Meet Them at the Plate: Reflections on the Eating of Animals

• In Event: Roundtable Session 117
  In Roundtable Session: Thinking Across/Through the Species Divide: Nonhuman Animals in Educational Theory and Research

Abstract

The author contends that schools do very little in the way of food education currently and notes that what we choose to teach, as well as what we choose not to teach has political implications (Ayers, 2004). The extent to which students’ know how what they consume comes to be food on their plates has troubling implications including violence, domination, and productification. Specifically, our willingness to consume non-human animals, and our complicity in the means of their productification – which includes our willful ignorance of this process – may reinforce people’s tendency to see the instruments of domination as holding little meaning (Horkheimer, 2004). As such, the notion that posits that animals are not worthy of the consideration afforded to people and the way that we exclude them from moral consideration bleeds into our consideration of people themselves. Thus although “it is easy for people to distance themselves from the tortuous prospects these beings-cum-products face in order that we might consume them” our “willingness to disregard animals as mere objects…leads to our capacity for guiltless violence against them” (Author, 2011) and ultimately against ourselves (Schnurer, 2004; see also Allan, Wilson, Ng, Dunne, 2000).
The author forwards the case that while imperfect and ideologically burdened (Althausser, 1970), schools can act as “nodal points” (Lyotard, 1979) with which to lay the groundwork for students to make more informed choices about what they eat. Jaime Oliver (2010) advocates that “school food [should be] an integral part of the school curriculum. Don’t just keep the food in the cafeteria, use it throughout the school to help kids to learn about where their food comes from; what fresh quality ingredients look and taste like; how to cook for themselves and their families; that food is fun!” (p. 13). However, it is not enough to make food fun. The author contends that the critical animal educator should employ “empowering discourse” (DeLeon & Love, 2009) and democratic deliberation (Hess, 2009) to engage students in their own critical inquiry into the foods they consume. One entrée into this topic can be the foods schools serve; thus empowering them to make educated choices about what they eat in a political circle they may feel they have the power to affect, rather than as passive consumers of what is put in front of them (Sandlin, Kahn, Darts, and Tavin, 2009). This approach is not without its critics (e.g. D’Arcy, 2007; McDonald, 2000; Young, 2003; Humphrey & Stears, 2006), and it is by no means a panacea for eliminating the consumption of nonhuman animals; however such education can help to break the silence that serves to perpetuate the status quo and begin students along a path they would likely never travel down if left to their own devices (Lowe & Ginsberg, 2002).

Author

• Cory D. Wright-Maley, St. Mary's University College