“We eat anything that moves,” my Aunt tells me. She is half joking, trying to lighten the mood as I, a Chinese American, am not adjusted to the food of my parent’s home country. I have visited southern China where next to the beef and pork dishes I am familiar with, there were also turtle, wasp, and pigeon. I was not adventurous enough to branch out of the familiar chicken, beef, and pork meats that are part of my daily diet. However, this made me think about the relationship between people and their meat-eating habits.
The aim of this project is to bring up the idea of our meat consumption and respect for each other. This was done by creating a remix with photos from different social media. One crucial media to include was Instagram as the app, often after long hours of doom-scrolling, displays videos of dishes that the average American (from the United States) has not seen before. This included un-American meats, to which the comments section never failed to express their disdain for the invention and at times, blatant racism. This imagery has also been used as political rhetoric such as Trump weaponizing stereotypes through claiming immigrants were “eating the dogs” and cats to spread hate. However, the same people who loudly express their opinions about their disgust for the unusual meats by claiming to have empathy for the animals, also at the same time still eat meat and criticize people who choose veganism.
I chose to point this hypocrisy out by making a Frankenstein photo of a “pet” and a photo of “livestock” through searching up these keywords on popular social media (Instagram, Pinterest, TikTok, Twitter) and stealing a photo from the top result. Artificial intelligence (ChatGPT) was also used in this creation as the program has also fed information that contains American biases. Screenshots of comments displaying the hypocrisy I have mentioned are also included. The piece is arranged to have the general feeling of what social media looked like to me when looking at this topic. I expected to see the Frankenstein photo of the pet to look more fuzzy and cute compared to the livestock photo. I expected that people had more of a connection to the animals they find cute and, therefore are opposed to considering them as meat. However, after combining all the features, the two looked equally cute and weird which further emphasizes the hypocrisy. I understand that a large part of this difference in views comes from culture, wealth, environment, and a multitude of other factors as I also stray away from eating the three types of meat I am unfamiliar with. However, my wish is for people to be more respectful to each other, and if felt inclined to, encourage ethical meat consumption through actions and conversations that are not hypocritical.
Although I have taken photos from other sources, what makes my piece original is that I have cut and rearranged the public photos into a new creation with specific intentions and messaging. Other people have also had the same ideas that I have but no one has created this specific Frankenstein animal and put this message together. I was inspired by the “an original plagiarism” project from Louisa Miller-Out (Published September 22, 2022) of the collaging aspect and was inspired by the environment I have been exposed to for the messaging. Following Johnathan Lethem’s idea, I took the existing art from the gift economy and created a new gift to pass on. I also do not claim to own the original photos and have also included a key to the sources I have used. For these reasons, I do not believe my plagiarism is really plagiarism.
Link to credits:https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-VjW8YO69VP114r-pjOr-NqXWZX2VMQcNUtnCZOxqV8/edit?tab=t.0