‘Meat is King’: Meat-eating, misogyny and intersecting oppressions in Jim Crace’s ‘The Devil’s Larder’ and Jeanette Winterson’s ‘The World and Other Places’

Food is a consumable item imbued with imagery and associations that not only act as a vehicle for the formation and transmission of cultural values, but which also to draw attention to a range of inequalities. In her feminist-vegetarian text The Sexual Politics of Meat, Carol J. Adams suggests that literary representations of meat-eating often overlap with the figurative language of women as meat, in part because viewing women as 'consumable' is a central aspect of our culture. This paper analyses short fiction from Jeanette Winterson's The World and Other Places and Jim Crace's The Devil's Larder through the lens of Adams’s theory to examine the ways in which they use food to address the intersecting oppression of women and animals. The interdependence of the language of patriarchal culture with that of meat production and consumption within Winterson and Crace's short fiction is examined through three primary areas. First, 'Meat as King', analyses how masculine power is tied with meat consumption and the objectification of women and animals with erotic desire. In the second section, Crace's approach to the problematic associations that form his language of body and food are compared with Winterson's to determine the extent to which they are critical of how food reflects various inequalities. This leads into the final section, in which the authors' conflation of meat with masculinity is juxtaposed by aligning vegetables and grains with femininity for differing effect. Whilst Crace and Winterson express a self-awareness of the overlap of oppression and food consumption in their short fiction, Winterson's wry, satirical utilisation of such oppressive language suggests an approach that is more critical than Crace's tendency to align food consumption with women's bodies and male sexuality.