Speculative Futures for Mindful Meat Consumption and Production

The stuff of food constantly shifts register between matter and meaning; animal and meat; calories and flavours, stretching and folding the time/spaces of here and now, ‘us’ and ‘them’, producing and consuming in complex and contested ways (Probyn, 1999 in Stassart and Whatmore, 2003, p.450). Meat consumption has entangled our human histories and lived experiences with those of other animals and humans unlike any other food. This co-evolution of experiences finds itself in deeply embedded sociocultural materials such as feasting and fasting rituals, religious dogma, gendered role divisions, ethics discourse, animal domestication, slaughter procedures, and government policies the world over (Fiddes, 2004; Pollan, 2006; Smil, 2002). Such materials have designed meat’s status as a coveted luxury, a symbol of supremacy, a delicious meal, another life, a cheap nugget, and an unnecessar indulgence; igniting impassioned debate over the ethics and procedures of killing and eating other animals for centuries (Preece, 2009; Spencer, 1996; Zaraska, 2016). Yet the draw of profit, progress, and power has moved humans over the course of history to continually develop new methods, tools, and systems to make meat’s acquisition easier at the expense of other animals, human communities, and environments (Lymbery, 2014). At long last, the far-reaching ethical and physical implications of intensively raising billions of animals for a meat-hungry and swelling human population of 7.7 billion people has brought attention for a need to challenge normative patterns of meat production and consumption (Bajželj et al., 2014; Machovina et al., 2015). A global crisis and a global opportunity; the question of contemporary meat consumption creates space to disrupt business-as-usual, and make way for more collective and participatory futures of eating and living with other humans and animals