A recent post in Ethicurian about the release of a Sesame Street DVD that featured some “trippy” farm sequences got me to thinking about how the general populace envisions farming and ranching, and how those perceptions affect ag policy, consumer preferences and food marketing. No other industry I can think of has the details of its production practices so scrutinized by the consuming public. I suspect that much of what the public sees and thinks about farms falls into one of two camps:
Idealized: In the Sesame Street version, farms are places where kids come to snuggle with pigs, ride on tractors (NOT a good idea) and ‘play’ with cows. Farms are multi-species enterprises, run by a single, traditional family where cows are milked by hand, all the animals have a name, and somehow meat appears in the grocery stores without an animal ever being slaughtered.
Villianized: In the Meatrix version, farms are run by heartless corporate-types with blatant disregard for animal welfare, the environment or consumer safety. Consuming meat produced by industry-standard methods is tantamount to participating in torture and environmental pillage.
Share This
