“Eat Responsibly”

I am going to write about two contemporary “food movements” that have remained largely separate: the movement to reconsider the consumption of meat and other animal products, on the one hand, and the movement to create alternatives to contemporary industrialized agriculture, on the other.¹ I am interested in both, but have been asked to contribute to this collection as a sympathizer with the latter—with the agrarian vision of Gene Logsdon, Wes Jackson, and (especially) Wendell Berry²—and to explore what contemporary agrarianism might have to say about meat eating. Though recent agrarians have had little to say about meat eating, things they’ve said about other topics can be helpful to us in thinking about this one. As anyone who has engaged seriously with agrarianism knows, its implications seldom fit tidily into familiar ideological drawers. That is part of its importance.