Decolonize your diet: Meat Production

Oberer Rheinweg 135

Text by Selma Meuli

Decolonize your diet! How eating animal products maintains colonial power relations. – Veterinary villa, St. Johanns-Park

Figure 1 Villa of the former slaughterhouse veterinarian, St. Johanns Park, Basel, Creative Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:St._Johanns-Park,_Basel_%284%29.jpg

This stop of the decolonial city tour in front of the former villa of the slaughterhouse manager aims at rethinking the way we consume animal products from a decolonial point of view, focusing on globalized livestock production as a source of injustice. For a more equal and respectful diet, we propose on the one hand to question the globalized production of animal goods as part of the modern food system from a decolonial and ecological point of view and, on the other hand, to rethink the human centered animal-human relationship in a posthuman perspective.

Figure 2 Sausages, pixabay, https://pixabay.com/de/photos/w%c3%bcrste-grill-grillparty-grill-party-3524649/

For over five centuries of colonialism, imperialism, modernism and globalization, the modern-industrial food system, increasingly characterized by transnational corporatization, has displaced small-scale producers, communities, and undermined cultural diversity (Figueroa-Helland et al. 2018). Part of this system is the industrialized production of livestock products, which is built on extensive livestock farming in industrial nations. Livestock production worldwide heavily depends on soy produced in the Global South as a protein-based fattening agent. According to Survival International this is one of the main causes of deforestation of South American rainforest and the associated neocolonial destruction of indigenous peoples' living and cultural space and according to the German Rainforest Foundation Oro Verde, 75% of global deforestation is due to the conversion of tropical forests to agricultural land such as soy monocultures, just as 80% of the world's soy harvest is used as feed in animal fattening (Oro Verde). Furthermore, the high value of soy on the world market drives up the local price of the resource and makes it impossible for local people to consume their own products.

Figure 3 Soy monoculture in the global south, pixabay, https://pixabay.com/de/photos/soja-kombinieren-ernte-k%c3%b6rner-1543071/

In addition to these economic ills, industrial food production, and livestock farming in particular, destroy ecosystems, soil fertility, and biodiversity through their unsustainable, energy- and resource-intensive industrial methods (Figueroa-Helland et al. 2018). Industrial livestock production is responsible for an estimated 9% of human-caused carbon emissions, 37% of human-caused methane emissions, and 65% of nitrous oxide emissions. This production has undeniably a significant impact on global greenhouse gas emissions, which in turn contributes to the destruction of the world's climate (Sebo 2021). In addition, due to the enormous clearing of rainforest for soy production as livestock feed, forest is lost as an important CO2 reservoir and CO2 stored in the peat soil is released (Oro Verde). This mechanism also leads to neocolonial injustices, because, although largely caused by the global North, the consequences of climate change - the warming of the climate, the rising of the world's oceans, and the increase in extreme weather conditions - will be felt first in the once colonized countries of the South.

Figure 4 Forest fires destroying people’s living space, pixabay, https://pixabay.com/de/photos/feuer-waldbrand-kinder-angst-4429478/

Just as industrial animal agriculture brings to light neocolonial consequences in relation to the populations of the global South, so too can the anthropocentric animal-human relationship implicit in it be seen as a form of the coloniality of power on non-human animals. Thus, in her book The Posthuman, philosopher and feminist Rosi Braidotti describes the human relationship to the animal as unequal, as shaped by the dominant humanistic and structurally male habit of free disposal and consumption of other bodies. By “other” she means both the “racialized other” and the “naturalized other” - that is, the animal (Braidotti 2013: 86). To counteract the exploitation of other bodies, Braidotti pleads for a shift away from humanistic values that put humans at the center of towards a coexistence based on solidarity between all species. The transversal life force that unites previously segregated species is what Braidotti calls zoe. For Braidotti, turning away from the centrality of anthropos is the solution to break down the boundaries between humans and his others and to open up new perspectives.

Thus, turning away from industrial animal agriculture towards a locally produced and plant-based diet offers the possibility to gradually counteract various discriminations. First those experienced by indigenous peoples due to exploitative deforestation and land cultivation; second those experienced by the inhabitants of the Global South due to livestock breeding as one of the factors for climate warming caused by Western societies; third those of the animals that have to give their lives for human consumer goods. This would create the opportunity for a new, more egalitarian form of coexistence, both among humans and among human and non-human animals.

References

Braidotti, R. (2013). The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity.

Figueroa-Helland, L., Cassidy, T., Pérez Aguilera, A. (2018). Decolonizing Food Systems: Food Sovereignty, Indigenous Revitalization, and Agroecology as Counter-Hegemonic Movements. Perspectives on Global Development and Technology, 17 (1–2), 173–201. https://doi.org/10.1163/15691497-12341473.

Oro Verde (n.d). Die Tropenwaldstiftung. https://www.regenwald-schuetzen.org/regenwald-wissen/regenwald-zerstoerung/warum-wird-der-regenwald-abgeholzt

Sebo, J. (2021). Animals and Climate Change. Philosophy and Climate Change, edited by: Mark Budolfson, Tristram McPherson, and David Plunkett, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Survival International (n.d). https://www.survivalinternational.org/tribes/ayoreo