You're a vegetable

Michael Jackson's lyrics to "Wanna Be Startin' Something" still elude me.  The chorus chants "You're A Vegetable, You're A Vegetable/ Still They Hate You, You're A Vegetable/ You're Just A Buffet, You're A Vegetable/ They Eat Off Of You, You're A Vegetable"....?

I got to thinking about these lyrics this week because of a work retreat.  At the retreat, we played this game "Two Truths and a Lie."  Out of a room of 70-ish people, about one out of every five women had the statement "I'm a vegetarian" as their lie.  So, these women would have something like 1) I love to cook (also a popular truth, but this post is about the lie not the truth....), 2) I love to garden, 3) I'm a vegetarian.  Turns out the woman likes to cook, loves to garden, and the lie is the vegetarian part.  Why is it that this was such a popular lie?  Not a rhetorical question, a question I really wanted to know the answer to.  It seems like such a lame lie to me that there had to be something behind it.

So, I phoned a friend and asked my vegetarian friends about this.  They explained how stating you are a vegetarian immediately makes people look at your size as if being a vegetarian is directly related toward the purpose of maintaining a certain weight rather than for political reasons.  She also mentioned the notion of food morality and how people judge you positively or negatively based on what you eat.  Michael Pollan tells us to eat mostly plants -- and he says to do it for political and health reasons.  Our "national eating disorder" as Pollan calls it, makes this seemingly innocuous choice of a lie for this game more revealing about how women think about food and how important what someone eats is to knowing who he/she is as a person.

Of course I'm interested in language...but as I'm increasingly focused on emotions and emotion theory, I'm also interested in appetite and the relationship between language and appetite...not only what we hunger for food-wise, but what we hunger for spiritually and emotionally and the words we use to communicate that hunger.  So, if what we eat and the make up of our diet reveals something about our personhood, then I am tempted to turn back to Michael Jackson and his catchy yet stupefying chorus.  Of course, being a vegetable as a human is being a body that has no physical or mental capabilities.  It comes from Late Latin vegetābilis  animating, from vegetāre  to enliven, from Latin vegēre  to excite....  Hmmm.  So, how in the world did the roots of this word get transformed to mean the exact opposite...instead of an enlivened or excited human, we get a human vegetable as a total void?

The OED defines vegetable as "A living organism belonging to the vegetable kingdom or the lower of the two series of organic beings; a growth devoid of animal life; a plant in the widest or scientific sense."  So, I guess that a human vegetable came to be called such because it is a person who is "living," but devoid of animal life....?  What does it say about angolophone culture that we use a food-related term to describe this state of being?  The word first seems to have appeared around the 1850's in England to talk about the uneventful and monotonous lives of peasants.

Once again I'm brought back to the intersection of labor -- peasants being low paid workers -- and objectification and how our culture dehumanizes workers by reducing them to objects.  Workers in effect become defined by the "fruits of their labor."