Happy Meat: The Sadness and Joy of a Paradoxical Idea

North Americans love eating meat. Despite the increased awareness of the meat industry’s harms-violence against animals, health problems, and associations with environmental degradation-the rate of meat eating hasn’t changed significantly in recent years. Instead, what has emerged is an uncomfortable paradox: a need to square one’s values with the behaviors that contradict those values.

Using a large-scale, multidimensional, and original dataset, Happy Meat explores the thoughts and emotions that underpin our moral decision-making in this meat paradox. Conscientious meat-eaters turn to the notion of ＂happy meat＂ to make sense of their behaviors by consuming meat they see as more healthy, ethical, and sustainable. Happy meat might be labeled grass fed, free-range, antibiotic free, naturally raised, or humane. The people who produce and consume it, together, make up the complex landscape of conscientious meat-eating in modern Western societies.

The discourse of happy meat ultimately may not be a sufficient response to all the critiques of meat eating, rife as it is with contradictions. However, it offers a powerful case for understanding how moral boundaries and notions of the ’good eater’ are constructed through negotiations of values, identity, and status.

Josée Johnston is Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on food, gender, culture, and politics. She is the co-author, with Shyon Baumann, of Foodies (2015) and, with Kate Cairns, of Food and Femininity (2015). Shyon Baumann is Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto. His work addresses questions of evaluation, legitimacy, status, classification, and inequality. Past book projects include Hollywood Highbrow (2007). Emily Huddart is Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of British Columbia. She is an environmental sociologist with a focus on consumer attitudes and behaviors. She is the author of Eco-Types (2022). Merin Oleschuk is Assistant Professor in the Department of Human Development and Family Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.