Normalised, human-centric discourses of meat and animals in climate change, sustainability and food security literature
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- 作者：Paula Arcari
- 关键词：Meat production ; Non ; human animals ; Critical animal studies ; Discourse ; Language ; Emotion ; Ethics
- 刊名：Agriculture and Human Values
- 出版年：2017
- 出版时间：March 2017
- 年：2017
- 卷：34
- 期：1
- 页码：69-86
- 全文大小：
- 刊物主题：Ethics; Agricultural Economics; Veterinary Medicine/Veterinary Science; History, general; Evolutionary Biology;
- 出版者：Springer Netherlands
- ISSN：1572-8366
- 卷排序：34
文摘
The large-scale, intensive production of meat and other animal products, also known as the animal-industrial complex, is our largest food system in terms of global land use and contribution to environmental degradation. Despite the environmental impact of the meat industry, in much of the policy literature on climate and environmental change, sustainability and food security, meat continues to be included as part of a sustainable food future. In this paper, I present outcomes of a discourse analysis undertaken on a selection of key major international and Australian reports. After highlighting common themes in the ways that meat and animals are discussed, I draw on the animal studies literature to critically analyse the assumptions underpinning such policy documents. My analysis illustrates that animals are effectively de-animated and rendered invisible in these bodies of literature by being either aggregated—as livestock, units of production and resources, or materialised—as meat and protein. These discursive frames reflect implicit understandings of meat as necessary to human survival and animals as a natural human resource. A critical examination of these understandings illustrates their dual capacity to normalise and encourage the continuation of activities known to be seriously harming the environment, climate and human health, while at the same time obstructing and even denigrating alternative, less harmful approaches to food. In response, I offer some conceptual and analytical modifications that can be easily adopted by researchers on climate change, sustainability and food security with the aim of challenging dominant discourses on meat and animals.