The treatment of animals by conventional agriculture has become impossible to ignore and difficult not to condemn. Is the solution to find the way back to traditional cattle-farming or abandon eating meat, leaving behind our cultural habits and rituals? What are different ways of conceiving the relation between humans and animals, and what does it have to do with eating animals?

February 7 (Monday)

Localising the Food Economy
Roger Scruton (Dock 11 EDEN)
10:15 – 12:00

Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals
Catherine Toal (P98a.U.16)
16:30 – 18:00
The novelist Jonathan Safran Foer’s book Eating Animals, a journalistic investigation into the meat-production industry, shares with other vegan and vegetarian activist works and statements the suggestion that complicity with this industry is comparable to collaboration in the worst kinds of political and social oppression. We consider the evidence for and the rhetoric of this argument, and the relationship between vegan and vegetarian commitment and wider claims of individual political and social responsibility.

Sense and Sensuality: Food in Film
Matthias Hurst (P98a. Lecture Hall)
16:30 – 18:00
We can neither smell nor taste films; only visual and auditory senses are stimulated in cinema. However, food and the acts of eating and drinking as sensual and meaningful experiences are favorite cinematic topics. As in real life, food as a cultural phenomenon does not only serve as a pure function and means of ingestion and nutrition; the preparation and consumption of food express much more than just the practice of sustaining the body. There’s a whole spectrum of meaning and both social and emotional connotations that unfold in cinematic scenes of cooking, eating and drinking. Issues such as cultural or individual identity and self-representation, ideas of abundance, consumerism and excess, and sensations such as love, passion and sexual tension are represented in the depiction of food. Food in film becomes a symbol for sensuality in general, but this symbolic form of sensuality does not always give us pleasure. The seminar will explore different films, their specific representations of food, and the related messages of sense and sensuality.

Philosophical Arguments on Vegetarianism
Bruno Macaes (P24.U.00)
19:30 – 21:00
This seminar will focus on the classical philosophical defense of vegetarianism, including a detailed and fair account of the arguments against it advanced by the main philosophical schools of the ancient world. We will start by asking why the topic was discussed in classical philosophy with such intellectual power as contemporary reflections on vegetarianism cannot hope to rival.

Cora Diamond’s Eating Meat and Eating People
David Hayes (P98a.1.00)
19:30 – 21:00
The philosopher Cora Diamond’s article “Eating Meat and Eating People” (1978) is a non-consequentialist ethical defense of vegetarianism. Diamond argues that the prevailing philosophical defense of vegetarianism, which is grounded in claims about rights, is both “comically uncompelling” and ultimately self-undermining. One should look instead, she argues, to a non-biological notion of what it means to be a “fellow creature,” a notion particularly available for contemplation through poetry and literature. This seminar follows up this suggestion, and partly tests it, through a consideration of Issac Bashevis Singer’s Yiddish folktale “Zlateh the Goat.”

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