The Postmodern Prince: Critical Theory, Left Strategy, and the Making of a New Political Subject. He is also editor of the anthology, Critical Theory and Animal Liberation.
Sanbonmatsu received his BA from Hampshire College and earned his PhD in the History of Consciousness program at the University of California at Santa Cruz. He lives in the Boston area and has an adult son.
He applied the “Page 99 Test” to The Omnivore's Deception and shared the following:
The reader who opens my book to page 99 will land in the middle of my critique of the celebrity animal farmer Joel Salatin, who was propelled to national fame by Michael Pollan in his bestselling book, The Omnivore's Dilemma (2006). The page begins with Thomas Jefferson's defense of simple American agrarianism against the corrupting influences of European sophistication and "luxury." Similar nationalist and conservative themes, I show, have now surfaced again in a "new" American pastoral ideal that has embraced the supposed "romance" of animal husbandry. The chapter this page appears in offers a critique of Pollan's hagiographic depiction of Salatin as a paradigm of rural virtues and American gumption, with a view to showing how this right-wing libertarian improbably became the doyen of Pollan's legions of well-heeled, urban, educated, liberal readers. As I explain on page 99, Salatin was for many years lionized in the mainstream and progressive press; then, five years ago, Mother Jones published a searing critique of Salatin, exposing his ugly views on race. Salatin, I write, "denied that 'America is systematically racist,' insisting instead that 'the failure in the Black community is dysfunctional family collapse.'"Visit John Sanbonmatsu's website.
Although page 99 is representative of my cultural critique of the "enlightened" omnivorism defended by Pollan, Salatin, and others, it is not representative of my book as a whole, because I cover a great many other themes too. My main argument is that we have effectively organized our entire existential identity as human beings around the domination of the other beings of the Earth; that this domination is undermining the ecology of our planet and ruining our souls; and that all exploitation and killing of animals for food--we kill about 80 billion land animals and up to 2.7 trillion marine animals each year--is morally indefensible and must stop. In the first half of the book, I trace the rise and lethal consequences of the modern animal economy, then demolish the myths and bad faith that prop up that system. None of our mass violence against animals, I show, is necessary or justifiable, since we can flourish easily on a plant-based diet. In the closing chapters of my book, I show that other animals have complex consciousness and emotions, and I make the case for treating them as persons or "someones," rather than as things, commodities, and slaves. Animals are not worthless beings--they are worthy of our love.
--Marshal Zeringue
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