Has meat outlived its usefulness?

Knotty Objects: Steak

From AEON

‘Where meat was once bound to the moral act of killing, it is now bound only to the market.’
While meat has played a vital part in the development of the human brain, according to the US author Harold McGee, our dependence on it could also be our undoing. Factory farming has removed almost everyone in the developed world from the process of raising and slaughtering animals, transforming cows, chickens and pigs from living creatures into commodities and raising significant moral questions about how we treat other living beings. However, the rise of meat production and consumption is also proving environmentally disastrous, contributing heavily to water shortages, deforestation, pollution and global warming.
Created in a collaboration between the US production company missing pieces and the MIT Media Lab, Knotty Objects: Steak is a brief plunge into the moral complexities of eating meat in the 21st century and some creative solutions that could help us overcome our inborn desire to eat animals, for the better of humanity and the world.

Click HERE to go to the Aeon video

For more on the ethics of meat and butchery, read Julian Baggini’s ‘The Vegan Carnivore?’ Eric Schwitzgebel’s ‘Cheeseburger Ethics’, and Amanda Giracci’s ‘The Art of Butchery’.