Happy animals at small scales: farmers’ portrayal of local food systems in New Jersey as an organic answer for farm animal welfare ethical concerns

TY - JOUR

T1 - Happy animals at small scales

T2 - farmers’ portrayal of local food systems in New Jersey as an organic answer for farm animal welfare ethical concerns

AU - Halprin, Franklin R.

AU - Schoolman, Ethan D.

N1 - Funding Information: This research was supported by the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences at Rutgers University. Publisher Copyright: © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V.

PY - 2022

Y1 - 2022

N2 - At a time when fast-food restaurants are serving plant-based “meat,” debates over the ethics of eating animals are strongly contested. Local food systems, by offering an alternative means of production and consumption, may give rise to new possibilities, and new considerations, pertaining to food animals and ethical consumption. Utilizing qualitative content analysis of New Jersey farmers’ websites, this study argues that farmers marketing food directly to consumers understand themselves as raising animals ethically—most strikingly, by portraying their animals as “happy”—and that these representations are relevant for debates over whether it is morally permissible to eat animals and animal products. This set of values and practices also suggests new dimensions to the contemporary concept of “organic” food. Farmers embedded in local food systems raise pressing questions about how animals experience the world, what consumers would like to know about their food, and what the implications of these questions might be for crafting ecologically conscious and moral systems of animal food production.

AB - At a time when fast-food restaurants are serving plant-based “meat,” debates over the ethics of eating animals are strongly contested. Local food systems, by offering an alternative means of production and consumption, may give rise to new possibilities, and new considerations, pertaining to food animals and ethical consumption. Utilizing qualitative content analysis of New Jersey farmers’ websites, this study argues that farmers marketing food directly to consumers understand themselves as raising animals ethically—most strikingly, by portraying their animals as “happy”—and that these representations are relevant for debates over whether it is morally permissible to eat animals and animal products. This set of values and practices also suggests new dimensions to the contemporary concept of “organic” food. Farmers embedded in local food systems raise pressing questions about how animals experience the world, what consumers would like to know about their food, and what the implications of these questions might be for crafting ecologically conscious and moral systems of animal food production.

KW - Animal ethics

KW - Animal welfare

KW - Farm animals

KW - Farmer practices

KW - Local food

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85141698252&partnerID=8YFLogxK

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85141698252&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - https://doi.org/10.1007/s13165-022-00414-1

DO - https://doi.org/10.1007/s13165-022-00414-1

M3 - Article

SN - 1879-4238

JO - Organic Agriculture

JF - Organic Agriculture

ER -