Meat

Animal agriculture accounts for 15% of all greenhouse gas emissions—roughly equivalent to the entire transportation sector—and is among the top contributors to soil degradation, air and water pollution, deforestation and... [ view full abstract ]

Animal agriculture accounts for 15% of all greenhouse gas emissions—roughly equivalent to the entire transportation sector—and is among the top contributors to soil degradation, air and water pollution, deforestation and habitat destruction, oceanic dead zones, and mass extinction on a planetary scale. Taken altogether, arguably no other industry—fossil fuels included—is so threatening to the web of life. And yet meat production and consumption remain marginal concerns within the discourses of environmental activism and climate justice. In my keyword essay, I argue for increased attention in the environmental humanities to meat’s centrality to the economic and geopolitical genealogies of our present ecological crises. Focusing on the territorial and economic expansion of the United States across the long nineteenth century, I consider the ways various forms of meat—from both wild and domestic sources—provided both the “cheap food” Jason Moore has identified as necessary to “the revival of accumulation in successive eras of capitalism,” as well as the foundations of a food culture tightly correlated to emergent formations of racial, gender, and national identity. Just as Stephanie LeMenager has described a “petroleum culture” that drives the inseparable phenomena of industrial modernity and global warming, this keyword tracks the emergence of a meat culture that has come to seem constitutive of an increasingly globalized American “way of life,” while at the same time constituting an existential threat to all life—both human and nonhuman—here on planet earth.