Ethics and the non-human: the matterings of sentience in the meat industry (original) (raw)
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The development of cultured meat has gained urgency through the increasing problems associated with meat, but what it might become is still open in many respects. In existing debates, two main moral profiles can be distinguished. Vegetarians and vegans who embrace cultured meat emphasize how it could contribute to the diminishment of animal suffering and exploitation, while in a more mainstream profile cultured meat helps to keep meat eating sustainable and affordable. In this paper we argue that these profiles do not exhaust the options and that (gut) feelings as well as imagination are needed to explore possible future options. On the basis of workshops, we present a third moral profile, “the pig in the backyard”. Here cultured meat is imagined as an element of a hybrid community of humans and animals that would allow for both the consumption of animal protein and meaningful relations with domestic (farm) animals. Experience in the workshops and elsewhere also illustrates that thinking about cultured meat inspires new thoughts on “normal” meat. In short, the idea of cultured meat opens up new search space in various ways. We suggest that ethics can take an active part in these searches, by fostering a process that integrates (gut) feelings, imagination and rational thought and that expands the range of our moral identities.
Our Discourse of Meat: What Are We Really Doing?
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'Happy Cows', 'Happy Beef': A Critique of the Rationales for Ethical Meat
The ethical food movement signals a significant transformation of cultural consciousness in its recognition of the intimate politics of what we eat and what kind of socio-political systems we sustain. The recent resurgence of economic localization exemplifies a grass roots attempt to undermine the hegemony of transnational corporations and build ecologically and economically sustainable communities. Social justice plays a key role in the guiding philosophies of these movements, and yet, while many ecocritical discourses examine the uncomfortable relationship of anthropocentricism and sustainability, some contemporary texts of the ethical food movement evidence a reluctant embrace of omnivorous eating, while simultaneously indicating a gendered, if ironic, machismo at odds with the principles of ethical eating. An analysis of the rhetoric of three popular nonfiction books that construct a similar narrative of the story of meat—Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Susan Bourette’s Meat, a Love Story, and Scott Gold’s The Shameless Carnivore—reveals an attempt by these authors to naturalize what is essentially an economic and lifestyle activity. Working within a vegetarian ecofeminist framework, though recognizing that multiple compelling philosophical positions exist for considering the ethics of meat eating, this paper intends to argue, not that “ethical” and “omnivorous” are contradictory terms, but rather that a moral ambivalence prevails in these texts despite these authors’ claims to the contrary. In elucidating these authors’ reactions to their own participation in “the omnivore’s dilemma” this paper pinpoints those areas where a resistance to a deeper examination of human-nonhuman relations is in operation.
This chapter considers ethics and the non-human in the empirical context of animal production and meat processing. There exists a long-standing interest within nonrepresentational 'theory' on non-human agency , influenced at its outset by among others the work of sociologist of science and technology, Bruno Latour. As Thrift writes on Latour's work:
Views from the Plate and the Plant: Four Books About Industrial Meat Processing
Classical Antiquity, 1996
eds. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995. Our view of meat can encompass a much wider cultural landscape than that covered by a place setting. Getting that broader view-the view that raises so many questions about taste, distinction, gustatory ritual, butchers and industrial work, and value-can start from almost anywhere. For Stull, Broadway, and Griffith, it starts with meat processors in the United States. For Vialles, the wider view comes from slaughter plants-hers are in southwest France. Fiddis's view of meat begins at the table; Andreas's lens is focused on one Colorado packing town. These books are about linking the making of meat with the meaning of meat.