Messy Kitchens, Clean Hands

Contemporary industrial food systems are well-tuned towards their primary goal: the efficient production of cheap food to generate high profits. Perhaps nowhere is this more acute than in the production of industrial meat. Here, workers, consumers and animals are trapped in a system that ignores their interests in order to achieve maximum profit for shareholders. But how does modern industrial meat production remain mostly hidden from view? This interdisciplinary art and cultural history thesis explores this question by looking to the kitchen, and more specifically, to its decor. These decorative objects both reflect and enable a complex ideological transformation. I explore this dynamic as a way to frame my own artistic response to the topic of industrial animal slaughter. Drawing on the genre of bucolic kitchen decor, I create my own set of kitchen towels, which reference this phenomena and interrogate this and other contradictions inherent to modern day eating. Kitchen decor is saturated with ideas about nature. Its imagery often presents an idealized version of food production: animals content, landscapes untouched, and the rhythms of agrarian life uninterrupted. While the concept of a sentimental pastoral is often used to critique reverence for the natural, in this thesis I argue that it can act as an ideological marker for a romanticized past. Just as visions of the pastoral can be used to celebrate the natural, they can also be used to erase our connections to the nature of mass slaughter. Masking the difficult-to-stomach reality of producing our food, this imagery allows us a sense of connection to the abstracted site of "the farm."