Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the faultlines in debates about livestock production and meat eating in the UK, exploring the way power is used, understood and foregrounded in these debates.

Paper long abstract:

The last 25 years have seen growing awareness of the negative environmental and other impacts of livestock production in the UK, and in the Global North more widely. Basing their advocacy on an ever-expanding body of research, environmental and animal rights campaigners have led the call for an agricultural and dietary shift away from livestock production and consumption. Plant centred food systems, they argue, can deliver wins for the planet, for animals and for human health. Social media campaigns such as Veganuary have further popularised their messages. But recent years have started to see a backlash to this ‘less meat’ campaigning, led by an unlikely alliance of interest groups, comprising not only large meat lobbyists but also small-scale farmers who align themselves with the agroecology movement. The mainstream environmental movement has got it wrong, they argue: at best their arguments are ill informed or naïve; at worst malignly intentioned.

Different ideas about power – what it is, who has it, who ought to have it – drive these disagreements. For stakeholders in this debate, the unequal or misappropriated distribution of power leads not only to financial and political distortions, but also drives the narratives we tell about cultural and historical identity, the role of the state, the value of different kinds of knowledge, the moral status of farmed animals, humanity’s relationship with the natural world and even the relative importance of different greenhouse gases.

This presentation will explore these issues and where we might go from here.