the absent referent

The book The Sexual Politics of Meat by Carol J. Adams that I bought a while ago has just arrived today and I have been reading through bits of it. I came across this piece of text which I think explains perfectly what I'm trying to say about how we view meat.


"Through butchering, animals become absent referents. Animals in name and body are made absent as animals for meat to exist. Animals' lives precede and enable the existence of meat. If animals are alives they cannot be meat. Thus a dead body replaces the live animal. Without animals there would be no meat eating, yet they are absent from the act of eating meat because they have been transformed into food.
Animals are made absent through language that renames dead bodies before consumers participate in eating them. Our culture further mystifies the term "meat" with gastronomic language, so we do not conjure dead, butchered animals, but cuisine. Language thus contributes even further to animals' absences. While the cultural meanings of meat and meat eating shift historically, one essential part of meat's meaning is static: One does not eat meat without the death of an animals. Live animals are thus the absent referents in the concept of meat. The absent referent premits us to forget about the animal as an indepenent entity; it also enable us to resist efforts to make animals present.
There are actually three ways by which animals become absent referents. One is literally: as I have just argued, through meat eating they are literally abesnt because they are dead. Another is definitional: when we eat animals we change the way we talk about them, for instance, we no longer talk about baby animals but about veal or lamb. As we will see even more clearly in the next chapter, which examines language about eating animals, the word meat has an absent referent, the dead animals. The third way is metaphorical. Animals become metaphors for describing people's experiences. In this metaphorical sense, the meaning of the absent referent derives from its application or reference to something else."