“Using animals as food has been critiqued most notably through Adams’s concepts of the 'absent referent' and the 'mass term,' and Deane Curtin’s theory of 'contextual moral vegetarianism.' According to Adams, when living animals are made into meat and other commodities, the language itself contributes to the animal’s absence. 'Live animals are thus the absent referents in the concept of meat,' Adams argues. 'The absent referent permits us to forget about the animal as an independent entity; it also enables us to resist efforts to make animals present.' When living animals are turned into meat or other commodities, Adams continues, 'someone who has a very particular, situated life, a unique being, is converted into something that has no distinctiveness, no uniqueness, no individuality.' Thus, 'meat' is a mass term because no matter how great the quantity, meat is still meat. It is the concept of the mass term that allows people to think that they can eat a hamburger steak and that cows still exist. ‘But if you have a living cow in front of you,' as Adams explains, 'and you kill that cow, and butcher that cow, and grind up her flesh, you have not added a mass term to a mass term and ended up with more of the same.’ The phenomenon of the mass term allows people to generalize that concept to apply to an entire species or group while simultaneously overlooking the needs and interests of individual members of that species.”
