In the Sunday Strib—the weekend advertising supplement to the Minneapolis Star Tribune that arrives free and unrequested on my doorstep every Saturday—food editor Lee Svitak Dean has an article about eggs. In an interview with Michael Ruhlman, author of Egg: A Culinary Exploration of the World’s Most Versatile Ingredient, Dean explores the deliciousness of eggs, the nutritional benefits of eggs, techniques for cooking eggs, the wonderfulness of meringue, and the purchasing of she calls “our most useful cooking tool.” The article concludes, of course, with a recipe.
What is missing? What remains screened from view, as if irrelevant or nonexistent? The living beings who create those eggs—the millions upon millions of hens who suffer so that we can make “Eggs in Puttanesca Sauce with Angel Hair Pasta.” The lives spent in darkness. The cramped cages. The wire mesh. The beaks snipped off without anaesthesia. The male chicks dropped live into grinders. None of that is present among the discussion of prices and cooking times.
Now, I know what you’re thinking: Jill, we love ya, but Dean’s is a FOOD column—and this is a WRITING blog, and neither should be about animal rights. So let’s not talk about animal rights. Let’s talk about writing and visibility.
In everything we write—every single thing—what we choose to include and what we choose to leave out is never neutral. What we select reflects what we know and think about, but it also determines what we know and think about. Reading and writing shape the way we view the world. They sharpen the focus on some issues, ideas, beings, and events, and relegate others to the background or the margins. They magnify what we wish to know and render invisible what we wish to ignore.
This isn’t just about animals. It’s about anyone and anything left out of the discourse. It’s about any troubling issue conveniently ignored. About all the uncomfortable realities that might force us to confront social injustices, challenge our own assumptions, and bring about change.
In Ursula K. LeGuin’s award-winning story, “The Ones Who Walk away from Omelas,” the citizens of a beautiful city enjoy perpetual pleasure and health—but only because a single child is kept locked, tortured, filthy, sick, and ignored in a dark room. The suffering of that child, hidden from view, is ignored by most, who dance to the “shimmering of gong and tambourine” and relax in “moss-grown gardens and under avenues of trees.” The freeing of that one child would shatter the peace and beauty of Omelas, so few dare even to think of it.
But there are some people who cannot enjoy the delights of the city, knowing about the suffering of that child. A few walk away from the beauty and pleasure and never return. “They keep walking,” LeGuin writes, “and walk straight out of the city of Omelas, through the beautiful gates. . . Each one goes alone.”
As writers, we’re in a unique position. We can support the status quo, bolster existing power structures, and go with the flow merely by writing what we’re expected to—by sticking to the script. Or we can peer into the darkness, listen to the silence, discover who and what is hidden there, and give them a voice. It’s our choice. We can enjoy the delights of the world as it is, or we can be the ones who walk away from Omelas.
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