What This Blog is About

There are many people in the world who either do not eat meat at all, or eat it unapologetically with no interest in how it is produced and the impacts on animal welfare (and also to some extent, conservation, nationalism, religious identity and a great many other subjects).  This blog is not for those people.

Others eat meat but want to make good ethical choices.  The want to know where their food comes from, how it is made, and how one product is different from another.  They do not, however, want to make the acquisition of this knowledge their life's work or daily obsession.   This is where I come in.

In this blog I will begin to tease apart the different types of animal products available to consumers.  What makes them different, what about this food might you want to know, where it was made? Was it raised humanely? Is it vegetarian fed, organic, genetically modified?  What doe this all mean. 

 

Some of the qualities food have are factual, like where it was made, what breed of animal it came from, how it was slaughtered, and it's nutritional qualities.  Some of these qualities are more conceptual, what some researchers call the fetishization of food (Cook, 2006).  This is what makes food seem wholesome, patriotic, exotic, sexy or comforting, regardless of what its constituent parts might actually be.  Sometimes these two aspects are inter-meshed in strange and misleading ways.

I intend to investigated animal-based foods (meat, milk and eggs), case-by-case, issue by issue, and draw what I learn altogether into a single, simple consumer guide which will, hopefully, emerge from this blog in book form.  I hope some of you will come along on this journey of discovery.

 

Welcome.

References:

• Cook I. (2006). Geographies of food: following. Progress in Human Geography 30, 655-666.