When foods become animals: Ruminations on Ethics and Responsibility in Care-fullpractices of consumption

Abstract

Providing information to consumers in the form of food labels about modern systems of animal farming is believed to be crucial for increasing their awareness of animal suffering and for promoting technological change towards more welfare-friendly forms of husbandry (CIWF, 2007). In this paper we want to explore whether and how food labels carrying information about the lives of animals are used by consumers while shopping for meat and other animal foods. In order to achieve this, we draw upon a series of focus group discussions that were held in Italy as part of a large EU funded project (Welfare Quality Õ ). In the focus group discussions we addressed how, when or if, claims made about the lives of animals on food labels intervened in what the participants bought and ate. We contend that such labels bring the lives of animals to the forefront and act as new 'subjectifiers' (Latour, 2005: 212) that offer a new tool for becoming an 'ethically competent consumer', who cares about the lives of animals while shopping for food. However, this offer is not always easily accommodated within existing competences and previous commitments, as it requires a reassessment of existing, and often intimate, practices of shopping, cooking and eating. We argue that new labels carrying welfare claims, with their intention of increasing market transparency, produce two contrasting outcomes: they open new spaces of action, which offer an opportunity for investing in new competences and for engaging with animal welfare issues, in short, they allow an 'ethically competent consumer' to emerge, but they also produce another outcome, or a collateral casualty (Bauman, 2007), namely the ethically non-competent consumer.

Citizens, Consumers and Animals: What Role do Experts Assign to Public Values in Establishing Animal Welfare Standards?

“…At one extreme the role of experts in the discipline of AWS is to produce objective evidence that informs the determination of appropriate animal use through political mechanisms and regulatory channels (which are responsive to public opinion and public values). At the other extreme the role of the discipline increasingly involves commodifying the welfare of animals (which implicitly or explicitly encodes a set of values), and then seeking to educate consumers about a predetermined set of choices Evans 2010, Miele andLever 2013). The former places the responsibility for determining and promoting higher welfare standards onto statutory authorities and food-chain actors who respond to citizens' concerns and democratic processes; the latter foreclose citizen choice and place the ethical responsibility for promoting higher welfare standards onto market mechanisms, and, thereby, onto the consumers of products derived from agricultural animals (Buller and Roe 2012).…”

Alternative Proteins and the (Non)Stuff of “Meat”

“…For example, they found that the presentation of chicken in highly processed forms-such as chicken nuggets-does much to "background" its animal origins in consumer thinking. Conversely, the inclusion of more "bodily" features (e.g., legs, skin, bones), certification labels, and descriptions of "happy animals" can have the opposite effect and instead invite contemplation on the life of the animal (Miele 2011). This balance of presenting and absenting particular qualities, imaginaries, and histories of animals highlights the complex process of turning living bodies into food, and also how this process is dependent upon a careful foregrounding and forgetting of the many things that happen in between.…”

“…This is examined within the context of other foods that also emphasize the stuff absented from the materialities of their supply chains and end products. In situating Beyond Meat's products within this wider trend, I build upon scholarship that examines food/body relationalities (Mol 2008) and things becoming food (Roe 2006;Miele 2011) by exploring how the non-stuff of foods is increasingly becoming part of the materiality of the modern food system. Furthermore, both my fieldwork experiences and the descriptions I have encountered in the media, such as Jacobsen's, reveal that the visceral stuff of Beyond Meat's products is integral to them becoming "meat" in public thinking.…”

Ethical Foodscapes?: Premises, Promises, and Possibilities

“…First, as many have pointed out in many different academic and practical contexts (eg Goodman et al, forthcoming; Low and Davenport, 2006;Raynolds, 2009), alternative foods have hit the mainstream and done so with a vengeance. Organic, fair trade and local foods are now regular, and even own-label-brand, fare at most supermarkets, farmers' markets are popping up everywhere, organic food delivery companies are expanding rapidly as massive businesses (5) The point here is that, as illustrated in work from, for example, Kneafsey et al (2008), Miele (2010), and Puig de la Bellacasa (2010), care as an ethical/moral driver in food networks is not left simply to the moment of consumption/shopping nor only to consumers (cf Barnett et al, 2005;Clarke et al, 2007;Miller, 2001), nor is it only cultivated and experienced in so-called alternative food networks.…”