved in the industry have consistently swollen. To rest much hope in the current vegan trends would be to fall victim to a deceptively sexist and ecophobic guiding narrative. While taking big steps toward shutting down the animal agriculture business, the great strides of the vegan industry follow a well-worn path. Putting veggie patties in the meat aisle and shunning words such as “vegetarian” and “vegan” engages in a disavowal of vegetal realities, and the fact that the meat aisle itself is so heavily gendered effectively re-genders the food itself. It may all seem harmless enough—even productive—until understood within the larger context of patriarchal “attempts,” to cite Laura Wright, “to reconceptualize veganism as an alternative untramasculine choice.” The Game Changers drips with such attempts, and, like the “meatless” products now enjoying such popularity, reeks of male self-delusionalism about having discovered a healthful, new diet. There is a lot more than veggies being served up with what we might call the new veganism, and there is not much chance of really effecting change unless we look at what’s really on the plate.Ha habido un repentino crecimiento en la industria vegana, con las hamburguesas sin carne consiguiendo una aceptacio n profundamente tentadora, e incluso gente como Arnold Schwarzenegger y Jackie Chan han ofrecido su apoyo al tema. De alguna manera, compan í as como Beyond MeatTM e Impossible FoodsTM y pelí culas como The Game Changers esta n teniendo e xito en lo que muchos vegetarianos y veganos polí ticos, acade micos, y activistas han fracasado durante mucho tiempo: tener un efecto real en el negocio de la agricultura animal. Quiza esto es algo a celebrar, especialmente ya que, a pesar del aumento constante de argumentos, protestas, e incluso de los negocios respetuoso con lo vegetariano, las cifras de animales implicadas en la industria han crecido continuamente. Poner muchas esperanzas en las tendencias veganas actuales serí a caer ví ctima de una narrativa influyente que es engan osamente sexista y ecofo bica. Mientras se dan grandes pasos hacia el cierre del negocio de la agricultura animal, las mayores zancadas de la industria vegana siguen un camino muy trillado. Poner hamburguesas veganas en el pasillo de la carne y evitar palabras como “vegetariano” o “vegano” conlleva la negacio n de la realidad vegetal, y el hecho de que el pasillo de la carne este tan orientado al ge nero hace que la comida se asocie a un ge nero a su vez. Parece algo bastante inofensivo—incluso productivo—hasta que se entiende dentro del contexto ma s amplio de “intentos” patriarcales, citando a Laura Wright: “reconceptualizar el veganismo como una eleccio n alternativa ultramasculina”. The Game Changers lo intenta a cuenta gotas y, como los productos “sin carne” gozan de tanta popularidad, apesta a autoengan o masculino sobre el hecho de haber descubierto una nueva dieta saludable. Se esta n sirviendo mucho ma s que veggies en lo que podemos llamar el nuevo veganismo, y no hay mucha oportunidad de realmente cambiar algo a menos que miremos lo que realmente esta en el plato

Post 9/11 and Narratives of Life Writing, Conflict, and Environmental Crisis

In his article Post 9/11 and Narratives of Life Writing, Conflict, and Environmental Crisis Simon C. Estok argues that there are four seemingly disparate and disconnected topics — war, migration, ecophobia, and life writing — which need to be discussed in tandem in order to produce deeper understandings of both the production and effects of post 9/11 narratives. Estok argues that narrative landscapes changed radically since the beginning of the twenty-first century and that this results in a combined effect both of terror reportage and of environmental crisis narratives. The pace and character of reportage blurred, erased, and expanded various boundaries and these changes will be increasingly central to discussions about life writing and its relation to environmental crisis writing

Timon of Athens, Food Transformations, and the World as Confectionary

In the transformation of early modern English food sources from the local to the international are a wide range of questions about the global-sourcing/local-demand conflict that was developing in Shakespeare’s time and continues today. Shakespeare’s food reveals the complexities of a network of global and local actors and transformations. As a performance, Timon of Athens potentially arouses sometimes intense visceral responses (ones that are peculiarly resonant with contemporary audiences) to Timon’s dream that the world is his confectionary. One of the results of performing the transformation of food from the local to the global (the play’s explicit representation of the world as Timon’s unsustainable confectionary) is that we are better able to see and understand ecological collapse: while anthropogenic ecological collapses in early modern times were relatively isolated, today’s collapses are more properly understood as global. We witness the transformative and deterritorializing potentials of food, even while such transformations are in the service of a deeply nationalist agenda that is troubling and unsustainable in its rejection of global connectedness. Performance is vital for excavating the layers and implications of food transformations and potentials in Timon of Athens, a play deeply relevant to food transformation debates current in the 21st century

Book Review: Ecologies of a Storied Planet in the Anthropocene

Dr. Simon C. Estok is a full professor and Senior Research Fellow at Sungkyunkwan University (South Korea’s first and oldest university). He is editor of the A&HCI journal Neohelicon and is an elected member of The European Academy of Sciences and Arts. Estok teaches literary theory, ecocriticism, and Shakespearean literature. His award-winning book Ecocriticism and Shakespeare: Reading Ecophobia appeared in 2011 (reprinted 2014), and his much anticipated The Ecophobia Hypothesis (Routledge, 2018; reprinted with errata as paperback in 2020) has been translated into Turkish (tr. M. Sibel Dinçel) and is currently being translated into Chinese and Korean. He is coeditor of five books: Anthropocene Ecologies of Food (Routledge, April 2022), Mushroom Clouds: Ecological Approaches to Militarization and the Environment in East Asia (Routledge, March 2021), Landscape, Seascape, and the Eco-Spatial Imagination (Routledge, 2016), International Perspectives in Feminist Ecocriticism (Routledge, 2013), and East Asian Ecocriticisms (Macmillan, 2013). Estok has published extensively on ecocriticism and Shakespeare in such journals as PMLA, Mosaic, Configurations, English Studies in Canada, English Language Notes, and others. He is currently working on a book about slime in the Western cultural and literary imagination

Suffering and climate change narratives

In his article Suffering and Climate Change Narratives Simon C. Estok begins with a brief survey of definitional issues involved with the term “suffering” and argues that there has been a relative lack of theoretical attention to suffering in climate change narratives, whether literary or within mainstream media. Estok shows that suffering, far from being singular, is a multivalent concept that is gendered, classed, raced, and, perhaps above all, pliable. It has social functions. One of the primary reasons for the failure of climate change narratives to effect real changes, Estok argues, is that they often carry the functions of suffering and act as a vehicle for the very social and psychological needs suffering fulfills