Becoming part of the food chain
On victimhood, political purity, and guilt economics
“It’s raw?”
“Yes,” my friend laughs at me, watching me chew on my first-ever bite of sushi at 26 years old, euphoria glimmering behind bulging eyes. Of course it’s raw. That’s the whole point of sushi. There is a 6 year old trapped in this 26 year old’s body, and in moments like these, it’s glaringly obvious.
There are a handful of experiences she’s missed out on—raw fish being one of them. In a way, it’s rather nice to have reserved many “first times” for adulthood. The particular ways I was deprived in youth opened doorways to raw, childlike wonder in my 20s. The latest: raw fish. It’s soft like a blanket, chewy like a pillow. My body feels tingly—my friend says salmon has that effect. I’m not sure what the science is, but I don’t question her.
“This is her first time eating sushi,” she tells our waiter. He grins and says, “You came to the right place!”
After this night, I will eat grocery store sushi every day for the next three weeks. It’s always all-or-nothing for me, isn’t it? What made me like this? A lifetime of repressed desire, perhaps?
I was a vegetarian my whole life. At 6 years old, when I learned that what my mother referred to as “meat” meant dead chickens and cows, I was horrified. I begged her to please, please, please stop force feeding it to me. She told me I could stop eventually, but first I needed these dead creatures to help me grow strong.
What? That was the rule of this game?
Animals have to die if I want to live?
But don’t they deserve life as much as me, Mommy?
Life is a beautiful thing, can’t you see?
Can’t we enjoy it without killing each other?
I didn’t want to believe the brutal rules of life. I would make my own rules.
I reluctantly swallowed dead things for a couple more years, until at age 8, I began to refuse. My mother lost the will to bargain with me and surrendered her nutritional crusade. I stopped eating meat overnight and switched to a questionable diet consisting of pasta, cereal, white bread, and white rice. White wheat and no meat—this was what purity looked like. Never again would I be subjected to specks of red.
What gave me the audacity to refuse at eight years old? Well, it was the year my father raped me for the first time. It was the year I got a true taste of meat—of what it felt like to be a caged animal, powerless and terrified, awaiting slaughter. The year I bled red. Still alive, but just as red as the dead I was fed. I already empathized with those helpless animals, but I was one of them now. I couldn’t see how their experience was any different from mine. They were only alive to feed the big fish in the sea—I was only alive to feed the big fish in the sea. We were here to be consumed. We were the small fish.
My vows came automatically: I would never become one of the big fish. Those depraved souls with bottomless stomachs, consuming their every desire with no moral regard—I learned what evil was, and it looked just like desire. I saw the demonic look of desire in my father’s eyes. The big fish were evil, and desire was terribly, terribly dangerous. I would never be like them. My soul would remain intact, and I would have no place in this awful, merciless food chain. I would opt out altogether. I’d opt out of desire, or at least do my best to ensure my desires were always respectable, cruelty-free, and politically correct. Perhaps, if everyone got the same taste of meat I did, we’d all be vegans.
It is easier for humans to compartmentalize the slaughter of non-human animals—to naturalize the modern food chain and celebrate our position at the top of it—if we are never thrust into a position of hyper-empathy with the caged animals at the bottom. I got a personal taste of the violence I was forced to swallow. Living as a caged animal funnelled me into overwhelming empathy and solidarity with helpless creatures in cages, “the voiceless” everywhere, the underdogs from all walks of life. I had no power to erase violence from the world, or to stop the bigger fish from eating smaller fish, or to alter the structure of the food chain—I could only refuse to participate.
At just 8 years old, vegetarianism was my original protest, my hunger strike. It was my assertion of bodily autonomy. You think you can rape me? Keep me in a cage? You think you have the right to enter my body? Whenever you want? Without permission? Well, then, I’m going to become very selective about what enters my body from here on out. My body would become a sovereign state. While I couldn’t erase enemy invasions of the past, I could choose to close my borders. I couldn’t change the violence I was forced to swallow, but I could choose not to swallow even more.
These animals were my comrades in the grand liberation struggle, in the collective fight for autonomy. I was fighting for them—and through them, for myself—though I didn’t have words for it yet. I was only 8, still stuck in a cage, too small to fight my father—that dangerous big fish, not yet—and lacking enough safety and self-concept to pour empathy onto myself, but I could let my sweet 8 year old heart bleed for other animals. Nobody found that threatening—a little girl’s empathetic heart is nothing but endearing, as long as she’s not fighting for her own freedom.
When emotions cannot be safely integrated, they are projected externally, concretized, and lived out through symbols. Vegans were once sensitive children who never received the tenderness they needed, whose hearts bled for the violent world they were born into, whose only form of acceptable protest was dietary restriction—much like the anorexic’s brand of grief-stricken hunger strike. We were children who, in one way or another, felt utterly alone and powerless in the food chain—and we never wanted another living being to be subjected to that terror. We wanted the world to be softer, gentler, and fair. We wanted the world to be good. And in spite of it all, we would be good.
Behind the tender sensitivity of many vegans is a deep, subterranean rage—born of personal grief, obfuscated through animal projection. It is a grief over our own position in the food chain, the very existence of the food chain, the nature of power structures, and the sheer impossibility of survival in this world without casualties. Beneath intricately spun ethical arguments often lies a refusal to feel the colossal weight of personal grief living in our bodies, followed by a transference of that grief onto beings who have it harder—smaller beings, beings who are even more helpless. It is an empathetic and poetic fight against the harsh realities we were made to swallow.
A personal grieving process masquerading as moralism follows the grief stages—denial, anger, bargaining—all the same.
Denial: These can’t be the rules of the game.
Anger: These are the rules of the game, and I’m enraged.
Bargaining: I’m going to bargain for a rule change.
When horrific violence happened to me, I couldn’t move through my own personal grieving process; I lacked the somatic capacity. I was in no position protect myself, fight for myself, or grieve for myself, but I knew how to protect, fight for, and grieve for other wounded animals. Focusing my emotional energy on the millions of innocent animals being killed helped me come to terms with own defiled innocence. Crying out for the millions of other creatures stuck in cages helped numb the terror of still being stuck in a cage myself. The assigned Holocaust books I was reading in elementary school in the same years I was getting raped functioned similarly. After all, I was still alive; it couldn’t be that bad. An easy way to deter from the unacceptable in your own life is to fixate on other unacceptable things in the world. I didn’t have the freedom I longed for, but I had more freedom than other beings—and who was I to pity myself or demand more for my life if others had it worse?
Others will always have it worse—which made my fixation on the more oppressed a brilliant coping mechanism, protecting me until I was ready to start feeling. I didn’t have to untangle the mess of my grief. My life now had a clear purpose: to fight for others, to uplift those at the very, very bottom of the food chain. Self-advocacy, self-compassion—or, dare I say, self-pity—would have to wait. There wasn’t time for it, and my body wasn’t ready for it—and in the scheme of life, did my own selfish little life matter that much? What about all the other victims? I wasn’t the smallest in the food chain. I wasn’t worth pity.
I was drowning in empathy and preoccupied with a pressing need to distance myself from even the slightest resemblance to the big fish, the oppressors. I would never become like my father. This meant I must always remain a victim—not victim-enough to be the one advocated for, but just victim-enough to live forever in solidarity with all other victims: a victim protecting other victims. Of course, this was the perfect gateway into social justice culture.
My rejection of the food chain and my unflinching solidarity with victimhood took new forms as I got older. In third grade, it began with the vegetarianism. In fourth grade, I brought news articles about the Iraq War into class to educate my peers. In fifth grade, Proposition 8 had me stomping around the playground during recess, screaming “Marriage is about love, not gender!”
By college, I was organizing high-profile direct action protests against weapons manufacturers and leading a city-wide chapter of Food Not Bombs. After graduating, I worked as a professional campaign organizer at an anti-war non-profit. I lived with the blazing heart of a warrior, bold and courageous—others saw my life as grand and heroic. I lived in the fast lane. It was hard to find a place for my fighting spirit in the real world—my moralism was rigid, my ideals unattainable—but I made it work.
Social justice provided the perfect outlet to contain my overactive nervous system stuck in a chronic fight response. I could not complete the fight response I needed to move through as a child, but now, I would fight the good fight. I would be good. I found an outlet to express my rage and be good, all at the same time. I needed to scream and cry for myself, but screaming about war into a megaphone would suffice.
I zoomed out on my own despair and contextualized it through the pain of the world. I buried my grief in something much, much larger, hoping to never find it again. I genuinely cared about the entire world’s suffering, so what difference did it make? I didn’t need to make it about me. I didn't want to make it about me. It would have been wrong to make it about me—unless I was at the very bottom of the food chain, and unless I was able to prove that through identity markers or somehow measure the extent of my pain. It was easier to transform myself into the hero—the hero people could actually trust, because I was also a victim.
To outside observers, my crusade looked like moral purity. Inside, I creeped in the direction of self-obliteration. I didn’t know what my real desires were. Desire was deeply dangerous, I learned, and taking what you wanted from life was an act of violence. Living selfishly was the most evil thing you could do. I equated self-will with violence and self-sacrifice with goodness. The only way to do no harm, leave no footprint, and be morally pure in this wretched world was to opt out of any pursuit that could be deemed “selfish” in any capacity—to align yourself with the utmost helpless and live entirely for them.
Goodness was achieved through proximity to victimhood—the lower you are on the food chain, the purer you remain. In a ruthless, dog eat dog world, perpetual victimhood is the only way to maintain moral purity, to live unstained by sin. We don’t ever want to be like our victimizers. So, we can never lose touch with the truth of oppression—we must either exist as the wounded or sacrifice ourselves for them. Isn’t that what they call Christ Consciousness? It rings true in many spiritual traditions. Proving victimhood proves goodness and trustworthiness. In the absence of victimhood, martyrdom is your only option—you must prove your purity through the correct self-sacrificial actions. If you are a victim, you’re free. If you’re not a victim, you better get to work.
If you hope to one day be worthy of living out your selfish desires on this planet, you must first sacrifice your desires to prove you’re good enough for them. Once you’ve proven your goodness, you’ve earned some dessert—not too much, though, and only eat after everyone has been served. Prioritize the hungriest, feed them first, and when you become amongst the hungriest, then you will be fed. It is true Christian logic. It is basic humanitarian logic. I practiced this logic while sharing thousands of meals with people through Food Not Bombs; we practiced it together. It was our own little pocket of peace, following a moral code that actually made sense, unlike the rest of the food chain. I was called to political organizing because my tender, grieving heart bled with compassion and because nothing felt more important than keeping other people alive —but quickly, I also learned, doing this earned me my right to exist.
In devoting a large portion of my life to feeding the hungry, welcoming the stress that came with spearheading a weekly operation, and sacrificing my time and body, I atoned for my privilege adequately enough to earn myself financial security within the Guilt Economy. In my friends’ tirades about privilege and identity politics, I somehow found myself exempt—no grievances were ever directed at me. In the Court of Social Justice, I was innocent, so I was free. I was a virtuous victim, and I had already well surpassed my quota for good works, probably enough for a lifetime. I’m not sure how that quota gets calculated, or exactly who my judge was, but the verdict was clear: I did my time, so I earned the privilege to have my own little selfish desires—sometimes. Now? I eat sushi sometimes.
A friend of mine has been expressing immense grief and rage over the genocide in Palestine, more than anyone else I know. Most of my other peers are numbing themselves to varying degrees for various reasons related to apathy or lack of capacity. I’d like to believe that given the time, tools, and circumstances, people naturally feel empowered to act out their highest ideals. Our political environment is deeply disempowering and hard for people to believe in—and it’s hard to engage with something you can’t believe in. It’s a brutal food chain that grinds you down, swallows you, spits you back out, and leaves you dismembered, tasked with re-membering your soul all by yourself. Opting out, to me, is not always an act of privilege but sometimes one of survival. This is not to excuse apathy but to understand it.
Maybe I’m naive. Maybe people just don’t care. The big fish don’t seem to care. My friend was enraged by the idea that she cares more than her other friends, which felt deeply isolating, like a moral betrayal. She questioned her ability to be in community with people who were not embodying their morals to the degree she was, and I’ve been there—I’ve been there my whole life. The world is heartbreaking when you care about violence that others cannot seem to take notice of. On a phone call, she vented to me about how her friends were failing to talk about Palestine, post about it, or perform any kind of noticeable public action. The rage she directed toward her apolitical friends seemed more fervent and aggressive than her rage at the entire military industrial complex.
Perhaps in compensation for our utter lack of control over the dystopian food chain of military powers, we might regain a sliver of control through shaming our friends in the Guilt Economy. She raged at their privilege to turn a blind eye and not take action. And while I certainly wasn’t turning a blind eye, I wasn’t taking anywhere near as much action as her—most of what she scrutinized her other friends for applied to me.
I cautiously told her, “Well, I’m no different from them. It makes me wonder why you don’t feel this way towards me.” I was curious if she would confront me with the same rage or if I would be spared.
She spared me. She told me that I am different from them, because I’ve lived a life of extreme trauma, and because I’m battling a chronic illness. In her eyes, in the Court of Social Justice, and by the logic of guilt economics, my struggles granted me a “get out of activism free” pass, at least this time around. I am still living as a victim, the logic outlined, so I am still politically pure, which excused me from the mandate of martyrdom. I am a small-enough fish, so I owed less to the other small fish. If your own existence is pitiful enough, you’re exempt from responsibility. All those privileged people—her oblivious friends whose days aren’t consumed by pitiful struggles such as mine—they’re the ones with moral obligation to sacrifice for the cause.
“I know you care. You’ve thrown down for causes in the past,” she reasoned to me.
My history of extensive anti-war organizing and the countless hours I had formerly devoted to the cause gave her enough faith in my morality—her rage was less about perceived inaction and more about perceived immorality. My years of self-sacrifice had earned me the right to prioritize my own needs this year and still be considered a moral person. I had already proven how much I cared in the past, which proved my morality, goodness, and trustworthiness in the eyes of the court. I was found innocent. All those privileged people, who aren’t visibly suffering, who aren’t proving that they care about genocide, who have never proved they care about anything but themselves—they’re the ones she’s raging at.
“These people have never done anything in their lives,” she told me.
They might not be active killers—they’re not the ones enacting the genocide, and they have little power over it—but they are big fish in her eyes. They have the tainted hearts of big fish. They can’t be bothered to make sure others get fed. They only care about what they want to eat. They are symbolic of a threat beyond genocide: the threat of desire.
My desire for sushi grew overnight, and it became normal just as quickly. One taste flipped a lifetime of morality. I was left with a hunger for flesh. In an instant, it became an acceptable desire for me to act upon.
I was a big fish now.
I never wanted to be a big fish. I never wanted to be like my father. I kept my desires on a tight leash for 20 years. The few desires I let myself have were pure, wholesome, and politically correct. I was good. I was going to heaven.
Look at me now. What have I become? I hated the rules of the food chain. I created my own rules. I practiced them, I preached them, then I broke them, and then I realized there were never any rules to begin with. That’s what my father realized, too. If there are no rules, you can do whatever you want.
A culture that no longer believes in morality descends into decadence.
Here I am: being selfish, eating shellfish. I even have the audacity to call it normal, natural, good. I could justify it for specific health reasons—I have a chronic illness, and fish is saving my life, I could say. Then, would I dare to eat it without guilt? What makes my life more important than these other fish? And what if I wasn’t eating them to survive? What if it wasn’t a need? What if it was a dangerous desire? All for my sick, twisted pleasure?
What then? What else could get normalized this easily?
Genocide?1
For decades, radical vegans have been equating mass animal slaughter with genocide. To them, the comparison holds true, and to suggest otherwise—to poke holes in the logic by enforcing a human-animal binary—is to be speciesist. If you’re against genocide, they argue, you must also be a vegan. By that logic, you also probably shouldn’t walk anywhere, at risk of accidentally killing an ant. But to moralists, it’s the intention that matters. Accidents are okay. If you kill something on accident, you can still be good. These days, personal morality seems to be measured in good intentions.
This writing is not a statement on the ethics of meat or genocide. I am staunchly anti-war and anti-factory farming—both are cruel and, ethics aside, environmentally lethal. This writing is about the social production of morality and the emotional forces that shape its expression. It is an exploration of victimhood, desire, purity, and social responsibility.
You’re a great writer. Thank you for this, and for all you’re unearthing and being honest about.