I thought I’d update this oft-neglected blog with some musings on my recent (re-)reading of Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” for my Restoration literature class. I first read it in high school, years before I went vegan. For those who don’t know, the proposal is that to solve the Irish hunger crisis, the infants of lower-class families should be sold at a year old to upper-class families as food. Poor people would have money and there would be less hungry children to feed – problem solved. (This actually isn’t Swift’s most shocking work. That title has to go to his poem “The Lady’s Dressing Room”, which one should not read on a full stomach.) The essay was intended to draw attention to the seriousness of the situation in Ireland with the stoic attitude of the proposer towards his extremely absurd solution.
But why is it absurd? Why are we so horrified at the prospect of selling human babies for food, when killing babies is one of the backbones of the animal agriculture industry? Male chicks ground into cattle feed less than a week after they’re born, veal calves killed for a supposed “delicacy”, broiler chickens manipulated to grow at obscenely fast rates so they can be killed at seven weeks old…What are we doing if not exactly what Jonathan Swift is ironically proposing? We kill the babies of a marginalized and powerless group in order to feed the dominant group. My favourite line is near the end of the essay: “I can think of no one Objection that will possibly be raised against this Proposal.” Well, why should we object? We already do it. In fact, Swift intentionally likens his proposal to the practices already used to raise animals for food: babies are overfed so that they’ll be plump when it comes time for slaughter; he refers to their bodies by words like “carcass” and “flesh”; and in his scenario more males will be killed than females to ensure good “breeding”. Swift’s proposal isn’t just absurd in itself. It draws attention to the absurdity of animal agriculture.
Swift didn’t make the connection, but we, fortunately, can.
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