ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the landscape within which the transition to low carbon milk is set, including the extent to which consumer desire, corporate branding and market-led governance have integrated environmentally-friendly targets into capitalist food systems. It reviews key approaches that have emerged for the mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions from the dairy sector and considers how these impacts upon human-animal, ultimately production-consumption relations. The chapter offers a summary discussion of the wider potential implications and directions that the transition to low carbon, and more broadly ethical or sustainable food systems may entail. In particular, it will show how these inform existing and future relationships between humans and animals and, consequently, also the food we eat. Using the case study of a pint of UK milk, the chapter examines how a progressive focus on lowering one's carbon footprint has resulted in co-existent and mutually productive shifts in both agricultural practices and consumers' perspectives on the foods we eat.
