The interviews contained in this collection highlight not only the personal and political aspects that constitute food and eating but also the sometimes fraught and negotiated tensions between individual, community, and systemic factors. As the interviews show, in many different registers and contexts, eating is not merely a physiological necessity but is related to questions of structural access, ecological ramifications, and ethics. At the same time, how and what we eat is deeply intimate and affective. Eating inescapably thrusts us into relation with various others, human and more-than-human. In this volume, the interviewees are asked personal questions about their dietary choices in relation to their background and academic work. It follows that their answers are individual reflections in which they describe how they make decisions about whom and what to eat by considering the others with whom they are in daily or familiar relation, such as spouses, colleagues, students, and nonhuman animals. However, while many interviewees denounce factory farming, some position small-scale and local animal agriculture (i.e., “happy meat”) as an ethical or improved alternative. Indeed, the promises of small-scale agriculture were a recurring theme throughout the interviews. This comparison, I suggest, is symptomatic of a general absence in animal studies and food studies—that of the specificity of the power relations specific to animal agriculture and the foundational private property status that constitutes and authorizes these relations. As such, I propose that rather than focus on different modes of producing animal flesh, we turn to an analytic of agricultural power that allows us to consider the relationship between private property, life, food, and ontology. I then propose a contextual ontological veganism centered on beingness and relations. Such a position, I suggest, is a potential method of resistance to settler colonial power relations that are shaping our ontologies of humans, animals, and land.
Sharon Holland, Kim TallBear, Harlan Weaver, and Kari Weil, for example, explain that they will buy free-range organically fed meat when possible, while being aware of the potential limits of animal products marketed as humane. Holland says that she likes “to shake the hand of the person who killed the cow.” Kim TallBear explains that the human–animal species barrier that authorizes hierarchical thinking and relationships does not resonate with Indigenous understandings of life. For this reason, she explains that there is nothing inevitable about dominant food practices, including the supposed inedibility of humans: “I’m not saying you should go out and kill people for food, although then one could say you shouldn’t go out and kill nonhumans for food either. But if we are capable of being the prey of nonhumans, I think ultimately, morally, we’re capable of being eaten by each other.” Despite this ontological argument, TallBear highlights the ways in which our food systems constrain choice and shape relations. Speaking about her consumption of meat labeled “free-range,” she says, “These labels facilitate people’s shopping choices. Do they facilitate a real change in agricultural practices? I do try to consume less meat and less things where I don’t know anything about the history. But you’re reduced to looking at labels.”
Weaver also positions his eating habits as relational in light of the human labor used in animal agriculture. For example, he states that he tries to not support factory farming because of immigration raids occurring in these locations and instead opts for locally produced meat when possible. Weaver also aptly highlights that many of the local farmers in his area are white and have recently moved from elsewhere, transferring their wealth accumulated in urban areas to start these farms. As such, he points to the fact that these “back to the farm” practices that traffic, I would argue, in idyllic imagery are made possible “using inherited capital that comes out of centuries of oppression.” For Weil, who identifies as a vegetarian, her purchasing and eating habits become messy when she is cooking for or eating with others. She explains that she will buy humanely certified or grass-fed products for her husband, who would instead likely purchase “some cheap brand” produced using factory-farming methods. For these authors, despite signaling the limits of these “ethical” labels, these products are positioned as an improvement over cruel, environmentally destructive, removed, and covert factory-farming methods. The issues highlighted in these interviews are those related to production methods and do not necessarily entail or catalyze a shift in what or who is being consumed. This in itself is symptomatic of the successful operation of agricultural power that ontologizes animals as always already food. More specifically, the successful operation of agricultural power constrains which kinds of questions we ask. As shown in these examples, the issue is not about the consumption of farmed animals but instead about the mode of production through which animal products are sourced.
Based on my analysis of the available literature, the contrast between industrial agriculture versus small-scale agriculture is a false opposition that focuses attention away from the operation of power relations that are the foundation of animal agriculture as an institution: private property. As I explicate below, an analytic of agricultural power confronts us with the property relations that traverse the farm, its labor practices, its ecological effects, and how the human and the animal become parsed through eating. As Lisa Guenther and James Stanescu argue, industrial animal agriculture relies on the de-animalization of animals and the deading of their life.1
Namely, animals in agricultural contexts are denied their animality as embodied creatures that have their own interests and desires and that come to understand themselves through meaningful relations with others of their choosing. Instead, they are reduced to input– output machines that can be manipulated, arranged, and replaced depending on the needs of the business in question.2 James Stanescu has argued that because the very point of the factory farm is to produce animal products, farmed animals exist as “deaded life”: While alive they are imagined as the meat they will become when slaughtered, butchered, and served.3 While Guenther and Stanescu aptly highlight the interplay between the de-subjectification and objectification of farmed animal life as a consequence of the industrialization of agriculture, I argue that these processes are not isolated to the modern factory farm. Instead, de-animalization and deading are distinctly related to the property status of nonhuman animals, which can be intervened upon and manipulated toward the ends of the humans and institutions that are their legal owners.
It is then my position that the problems associated with factory farming that are aptly highlighted by respondents in this collection cannot be remedied through a nostalgic return to small-scale, local animal agriculture. For example, as Holland explains in her interview in this volume, “I know the woman at Firsthand Foods, the names of the farmers who grow my food, I drive by those cows every day. I say to my children, ‘See those cows? That’s the grass-fed beef we buy when you go to the farmers market.’” This passage illustrates the relations shaping local food ethics: The consumer is in a closer relationship with the farmer, yet the animals remain deaded life, imagined while alive as nothing more than the products they will become when slaughtered. As it is currently practiced, small-scale and local farming might better be understood as highly successful marketing strategies premised on telling consumers that they are making ethical choices of which they can be proud. Pragmatically, however, consumers are supporting the very relations and often commensurate practices that they are told they have avoided through this choice.
Locavorism pivots on three tenets of ethical consumption: environmentalism, the support of local economies, and the moral treatment of animals who become or produce meat, milk, and eggs.4 The promise of locally produced foods as better for the environment is tied up in a commonsense notion that the less distance an item is transported, the lower its ecological imprint. However, transportation emissions account for very little of food’s overall ecological impact. The production stage accounts for approximately 83 percent of food-related greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, whereas transportation from producer to retailer represents 4 percent.5 However, not all “foods” are as resource intensive as others. For example, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found that “meat production contributes more greenhouse gases than the entire transportation industry, including all automobiles, combined.”6
At the current rate of consumption (more than 55 billion land animals per year), more than 80 percent of the land currently used by humans is for meat production. This is the leading cause of species extinction, water scarcity, and biodiversity loss as rainforests and other areas are cleared to become pastures.7 While promoted as an ecologically responsible alternative, small-scale animal agriculture requires more resources than factory farming. Free-range production uses more land and emits more methane and nitrous oxide than do industrial methods. This is because farmed animals are allowed (somewhat) more space, and because these animals take longer to reach slaughter-weight, as they typically have not been genetically altered in such a way as to promote rapid weight gain. Given that small-scale animal agriculture accounts for only 1 percent of the meat produced in the United States, it is hardly a large-scale solution.8 Even popular “happy meat” farmer Catherine Friend reports that factory-farmed animal products make up 25 percent of her weekly diet.9 There is simply not enough land, even when we include the potential transformation of land currently used for feed crops, to make this a feasible worldwide “alternative.”10 Diets that do not include animal products, however, have been shown to be a far more effective mode of mitigating climate change and ecological destruction: “[S]hifting from beef to vegetables for even a single day a week would in fact be more helpful in reducing greenhouse gas emissions than shifting the entirety of one’s diet to exclusively locally produced sources.”11 The question of environmental impact is then not about local versus global production methods but whether the product in question is that of a farmed animal.12
Small-scale animal farmers also market their animals as living “happy” lives prior to their slaughter, but an analysis of routine practices carried out on local farms reveals otherwise. As Vasile Stanescu reports, the production of happy meat commonly entails the forcible insemination of female animals, unnecessary surgical procedures performed without anesthesia, as well as the long and traumatic transportation of the animals to (often) the same slaughterhouses where factory-farmed animals are killed.13
In The Compassionate Carnivore, Catherine Friend recounts that routine practices on her farm prevent her from meeting animal welfare standards for her sheep.14 Vasile Stanescu summarizes Friend’s approach: “[S]he uses herd dogs, does not allow her sheep to lie down comfortably during transport, does not provide continuous access to shelter, and most importantly ‘docks’ (amputates) their tails without the use of anesthesia.”15 In another book, Hit by a Farm, Friend describes castrating baby male lambs without sedatives or pain relief. There is indisputable evidence that this practice causes excruciating pain in the short-term as well as chronic pain in the long-term.16 Other practices that both factory farms and small-scale farms employ include “grinding up male chickens at birth; using animals who have been selectively bred into shapes which cause disease, suffering, and early death; forcing and repeating pregnancies; separating family members for profit; and killing the animals in the exact same slaughterhouses and identically ‘inhumane’ conditions as factory farms.”17 In their approach to farmed animals, the reality of small-scale farming practices reveals little practical or philosophical alternatives to factory farming.
I would further argue that small-scale faming is coterminous with the settler colonial and racial capitalist systems that sustain the settler nation states of Canada and the United States.18 Small-scale animal agriculture cannot resist the property relations to land and to animals that are foundational to animal agriculture and that have been deliberately instituted as part of settler colonial projects in Canada and the United States.19 Specifically, colonists imported the institution of animal agriculture, farmed animals, legal statuses of property, and ontologies of Western human superiority that structured ways of being and living in their homelands. Colonists positioned animal agriculture as the civilized manner in which to interact with animals, as well as the proper way to relate to land as a resource. English law also allowed colonial governments to make legal claims to land as they could show (as per their own legal metrics) that they had a productive relationship to the land in question.20 Animal agriculture in these settings is then historically rooted in a settler colonial project of territorialization. The property relation to animals, as Lauren Corman aptly highlights in her interview in this volume, underpins and is reproduced through dominant eating practices. It is for this reason that I suggest it is more appropriate to consider food and eating as bound up in the exercise of agricultural power and its multiple expressions.21 An analytic of agricultural power allows us to focus on its underlying logic, relations of property, and political deployment, regardless of its exact technique of production.
For decolonial, environmental, and ethical reasons, it is urgent that we develop a food politics that attends to and resists the settler ontologies of animal life and land as private property that are foundational to animal agriculture. Corman explains that for her, the importance of veganism lies in its “direct challenge to the property status of animals and the notion that they can be rendered as objects. It’s kind of a daily personal boycott, a rich practice of eschewing the understanding of animals as objects or servants from the beginning of their lives to their deaths.” One such possibility for a food politics premised explicitly on the recognition of animals as beings and not property is a contextual ontological veganism. Because ontologies are inescapably political, they are also contextual and can be otherwise.22 It is therefore not the case that because animal-based foods are often thought of as the most authentic and “real” foods, these food ontologies are stable. Instead, how we understand the “what is” of food is the result of deliberate political projects and, as such, can be otherwise. It does remain useful, however, to continue to ontologize food, as doing so provides a framework for legal, ethical, and political action.
I argue for a contextual ontological veganism premised on a distinction between edibility and food. An edible product would be ontologized as food only pending an evaluation of whether the relations that went into the making of the product, as well as the relations that are produced by its consumption are ethically desirable.23 This ontology recognizes that both humans and animals are technically edible, yet unequally targeted by agricultural power. In other words, the likelihood that humans will be subjected to the processes entailed in agriculture, from forced breeding and forcible confinement, to premature and exceptionally violent deaths, is minimal. This is because humans are persons under law while animals remain property.
Therefore, I propose that a true alternative ontology of food must also be premised on a non-anthropocentric legal ontology of animals. Maneesha Deckha’s concept of beingness is helpful. Beingness refers to a legal subjectivity for animals in which they are neither property nor persons but beings that are relational, vulnerable, and embodied. Avowing the beingness of animals would remove them from the legal category of property in which they are reproduced as “living meat” and ontologized as food. An ontological framework such as this is responsive to the contextual realities and competing ways of knowing and being in the world that structure who is edible and in what ways. Such an ontological position recognizes that while we are all edible, we should not be subjected to the carcerality of animal agriculture. This ontology would then apply to our ethical evaluations about market-mediated food production and consumption, and is not meant to apply to nonproperty-mediated eating habits, such as the multitude of Indigenous subsistence hunting, gathering, or crop-based agricultural traditions.24
To return to the interviews that position large-scale and small-scale approaches as divergent practices that shore up different ethical practices and responses, we should instead understand such methods of production as different iterations of agricultural power that are produced by and that sustain the foundational relational of property. Within such a frame, it becomes apparent that there is very little that is alternative about small-scale animal agriculture. A focus on agricultural power might then be a necessary supplement to animal studies and food studies scholarship working to constitute ethical food politics. It is my hope that a relational and contextual ontological veganism can open possibilities for differently relating to ourselves, others, and to territory that has been not only violently dispossessed from its original stewards but also parceled into privately owned resources used to sustain animal agriculture and its subsidiary industries.25
1. Lisa Guenther, Solitary Confinement (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013); James Stanescu, “Beyond Biopolitics: Animal Studies, Factory Farms, and the Advent of Deading Life,” PhaenEx 8, no. 2 (2013): 135–160.
2. Guenther, Solitary Confinement.
3. Stanescu, “Beyond Biopolitics.”
4. Chaone Mallory, “Locating Ecofeminism in Encounters with Food and Place,” Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 26, no. 1 (2013): 171–189; Vasile Stanescu, “‘Green’ Eggs and Ham? The Myth of Sustainable Meat and the Danger of the Local,” Journal of Critical Animal Studies 1, no. 11 (2010): 8–32; Vasile Stanescu, “Why ‘Loving’ Animals Is Not Enough: A Response to Kathy Rudy, Locavorism, and the Marketing of ‘Humane’ Meat,” The Journal of American Culture 36, no. 2 (2013): 100–110.
5. Christopher L. Weber and H. Scott Matthews, “Food-Miles and the Relative Climate Impacts of Food Choices in the United States,” Environmental Science and Technology 42, no. 10 (2008): 3508–3513.
6. Stanescu, “‘Green’ Eggs and Ham?” 13; Henning Steinfeld, Pierre Gerber, T. Wassenaar, V. Castel, Mauricio Rosales, and C. de Haan, “Livestock’s Long Shadow,” Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 2006, http://www.fao.org/docrep/010/a0701e/a0701e00.HTM.
7. Steinfeld et al, “Lifestock’s Long Shadow”; Stanescu, “Why ‘Loving’ Animals Is Not Enough”; Stanescu, “‘Green’ Eggs and Ham?”
8. Stanescu, “Why ‘Loving’ Animals Is Not Enough.”
9. Catherine Friend, The Compassionate Carnivore: Or, How to Keep Animals Happy, Save Old MacDonald’s Farm, Reduce Your Hoofprint, and Still Eat Meat (New York: Da Capo, 2009), 240.
10. Stanescu, “Why ‘Loving’ Animals Is Not Enough.”
11. Stanescu, “‘Green’ Eggs and Ham?” 13; Weber and Matthews, “Food-Miles.”
12. Stanescu, “‘Green’ Eggs and Ham?”
13. Stanescu, “Why ‘Loving’ Animals Is Not Enough.”
14. Friend, The Compassionate Carnivore.
15. Stanescu, “Why ‘Loving’ Animals Is Not Enough,” 103.
16. Catherine Friend, Hit by a Farm: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Barn, first edition. New York: Da Capo, 2006); N. P. French and K. L. Morgan, “Neuromata in Docked Lambs’ Tails,” Research in Veterinary Science 52, no. 3 (1992): 389–90; Michael C. Morris, “Ethical Issues Associated with Sheep Fly Strike Research, Prevention, and Control,” Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 13, nos. 3– 4 (2000): 205–217.
17. Stanescu, “Why ‘Loving’ Animals Is Not Enough,” 103.
18. Virginia Anderson, Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); Billy-Ray Belcourt, “Animal Bodies, Colonial Subjects: (Re)Locating Animality in Decolonial Thought.” Societies 5, no. 1 (December 24, 2014): 1–11. https://doi.org/10.3390/soc5010001; Claire Jean Kim, Dangerous Crossings: Race, Species, and Nature in a Multicultural Age (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Kelly Struthers Montford, Agricultural Power: Politicized Ontologies of Food, Life, and Law in Settler Colonial Spaces (PhD dissertation, Edmonton: University of Alberta, 2017).
19. Anderson, Creatures of Empire; Kim, Dangerous Crossings; Struthers Montford, Agricultural Power.
20. Anderson, Creatures of Empire; Kim, Dangerous Crossings; Struthers Montford, Agricultural Power.
21. See further Taylor (2013) and Stanescu, where they suggest that we ought to begin thinking in terms of agricultural power. Chloë Taylor, “‘Foucault and Critical Animal Studies: Genealogies of Agricultural Power,’” Philosophy Compass 8 (6) (2013): 539–551. https://doi.org/10.1111/phc3.12046; James Stanescu, “Beyond Biopolitics: Animal Studies, Factory Farms, and the Advent of Deading Life.” PhaenEx 8 (2) (2013): 135–160.
22. Johanna Oksala, “Foucault’s Politicization of Ontology,” Continental Philosophy Review 43 (4) (2010): 445– 466.
23. See Heldke (2012) on a relational food ontology. Lisa Heldke, “An Alternative Ontology of Food: Beyond Metaphysics,” Radical Philosophy Review 15 (1) (2012): 67–88. https://doi.org/10.5840/radphilrev20121518.
24. Anderson, Creatures of Empire; Kim, Dangerous Crossings.
25. Belcourt, “Animal Bodies, Colonial Subjects”; Eli Clare, Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2017).