Growing out of the ongoing debates about the many detrimental effects of cattle and meat production is a lively debate about whether humans should consume meat at all. Plenty of recent books argue we should, or at least can, offering a range of philosophical, ethical, and cultural justifications for carnivorism. One of the more extreme positions emerged in Stephen Budiansky’s The Covenant of the Wild, which attempted to contest the liberationist framework that meat is murder by claiming that domestication benefits animals as well as people. Melanie Joy has argued that eating animals is normal, necessary, and natural in Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows. The presumption of normalcy also informs Why It’s Ok to Eat Meat, in which Dan Shahar posits that individuals do not have to abstain from meat—even cheap industrially produced varieties—in order to be ethical people. The notion that meat consumption is somehow natural and necessary has become somewhat of a mainstay in apologist circles. Sacred Cow by Diana Rodgers and Robert Wolf, for instance, advances the claim that animal flesh is essential for human bodies and that animals are a necessary part of a sustainable food system. Elucidating the cultural drivers of meat consumption, Marta Zaraska posits in Meathooked that there are discernible aspects of the taste of meat that lead people to crave it, and that that inclination is embedded in human DNA.
These and other justifications frequently inform even more pragmatic and reformist perspectives, including the reducetarian movement. One example is Vaclav Smil’s Should We Eat Meat?, which recognizes the environmental and other harms caused by meat, but still contends that humans need it (albeit in lesser quantities), especially beef, which should be reduced in favor of poultry, fish, and dairy. Similarly, Meat Me Halfway by Brian Kateman dismisses the prospect of halting animal consumption entirely as unrealistic. He argues for reducing meat to ameliorate the environmental and health costs and make it more sustainable and humane. Likewise, the meat chapter in Louise O. Fresco’s Hamburgers in Paradise urges the reduction of meat consumption, the reform of animal industry, and the use of meat replacements to curb the environmental and public health costs of industrial meat production, but implies that some meat is fine.
While there is no shortage of outright meat apologists, much of the most thought-provoking work explores the situational and historically contingent nature of such choices, and often the lack thereof. In The Meat Paradox, Rob Percival asks precisely when humans’ relationship with meat-eating became emotionally and ethically fraught. The Moral Complexities of Eating Meat, edited by Ben Bramble and Bob Fischer, contains essays arguing that eating meat is sometimes permissible and occasionally even morally imperative, alongside others that expound upon foundational arguments for vegetarianism. In Some We Love, Some We Hate, and Some We Eat, Hal Herzog challenges these assumptions about meat, reframing it as dangerous, dead, and to an increasing number of people, disgusting—though still, to many, delicious. Michael Huemer’s Dialogues on Ethical Vegetarianism examines some of the most prevalent arguments for and against meat consumption through a dialogue between two college students, one a vegetarian, the other not. Debates include the extent to which intelligence impacts the ethics of pain, if livestock production can be said to give life to farmed animals, and why acceptance of arguments against meat often fails to produce relevant changes in behavior. This text would make a compelling teaching resource for courses on ethics, human-animal relations, or food studies.
An increasingly rich body of scholarship challenges the practices and ethics of modern animal agriculture. While the critiques are wide-ranging and diverse, most approaches fit under the umbrella of reformism or abolitionism. Reformism, including animal welfare and reductionism, entails efforts to reduce the detrimental effects of meat production while leaving the systems and underlying assumptions largely intact. Abolitionist approaches deliver deeper, more structural critiques that imply the need to dismantle existing systems and reimagine worldviews. Erik Marcus’s Meat Market offers an overview of three movements: one reformist (animal welfare) and two abolitionist (animal rights and vegetarianism). He assesses each movement’s effectiveness in catalyzing change, arguing that all have been quite circumscribed, and offers recommendations on how to overcome these weaknesses. However, since that publication, both reformism and abolitionism have taken new directions, including the rise of consumer-driven reformism and a discernible shift from vegetarianism to veganism.
