1980–the present: The sorrow of meat

Abstract

This chapter examines the effects of what I have described in Chaps. 5 and 6. The extreme industrialization of meat has led to a change in meat perception since 1980. The chapter principally analyzes the growing degree of industrialization, named factory farming, and the related, widespread warnings raised by the scientific community and the animal right advocates, focusing on the damages that this way of producing meat causes to the human and animal health and to the environment. As a result, we may see a new social and cultural scenario, in which eating meat is seriously called into question. On the one hand, this has provoked a reaction from the proud meat eaters; on the other hand, suspicion over meat has produced a form of adaptation, in which meat producers and sellers have tried to appease the gradually growing negative elements associated with meat consumption. However, meat consumption is under fire, and this is demonstrated by the popularization of vegetarianism and veganism. These two food practices had grown slowly but unstoppably in the previous decades, and since the 1990s have become increasingly widespread, to the point that some are advancing the idea that meat eating is not forever.