15 - The Exposé

Summary

We cannot pretend that we do not know this. We are not ostriches, and cannot believe that if we refuse to look at what we do not wish to see, it will not exist. This is especially the case when what we do not wish to see is what we wish to eat.

Leo Tolstoy, “The First Step,” (45)

The world runs … on the fuel of this endless fathomless misery. People know it, but they don’t mind what they don’t see. Make them look and they mind, but you’re the one they hate, because you’re the one that made them look.

Karen Joy Fowler (232)

Introduction

The purpose of the exposé form is to expose, to bare, to bring to light, to disclose, display, uncover, unmask. Exposé is often an attempt to reveal truths deliberately kept hidden. In the case of exposé related to the impacts associated with human consumption of billions of nonhuman animals each year, exposé has the challenge of exposing violence to a human populace pretending not to know; or to expose the systems of power that hide violence and lull society to complacency. Musician Sir Paul McCartney is often quoted as saying, “If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would go vegetarian.” But what happens when the exposé writer who encounters those glass walls refuses to fully see through them, or sees but does not go vegetarian?

This chapter looks at the form of exposé through a vegan literary lens that is inclusive of multiple perspectives including those of animals, labor, immigration, feminism, and the environment. By looking closely at four texts, this chapter shows how the vegan literary exposé seeks to wake a population pretending to be sleeping. Two of the popular literary exposés written by omnivores – Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006) and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals (2009) – will be in conversation with two academic exposés by vegan writers who explore the ethical challenges of the form and of bearing witness – Timothy Pachirat’s Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight (2011) and Kathryn Gillespie’s The Cow with Ear Tag #1389 (2018). This essay is also itself a form of exposé, exposing the fictions and omissions made in Pollan’s and Foer’s texts and the ways in which they reinforce strategies of concealment.