What if meat were more than just food—what if it were shaped by cultural, economic, and psychological forces that influence our relationships with animals? In his book, Interpreting Meat: Theorizing the Commodification and Consumption of Animals, professor Teddy Duncan Jr. challenges us to rethink meat as a commodity deeply tied to cultural practices and beliefs. In this interview, Duncan explores the language surrounding meat, the values that shape human-animal relationships, and how understanding these dynamics can lead to a more compassionate and reflective engagement with the world around us.
What inspired you to write Interpreting Meat, and what do you hope readers will take away from it?
The idea for the book emerged from an academic article I wrote on the slaughterhouse-Holocaust analogy and analogous (human-to-animal) thinking in general. In that article, I assert that meat should be examined in its specificity, especially its economic dimension. From there, after reading Slavoj Žižek’s book For They Know Not What They Do, I realized that many insights from Žižek and Jacques Lacan, especially the psychoanalytic ideas around “enjoyment” and jouissance, applied directly to the meat-commodity and so I began to write the ensuing chapters.
I hope that readers will reorient their view of the meat commodity, not in terms of whether they should eat meat or reject it, but rather consider meat as an object predicated on certain cultural practices and beliefs. In short, I hope the reader will “de-naturalize” meat instead of thinking of it as an immediate given of the world.
You describe meat as a “commodity” in your book. Could you explain what this means and how it affects our relationship with animals?
Meat is, in the contemporary world, a commodity because it is produced to be bought and sold. Recognizing meat as a commodity does a few things: It facilitates the realization that meat exists not only for nutritional or gastronomical pleasure but also exists to generate money. Additionally, thinking of meat as a commodity tells us that it is contingent rather than necessary. Oftentimes, we look at the objects around us and naturalize them—“that is just how that thing exists”—yet commodities do not emerge from acausal nothingness: they exist due to a certain economic and ideological configuration of the world. Understanding a commodity-object helps us understand culture and why a culture demands a commodity.
Further, examining the modern meat-commodity distinguishes it from other forms of meat existing under entirely distinct social and historical circumstances. For instance, raising cows in colonial America to feed one’s family, domesticating goats in an agrarian society, or even my family—a few generations ago—who were hunting deer and squirrels in the hills of rural Kentucky to survive. All these examples are distinct from going to the supermarket and purchasing packaged pre-sliced meat for sandwiches. I do not mean a moral or ethical difference here but rather a literal, material difference: There is an entirely different apparatus that produces the meat—and the human holds a different (literal and psychic) relation to the animal.

Susie Coston and a rescued resident pig at Farm Sanctuary. JoAnne McArthur/WeAnimals Media
How does the way we talk about meat and animals influence our understanding of them as living beings versus products for consumption?
That is a great question! I think that language is crucial to human-animal relations. Consider something such as domestic naming-practices: How does conferring an animal, such as a pet, a name distinguish them from livestock? The answer is this: A name individuates and gives them a moral status, unlike the nameless, non-individuated mass of livestock-animals. There are also insights from theorists such as Carol J. Adams on the function of meat names and the “absent referent.” For example, we refer to pig-meat as pork and cow-meat as beef, and some assert that this is a way of severing the living animal from the dead animal on a plate.
However, even more foundationally, I think that naming-practices are ways of circumventing the traumatic kernel of slaughter: Even if an animal activist calls cow-meat “dead cow flesh” or some other hyper-descriptive term in an attempt to “name” the “true reality” of meat, the language can never capture the “truth” of the slaughter-act. So, rather than language being something that merely avoids naming “truth,” the even more crucial insight is that language can only impossibly orbit around it. Either way, the slaughter-act exceeds the language that tries to signify it.
How do you think people’s most deeply held values can shape their approach to meat consumption and the treatment of animals?
Unlike some, I am radically optimistic about the social field: In general, I think that people love animals, and this is reflected in the growth of animal abuse legislation and the widespread near-unanimous sentiment to protect animals. Simply, I believe that the values are already present, and I reject the thesis (of some) that eating meat is indicative of primitive violence or a sadistic impulse—my friends and family members who eat meat are not somehow uninformed and do not want to (consciously or unconsciously) impose violence on animals. Instead, in the case of meat, there is a mechanism of “disavowal” at play.
This goes something like this: “I know that animals are living subjects, yet due to the circle of life, I must eat them to sustain myself. . .” The disavowal functions to create a gap between belief and action: “Yes, I must not harm animals, but because of X, I must consume them.” In the book, I catalogue the different reasons this disavowal exists. The fundamental insight is, though, that it is not the case that people are innately violent or do not value animal life or that there is some concealed reality of meat that people are unfamiliar with (everyone knows what occurs in a slaughterhouse) rather disavowal permits one to concurrently abhor violence towards animals and continue to eat meat.
What gives you hope about the future of human-animal relationships, and how do you see your work contributing to a more compassionate world?
Although, in many ways, I am radically optimistic, I’m not optimistic about the activistic or real-world application of my book. To me, the book functions as a contribution of knowledge on the subject of meat. In the conclusion of the book, I explain that I try to take on the neutral position of the psychoanalyst.
Lacan has an incisive moment in one of his seminars where he explains the ideal role of the analyst through someone visiting a Chinese restaurant: Someone goes to a restaurant and doesn’t know what anything means, so they ask the server to explain the menu items. The server translates the menu, but the customer still doesn’t know what they want, so they resort to a common gesture: “Recommend something!” Of course, by asking this question, the customer is asking the server what they should want on the menu. Yet, the server has no idea what the customer really wants; they can only explain and translate the menu. To Lacan, this is the same position that the analyst occupies: One can translate the operations of the unconscious, but one cannot tell someone what they should desire. Although I am not an analyst, I try to take on this perspective in my function as an author: My book presents the meat-commodity “translated”—interpreted through philosophy and psychoanalysis—but, I cannot tell the reader how to proceed; I cannot tell them what and how they should desire.
Teddy Duncan Jr. is a professor at Valencia College in Orlando, Florida, specialising in English and philosophy.
His academic interests encompass animal ethics, psychoanalysis, and cultural studies, with a particular focus on the moral status of animals and the commodification of animal products.
His debut academic book, Interpreting Meat: Theorizing the Commodification and Consumption of Animals, is published by McFarland & Company.