Citations

The bad takes on COVID wend across the poli­ti­cal conti­nuum into the more reco­gni­zable left. Superficially more groun­ded ana­to­mies of the cri­sis have leapt atop the backs of the dead ani­mals and bro­ken land­scapes that did indeed help pro­duce the pan­de­mic. But in a clas­sic riding trick, the acro­ba­tics sud­den­ly switches mounts mid-ride to cha­rac­te­ris­ti­cal­ly Eurocentric hob­by­horses from which to herald impe­rium-old edicts on how to live, eat, and die.

Should we eat meat, with source live­stock an appa­rent dri­ver in the emer­gence of dead­ly patho­gens ? Documentarian Astra Taylor, envi­ron­men­tal his­to­rian Troy Vettese, and poli­ti­cal scien­tist Jan Dutkiewicz—TVD, for brevity’s sake—answer in the nega­tive : “Individually, we must stop eating ani­mal pro­ducts. Collectively, we must trans­form the glo­bal food sys­tem and work toward ending ani­mal agri­cul­ture and rewil­ding much of the world.” With anthro­po­ge­nic glo­bal war­ming alrea­dy taking car­bon dioxide levels through the roof, meat was alrea­dy an easy tar­get. It’s a synec­doche for effete glut­to­ny, the emblem of a glo­bal class divide, an easy piece of fat—and protein—to trim from weal­thier consump­tion bas­kets, and a neat way to merge indi­vi­dual ethi­cal consump­tion and world ecology.

The anti-meat cru­sade has appa­rent­ly recei­ved an unin­ten­ded and misu­sed push from recent eco­lo­gi­cal and epi­de­mio­lo­gi­cal work on the like­ly ori­gins of the pan­de­mic. These ana­lyses tra­ced how the inter­ac­tion across confi­ned ani­mal fee­ding ope­ra­tions, mono­cul­ture dop­pel­gan­gers, fading forests, and anti­mi­cro­bial mari­na­tion has pro­du­ced a petri dish of new diseases. Out of this com­bi­na­tion, one virus after ano­ther easi­ly jumps from ani­mal popu­la­tions to humans.

Pre-pan­de­mic, TVD fel­low tra­ve­lers rejec­ted such poli­ti­cal eco­lo­gy, which in their psy­cho­lo­gi­zing dis­mis­sal “often roman­ti­cizes what are seen as anti-modern sub­sis­tence live­li­hoods on the mar­gins of glo­bal capi­ta­lism.” But now, given the obvious rea­li­ties on the ground, a pan­de­mic strain that hops­cot­ched from bat caves on the other side of the world into the lungs of urban wor­kers they cham­pion, the eco­mo­der­nists (again to no repu­ta­tio­nal damage given their gol­den tickets) have tur­ned to fol­ding in the ana­lyses they pre­vious­ly cha­rac­te­ri­zed in the most scur­ri­lous terms as if they appro­ved all along.

Such systems—these incu­ba­tors for viruses, huge bio­lo­gi­cal emit­ters of CO2 and methane, ram­pant defo­res­ters, and living beings suf­fe­ring amid the cruel­ty of enclo­sed indus­trial ani­mal camps—merge into a pithy com­mand from TVD : No, don’t eat meat. The team sug­gests we plow “public-direc­ted invest­ment” into “both plant-based meat alter­na­tives and cel­lu­lar agri­cul­ture,” or, in other words, lab meat, a pro­duct that so far exists pri­ma­ri­ly among ven­ture capi­ta­lists, a few labs, and red-washed ad copy lau­ding it as a socia­list won­der food from Keynesian Green New Deal cookshops.

Key ques­tions are grea­sed over, res­tric­ting, as socio­lo­gist Andy Murray des­cribes, the very dis­course lab meat pro­po­nents claim they wish to open up. Who is this “we,” for one, and even, what is meat ? Veganism and ani­mal rights, to which one needn’t object as ethoses on their face, are reflexi­ve­ly deployed here to conflate objects and pro­cesses. There is no thing, meat, that has uni­form­ly nega­tive eco­lo­gi­cal, social, or epi­de­mio­lo­gi­cal conse­quences. Meat only has in com­mon that it comes from living crea­tures, and ani­mals, just like people, can only be fun­da­men­tal­ly unders­tood in rela­tion to the mate­rial envi­ron­ments within which they live, are loved and cared for, or mal­trea­ted and abu­sed, and, in the case of most food ani­mals, killed.

The ques­tion of “Should we eat meat?,” the­re­fore, appears very dif­ferent among dif­ferent sets of “we” and the dif­ferent rela­tions “we” have with such animals.

There are mil­lions who might bridle at, or whose lives would be sim­ply uptur­ned and devas­ta­ted by, enfor­ceable com­mands that they sim­ply cease meat pro­duc­tion and consump­tion. Tunisian camel her­ders in the semi-arid steppes of the Jerid who rely on her­ding for day-to-day sur­vi­val, or Bedouins in the nor­thern Gaza Strip, have not been consul­ted about how they feel about an order from the Global North—in this case from Harvard and Johns Hopkins direct—to stop eating meat or enga­ging in the meat trade. Nor, in the other direc­tion, have these resear­chers asked if such meat is sub­stan­ti­ve­ly iden­ti­cal to the confi­ned feed­lots they right­ly condemn.

A herd of examples stam­pedes to the hori­zon, but the point on that front is clear enough. Advocating inter­ve­ning in the Global South and bli­the­ly deman­ding adop­ting capi­ta­list tech­no­lo­gy in the name of a socia­list Half-Earth, as does Vettese, who orders that it “must be from pas­ture that an eco-aus­tere world will derive the land nee­ded” for tree plan­ting, is a form of “natu­ral geo-engi­nee­ring,” deve­lo­ped accor­ding to spe­ci­fic values, spe­ci­fic deva­lua­tions, and patho­lo­gi­cal exter­na­li­za­tions. These are not the no-brai­ners their advo­cates pre­sume. Compulsory vega­nism and lab meat, endor­sed by pro­minent social demo­crat Green New Dealers, among them UPenn socio­lo­gy prof Daniel Aldana Cohen, consents to the brute confis­ca­tion and era­sure of pea­sant and pas­to­ral par­ti­cu­la­risms in the name of “uni­ver­sal” ideals : rewil­ding Earth upon the bones of sup­po­sed­ly ata­vis­tic peoples poor and brown.