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ROBERT MCKAY: When did people first know what meat is?   RACHAEL ALLEN: I became vegetarian when I was 9, but not because I was concerned with an animal I became vegetarian because I was really aware of Mad Cow Disease And that shaped my ideas about eating animals or not eating animals way more than respecting them or loving them It was a fear of what they were going to do to my body if they were diseased   PATRICK STAFF: I think that it’s interesting to consider how things enter into our consciousness via crises My first question to myself and to everyone is, how do we define our terms It feels like we need to establish exactly what we mean by ‘meat’   MCKAY: One of the things that meat discussions tend to do is create a kind of slippage between knowledge and ideology, though So even the question, ‘When did you first know what meat is?’, prompts the response, ‘When did I see through cultural discourses about it to what it truly is?’ Which is essentially a point of trying to read meat as an ideology When did you know that meat was ‘meat’? When did you know that the thing that you eat was this kind of cultural force? This is part of the question, I guess But then there are other ways of thinking of meat, right?   REVITAL COHEN: For me it’s a really visual memory There are two images from around the same time, although I don’t really remember which came first One of them was seeing an open van next to the butchers with sheep carcasses And the second, I had just started reading by myself, I was reading the newspaper and there was a story of a little girl who was murdered and pieces of her body came ashore Something kind of mixed in my head about all these pieces of bodies, and I haven’t eaten meat since   MCKAY: And you saw a connection So the connection there is to do with the meatiness, the way the human body suddenly becomes seeable as meat?   COHEN: Maybe also a feeling of vulnerability Suddenly seeing this, this personhood in these pieces of meat in the van, and understanding that we could all be these pieces at some point   MCKAY: There’s a philosopher called Matthew Calarco who coined the term ‘indistinction’ for this