Alongside animal welfare, concerns over the detrimental health and environmental consequences of industrial animal production have given rise to movements centering smaller-scale, local production and urging consumers to make smarter, more ethical buying decisions. In What’s the Matter with Meat, Katy Keiffer argues that industrial meat production has become disconnected from traditional agriculture, leading to critical threats to consumers. She implores consumers to pressure industry for reform through their individual consumer choices. The movement to return to “traditional” animal husbandry methods and small-scale local production has gained some traction among middle-class consumers. Among the best-known advocates of this shift has been Michael Pollan, whose book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, urges consumers to choose meat produced by small family farms, where livestock supposedly live happier lives before their violent deaths, producing higher-quality, healthier “happy meat” at a reduced cost to the environment. The emotional and cultural dimensions of such consumer decisions are the subject of Happy Meat, by Josée Johnston, Shyon Baumann, Emily Huddart, and Merin Oleschuk, which explores how consumers negotiate one of the many paradoxes of meat—a love of animals and the parallel desire to eat them anyway. The notion that meat derived from animals raised under humane conditions, on small farms by ethical producers helped consumers reconcile their moral misgivings and create a more ethically and emotionally pleasant meat-eating experience.
The growing popularity of ethical omnivorism and locavorism reflects an effort to reconcile the increasing public awareness of the troubling ethical, environmental, and health consequences of cheap industrial meat, all without the inconvenience of compromising corporate profits or reforming personal habits. Several studies show how animal industry exploits consumer ethical concerns through marketing designations suggesting environmental or humane reforms, which support elevated pricing. As The Humane Hoax, edited by Hope Bohanec, documents, humane-washing and greenwashing tactics have become standard in the meat industry. Contributors reveal how the proliferation of unregulated labels like “humane” and “sustainable” on animal products is not indicative of meaningful changes in industry practices. In The Ultimate Betrayal, Bohanec argues that marketing designations like “grass-fed,” which invoke the small-scale livestock farming trend, merely manipulate consumers’ concerns for sustainability, humane treatment of animals, and health. Developing a relationship with cattle only to then violently take their lives defies any allusion to ethical treatment.
Other critics maintain that logics informing enlightened omnivorism and happy meat merely serve as more insidious arguments for meat consumption, since no amount of reform can resolve the fundamental violence of consuming animals nor mitigate the oversized environmental footprint. For Peter Marsh, these are strategies of moral disengagement that meat consumers employ to rationalize their continued consumption. In Happy Meat, Humane Animal Research, and Other Myths, he frames ethical meat as an oxymoron, showing how prejudice against animals is intertwined with racism and sexism, in addition to environmental destruction and animal cruelty. As John Sanbonmatsu points out in The Omnivore’s Deception, the “Locavore” and “enlightened” omnivore movements fail to mitigate the ethical quandaries associated with meat consumption. They mask the integration of smaller producers with corporate feed lots and huge corporate packing plants while perpetuating the speciesism that undergirds the violent deaths of billions of animals each year. His excavation of the operations of well-known boutique livestock farms reveals a little-recognized connection to libertarian and other right-wing ideologies. In that vein, in Little Red Barns, Will Potter elucidates how the authoritarian practices employed to sustain the global food system, including factory farms, are directly linked to the rise of far-right militia groups.
Neither environmentalists nor animal rights advocates are alone in their reservations about the future of cattle production. Personal reflections like Kathryn Wilder’s in The Last Cows present a more complex picture of internal reflection occurring even among stakeholders personally invested in beef and cattle. Wilder’s grass-fed “heritage breed” of (criollo) beef cattle, grazed on public and private lands in Colorado for local sale, would qualify as somewhat of the poster child of the locavore movement. Yet, her musings on the operation’s uncertain future reveal discomfort with common assumptions underlying even happy meat consumption—namely, that raising a non-native animal could possibly be done in a regenerative way. Though less concerned with the ethics of slaughter, the critical evaluation of morally convenient beliefs about beef production provides a heartening counterpoint to the more trenchant denialism of some meat apologists.
Alternatives to the neoliberal, consumer-centered resistance to today’s corporate food regime have emerged in explorations of sovereign knowledge among Indigenous producers. Liza Grandia’s Kernels of Resistance, for instance, shows how mobilization among Maya milperos (small farmers) in Mexico and Guatemala has led to key victories protecting heritage maize against genetically modified corn pedaled by U.S. agribusiness for consumption by both cattle and humans. Likewise, in Knowledge Sovereignty Among African Cattle Herders, Zeremariam Fre shows how Beni-Amer cattle raisers in the Horn of Africa have developed a unique system of breeding based on their experience and cultural practice, which is both sovereign from and capable of enhancing dominant livestock production methods. His book suggests that sustainable food production and food sovereignty must be rooted in such Indigenous science.
Happy Meat, Humane Animal Research, and Other Myths
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Knowledge Sovereignty among African Cattle Herders
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