One of the implications of abolitionist perspectives like animal liberation is that humans should cease consuming meat and animal products more generally. Meat replacements and alternatives offer one pathway out of the meat crisis. In Clean Meat, Paul Shapiro calls this production of meat without killing animals, but by culturing animal cells in a laboratory, the second domestication. The development and commercialization of this new technology, though, is not innocuous. Rachel Robison-Greene explores the ethical considerations surrounding lab-created cell-cultured meat in Edibility and In Vitro Meat. One of the ethical challenges she explores involves the use of animal cells—often bovine fetal cells—which are sourced from the fetuses of pregnant cows killed in slaughterhouses. As Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft suggests in Meat Planet, debates about artificial flesh far transcend the realm of food production, prompting deeper social and political questions about animals, resource use, sustainability, and what a desirable future looks like.
Yet the evolving geographies of global carnivorism suggest different prospects for such a shift away from beef, and distinct implications across place and culture. One of the challenges of flesh-free lifestyles is the powerful positive associations meat carries, a function of more than a century of deliberate promotion, as we have seen. In Meat: A Natural Symbol, Nick Fiddes examines the cultural work of meat in Western cultures, highlighting core associations with strength, power, and domination both over nature and in systems of oppression, including colonialism and empire. While Western attitudes toward meat have certainly gained global traction through the tentacles of empire, Global South civilizations have their own histories, understandings, and relationships with this product. Cross-cultural contact becomes a site through which these distinct attitudes toward meat are negotiated, as Carol Kline shows in Tourism Experiences and Animal Consumption. In their edited volume Meat!: A Transnational Analysis, though, editors Sushmita Chatterjee and Banu Subramaniam make clear that how we understand meat is modulated by race, sexuality, gender, disability, and, importantly, nationality, culture, religion, and (post)coloniality. One of the implications of this important work is that abstaining from meat follows distinct logics and implies different consequences across the world.
One arena in which this becomes evident is the stigmatization of vegetarianism, particularly salient in the West, which manifests in distinctive sets of negative attitudes toward communities who abstain from meat at home and abroad. Calls to reduce meat consumption and modified dietary guidance recommending consuming less meat, such as those growing out of the most recent Climate Change Summit, have received pushback. The flesh-free diets prevalent in some Eastern societies are framed as an indicator or even a cause of feminized underdevelopment and poverty, while the abstention from meat in the West is dismissed as faddish and bourgeois. This culturally specific critique even extends to some activist circles, prompting movements of a decidedly colonial persuasion seeking to save animals and environments from threats posed by impoverished communities in the Global South, as the epicenter of global carnivorism. Though this desire to save animals and environments is perhaps well-intentioned, it ignores the structural dynamics constraining consumption choices and the disparate impacts of meat’s collective consequences.
Recent works, like Sacred Cows & Chicken Manchurian by James Staples and Johan Fischer’s Vegetarianism, Meat and Modernity in India, have offered a more nuanced understanding of the role of cattle and beef in South Asia, helping to reconcile the apparent contradiction that heavily vegetarian India is among the world’s largest exporters of beef. Other works demonstrate the deep historical roots and heterogeneous origins of plant-based diets in Western societies. In Vegetarian America, Karen and Michael Iacobbo trace abstinence from flesh to numerous social and religious movements in U.S. history, arguing that vegetarians have played a major role in shaping American eating habits, even though their contributions have remained obscured since meat-eaters have written history. The origin story of an early wheat-based meat substitute called Protose, developed by Ella Eaton Kellogg in the late nineteenth century, emerges in Adam Shprintzen’s chapter, “Modern Food as Substitute Food,” in Acquired Tastes, edited by Benjamin R. Cohen, Michael S. Kideckel, and Anna Zeide. Tristam Stuart widens the geographical and chronological scope in Bloodless Revolution, which explores vegetarian movements across the world (mostly in the West) since the early modern period.
While vegetarianism has gained a degree of social tolerance, especially in more metropolitan areas of the West, veganism remains largely misunderstood as a form of extremism. Several scholars have explored this vilification and even criminalization of vegan and eco-activism by the animal industry and others. Carol Adams provides vivid examples of the everyday hostilities vegetarians and vegans face in Living Among Meat Eaters, which offers practical guidance for negotiating the often contentious interpersonal relationships with the meat-eating majority. In Constructing Ecoterrorism, for instance, John Sorenson examines how corporate meat producers and other animal industrialists label animal rights, environmental, and health activists as terrorists to repress criticism of the harms perpetrated by the animal industrial complex. Similarly, in The Vegan Studies Project, Laura Wright situates the negative perceptions of veganism and its links to animal rights activism within the broader post-9/11 animosity against all things “un-American.”
Challenging stigmas against plant-based diets as extreme and niche is a growing body of work documenting the wide variety of people and rationales informing this lifestyle. In Why Veganism Matters, Gary L. Francione presents veganism as an ethical imperative naturally arising from care for animals as sentient beings. In Sistah Vegan, A. Breeze Harper explodes the common assumption that veganism is for white people, compiling a beautiful collection of essays and reflections by Black women on their myriad reasons for abstaining from animal products and their experience of that decision. For some activists, veganism offers unique approaches to research, preservation, and social theory. In Veganism, Archives, and Animals, Catherine Oliver frames veganism as both a subject of study and an academic approach informing research in and creation of archives, multi-species ethnography, and less violent futures rooted in a feminist praxis of care beyond the human.
