"Where's the Meat?" Ethics, Schooling, and the Food Regimes of the Animal-Industrial Complex

• In Event: Critical Approaches to Food Systems Education Part II: Exploring Diverse Feminist Perspectives

Abstract

This paper begins by making explicit how Western industrial models of education, often referred to by critical educators as schooling, (re)produce regimes of food understandings and practices that are predicated and dependent on the animal-industrial complex (Twine, 2010, 2012; Martusewicz, Edmundson, & Lupinacci, 2015). In response to the call for more educational research that examines food politics in schools (Weaver-Hightower, 2011; Robert & Weaver-Hightower, 2011), this paper first explores anthropocentrism and how anthropocentric assumptions undergird school curriculum and everyday practices. Specifically, the researchers illuminate how anthropocentric curriculum and instructional habits of classroom and school-life frame food politics for students in favor of the commodification, subjugation, and exploitation of living beings as resources. The paper includes an examination of school lunch in connection with free and reduced lunch statistics, and the authors highlight pedagogical suggestions for how to introduce and support a non-anthropocentric framework for food ethics that directly subverts and resists current neoliberal food regimes in favor of food sovereignty (Lupinacci, 2017; Nocella II, Ducre, & Lupinacci, 2017). The authors make an argument that fulfilling the right to a healthy food system and living environment is fundamental to the empowerment and emancipation of all youth. The authors conclude by sharing examples from teaching using food as a central organizing theme for an elementary social studies methods and social foundations course that engage students in rethinking curriculum and pedagogy toward an interdisciplinary approach embedded within critical place-based education frameworks. These pedagogical suggestions are informed by key arguments within an ecocritical approach in education (Martusewicz, et al., 2015; Lupinacci & Happel, 2015, 2016) which is drawing from ecofeminist philosophy (Plumwood, 2002) and critical animal studies (Nocella II, Sorenson, Socha, & Matuoka, 2014; Twine 2010, 2012).

Authors

• Alison Happel-Parkins, The University of Memphis

• John Joseph Lupinacci, Washington State University - Pullman