{"id":3232,"date":"2016-01-01T19:57:54","date_gmt":"2016-01-02T01:57:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/?p=3232"},"modified":"2016-01-01T20:11:57","modified_gmt":"2016-01-02T02:11:57","slug":"consensual-violence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/?p=3232","title":{"rendered":"Consensual Violence"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"420\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/Lg1lKivZqiw\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve been some form of vegetarian since 1995&#8230; being strict vegan between 1999 or so until around 2007-ish, then doing 2 years as a raw food vegan and then re-introducing eggs and dairy into my diet after a running injury wouldn&#8217;t heal for several months. My thought was that I wasn&#8217;t getting enough protein, which seemed to turn out true when I healed within a week of eating eggs. <\/p>\n<p>Since then I&#8217;ve been a pretty standard vegetarian. No meat or fish, unless meat was served to me by mistake and then feeling obligated to eat the food so not to waste it or in my mind, disrespect the animal sacrifice. <\/p>\n<p>Basically it&#8217;s been 20 years of no-meat. In general I avoid straight cheese and milk since my body doesn&#8217;t seem to agree with it so much. If there&#8217;s a vegan pizza option, I&#8217;ll usually go for that. But in those rare times where I&#8217;ve been handed a prepared meat dish and felt obligated to eat it out of concern for waste, it&#8217;s caused me to reflect on the intensity of food violence, and the &#8220;overwhelming and collective murder&#8221; of the natural world as Herzog so humorously put it. <\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"420\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/ze9-ARjL-ZA\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Unlike some romantic vegetarians, I don&#8217;t have illusions about the psychotic violence of the natural world; that we as humans with our cow farms and factory chicken hell-pits are simply acting out our programming to exploit potential food resources to the best of our abilities. That&#8217;s not the point of this entry. I&#8217;m making an observation about the visceral feeling of encountering death through eating, and how heavy that can be for someone who hasn&#8217;t eaten meat in years. <\/p>\n<p>When you&#8217;ve been a vegetarian for many years, and you are put in a situation where eating a dead animal seems necessary, suddenly the act of consuming becomes incredibly vivid. Eating the meal becomes a super heavy philosophical act. And then to imagine that people every day thoughtlessly consume food that was created through such a powerful act of violence really blows your mind. It&#8217;s fucking crazy, actually. What is even more heavy is how the violence for us humans is almost always second, third, fourth (etc) hand. For non-humans the violence is more often than not, direct. The understanding of death=food is unavoidable. As a lion, you have to engage in a fight to eat, so living can&#8217;t exist without murder. <\/p>\n<p>Which loosely brings me to the title of this post &#8220;consensual violence&#8221;, and my musings on the ritual of sport fighting. For some reason I&#8217;ve been watching a lot of MMA clips since moving to France. I used to find MMA totally unwatchable. The violence really upset me; almost as much as some horror movies. As a kid, my dad liked watching MMA fights, and I would usually leave the room, because I couldn&#8217;t take the brutality. It was different from boxing, which felt more like a mythical dance. <\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/1VDOGNE1oxo\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>The only time I would stay in the room was if I knew one of the fighters was a jiu jitsu guy because they&#8217;d go for submissions rather than face pummelling. <\/p>\n<p>Something changed in me as the time passed&#8230; dwelling endlessly on heavy thoughts regarding the death and violence that we in the U.S. take for granted. This includes the weird silent wars we wage on other countries which feels super similar to the way we, the passive public engage with our feelings about food. <\/p>\n<p>Now that I&#8217;m older it feels like fighting sports (like MMA) are one of the few things we have that help remind us of the stakes of survival, of death. But the fight is consensual, which gives it a certain beauty instead of horror. When I watch these fights, I do feel that visceral feeling of watching a nature video where a lion is eating a gazelle, but there&#8217;s also the element of rules, social rituals and discipline that doesn&#8217;t exist in the nature video. I don&#8217;t know if lions feel respect for their prey. Anyway what I&#8217;m saying is, I feel like there&#8217;s some relationship between MMA fights and the way we should be thinking about our food??? Hey guess what, I&#8217;m just gonna leave it at that! Also I&#8217;m pretty proud of that Meat Man bit that I wrote for Adventure Time. Goodnight!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been some form of vegetarian since 1995&#8230; being strict vegan between 1999 or so until around 2007-ish, then doing 2 years as a raw food vegan and then re-introducing eggs and dairy into my diet after a running injury wouldn&#8217;t heal for several months. My thought was that I wasn&#8217;t getting enough protein, which [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[13],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3232"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3232"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3232\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3237,"href":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3232\/revisions\/3237"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3232"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3232"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3232"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}