When Amber Husain was 26, she was preparing a piece of chicken for a friend to eat and was overcome by an unfamiliar feeling. A lifelong meat-eater, suddenly she was disgusted by what was in front of her. “I was just handling it and it felt so weird and horrible,” she says. Living with her vegan partner, she had been cooking meat far less often but had not totally given it up, believing that to do so was “little more than a salve for the naively guilty consumer”. Looking at it now though she “felt really strange … It completely transformed what I was able to confront in terms of the political reality of where meat comes from.”
Husain says she realised at that moment that for all the meat she had consumed in her life, she had never really seen it. She was, now, “relearning meat as a corpse”.
