Fast Food, Consumer Culture and Ecology

Abstract

Alongside roads and car culture, many of the highest-profile protest campaigns in the UK in the early 1990s were over food, or more particularly, over meat. One of these concerned the live export of veal calves destined for overseas rearing where the conditions the animals were kept in were held by protestors to be barbaric. The central issue was therefore the question of humanity’s ethical obligations with respect to other animals. Another was over bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), or ‘mad cow disease’, where substantial numbers of British beef cattle were regarded as being infected with a disease which, it increasingly came to be believed, could be transmitted to humans and become Creuzfeld-Jakob disease. This conflict was over a broader range of issues, primarily threats to human health, but also government legitimacy, particularly concerning its credibility in making pronouncements concerning human health, animal welfare and the intensive-industrial methods of animal rearing, and the authority of science. It could also be interpreted as being about the policing of boundaries between humans and animals, the so-called ‘species barrier’. Much of its political force derived from the permeability or otherwise of this ‘barrier’. A third food campaign has been over genetically modified food.

Objecting to roads!… But that’s crazy! What are they going to object to next? Food? (Elton, 1991, p. 49)

Today, almost every direct action is embedded in an extensive political matrix. No description is more misleading than ‘single issue politics’. The people who started the squatters’ estate agency in Brighton and those occupying the derelict land in London, today, want to change the whole world, not just part of it.

(Monbiot, 1996)