Storying Food

In this piece, I wanted to portray the difference between the way two different categories of animals are valued: the wild and the domesticated- and the direction in which our society is headed in the way that animals overall are to be valued. The wild animals are symbolized by the baby mountain goats, and the domesticated animals are symbolized by the chicks. These central focuses are demarcated through the grey outlines that draw the eyes to them.

For the chicks, I tried to utilize negative space in the center to convey the way that they are valued. They are expected to live in a vacuum, only to support human-serving values and economic demands. How long they live and every circumstance of their lives (they will eventually be slaughtered regardless of sex) is completely controlled by whether or not they can serve the human market for eggs. It is a well known fact that the day male chicks are hatched, it is common procedure to cull them by dropping them into meat grinders while alive. The full extent of their human-serving reality is something that I wanted to convey through the extreme violence of an ordinary scene such as this. They are given no opportunity to have any meaning in themselves and only exist as commodities of flesh and blood (symbolized by black against the red- no context of their environment given, only the human action of putting them into a meat grinder to reveal their true form). I placed them in the center of the piece to bring emphasis to this message.

For the mountain goats, I tried to utilize color and style of background as well as to convey the way that they are valued. They are understood to only be able to live fully in the wild, relating intimately with aspects of the environment that sustain them. They are free from captivity and are viewed with those older sort of reverent notions that exist in the ever-influential Shintoism in Japan and in the Greek raising of nature to the level of the human through anthropomorphic depictions. To reference these two notions, I tried to depict something similar to Hokusai Katsushika’s Fine Wind, Clear Morning and to Ferdinand Hodler’s The Dream of the Shepherd. I drew a setting sun behind the mountain to show the way that these ideas of respect for the environment have mainly just become popular talking points rather than practices materially observed. However, the goats remain free to grow and change in their environment and to determine the meaning of their own lives. Even if they are shot and eaten by a hunter, they still would have retained their own value in their very flesh.

The reason why I created this piece for a Storying assignment is because the subject is influenced by things that I saw first-or-secondhand that influenced my opinion on the ethics of how animals should be treated. During a school camping trip to Mount Rainier in fifth grade, we saw baby mountain goats playing on some cliffs over the Carbon Glacier. I had never seen animals playing out in the wild before, especially out-of-captivity in a situation like that. Opening Youtube for a brief stint a couple of years later, I stumbled across a video of some Animal Liberation Front members raiding a hatchery in which male chicks were fed via conveyor belts into meat grinders. The gory sight encouraged me to look at food in a different way and I became vegan at that point in my life.