Education Toward an Increasingly Integrated Outlook on Meat

Most students eat meat as part of their school lunch and other meals throughout the day, but few know that, in the context of contemporary agricultural practices, the production of meat-based foods entails significant harm to the environment, to animals which become food, and to humans—those who eat certain kinds or quantities of animal-derived food or carry on animal agriculture. In this chapter, I discuss what might be entailed in helping students gain a more integrated outlook with respect to food, particularly food derived from other animals. An integrated outlook is one in which each part of a multifaceted phenomenon is increasingly understood in terms of its bearing on one or more of the other parts and how these parts work together and comprise the whole. Educating students about relations and connections involving food provides them an opportunity to better understand the food system of which they are a part and, from there, to consider how they might best participate in, or perhaps even work to change, that system.