It’s not every chicken that can wash the tidal of blood generated by the industrialised meat industry from a consumer’s hands. And it’s not every chicken, or chop, or sausage, that can do the work of turning economic advantage into righteous superiority. But some can. Starting from $55.00, five times the price of a factory farmed chicken, an ethically raised bird is the exclusive dinner for the ecological hero. But the discourse on being what is termed an ‘ethical omnivore’ creates another kind of consumer: the one who necessarily buys their meat from supermarkets and fast-food outlets (or maybe even works at one) and is portrayed as some kind of dead-eyed ecological monster.

Is a whole chicken worth $55.00? Yes, if everyone who raised and slaughtered that chicken is paid a decent wage, and the chicken did chicken things with their day and the farm had regenerative practices. All that comes at a cost (and we’ll come back to this). But what does this have to do with the person buying such a chicken being ethical or not? Let’s put aside the dilemmas of eating meat at all — but especially at a time of climate catastrophe — to focus on the righteousness that underpins the so-called ethical omnivore discourse.

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‘It’s not meat that’s the problem — it’s factory farming,’ says every single advocate of the ethical omnivore diet at one time or another. Every single one. This serves as a framework for the meat-eating part of this diet: it’s meat, but it’s untethered to the real problem, so it’s ethical, okay?

Not really okay, because its definition is dependent on drawing in the identity of the consumer in ways that implicitly or deliberately turn eater against eater. An ethical omnivore’s diet is posed as a choice that is made by a person whose shopping and eating habits are guided by considerations of animal welfare and environmental impact. The onus is entirely on the consumer to create and articulate their ethical stance on the stupendous problems of the industrial food system through their purchasing choices, as if money was no object and access was only a question of the effort you put in.

The global and local food system is an operation of power, a knot of colonial and racist histories, long chains of supply, and the ongoing brutalisation of animals, humans, and soil. It needs collective and urgent action. It needs to be undone. Yet, the ethical omnivore seeks to step out of this messy business of relations and structures by privatising the solution through good and ethical choices.

Michael Pollan, the patron saint of ethical meat eating, has built a long career on having strong opinions on what is healthy and what are ethical food choices. Pollan has in many ways designed the ethical omnivores diet: pinching a bit from the Slow Food movement and a bit from American restranteaur Alice Water’s seasonal eating dictum, to emphasise that eating ethically and healthily is merely a series of decisions about where your food has come from and how much of it you should eat. Easy, right?

As Pollan writes in his enormously influential New York Times piece ‘An Animal’s Place’:

For my own part, I’ve discovered that if you’re willing to make the effort, it’s entirely possible to limit the meat you eat to nonindustrial animals…I’ve become the sort of shopper who looks for labels indicating that his meat and eggs have been humanely grown…who visits the farms where his chicken and pork come from…

He concludes by acknowledging that

yes, meat would get more expensive. We’d probably eat less of it, too, but maybe when we did eat animals, we’d eat them with the consciousness, ceremony, and respect they deserve.

There is a lot going on in this advice. Willing to make the effort is of course very different to being able to afford the effort. Even with an acknowledgment that animals raised and slaughtered in ways that are respectful and even ceremonial will become more expensive meat, the inference is that it’s no biggie. Not only is it not a biggie, but not making the effort to afford nonindustrial meat is tantamount to being less conscious, less ethical.

Amber Husain’s recent book Meat Love contends with this notion of respect and ceremony and indeed love of livestock (love the animal to condone the love of the meat) that constitutes the entitlement to helping ourselves to their flesh. This position, as Husain demonstrates, is largely an economic privilege, because small farms will always be niche under capitalism — with its taste for scale, cheapness, and profit.

Circumventing this reality, ethical meat-eaters and producers are deeply invested in justifications, both visual and rhetorical, which place humans at the top end of a species order understood as being natural, albeit forgetful of the differences between necessity and entitlement.

In place of an awkward conversation about food costs and wages, the debate has veered into talk of awareness that verges on personal enlightenment. Pollan has gone so far as to suggest that the abolition of intensive factory farming would inevitably come about if the walls of the abattoir were made of glass. Just this! As if seeing and affording are the same thing. As if people who buy the available, cheaply produced, and affordable meat off the supermarket shelves aren’t perfectly aware that there are others (not them) who have different/better options.

One of the more insidious moves in this discursive muddle is the conflation of the good lives of the animals and the good vibes of the consumers. The curated picture of the ethical omnivore is a smug shopper, reading labels (except perhaps the price ones), making appointments to visit farms, and taking cues from an imaginary peasant whose frugality is more nose-to-tail fine dining and less cabbage soup.

The pastoral is our setting for the good life that puts the ‘ethical’ in ‘ethical sausage’. The websites for small-scale farms and ethical meat butchers around the world, and certainly in the major cities in Australia, look like brochures for retirement living, with images of chickens and pigs and cows enjoying the sun with wholesome farming families in attendance. Together, the happy animals, their conscientious handlers, and ceremonial butchers form a picture of aligned values. Yet looming out of frame, are their opposite wretched counterparts: pretty much everyone else.

So, what about everyone else?

Well, for every sad chicken there is a sad consumer. Or, more accurately, for every fifty kilos of sad chickens per year, there is one sad consumer — because Australian’s eat a lot of chicken. But what we are scrutinising here is not the consumption/over consumption of meat, but the righteous tone of the ethical meat discourse. Of course, as a practice ethical consumption wouldn’t dream of presenting as an indicator of superior choices but rather as an orientation from which change can be made through consumption. Yet, when it’s put like TV’s favourite aristo-peasant Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall does in his 2004 cookbook River Cottage Meat, as meat eating at ‘its worst’, being an ‘ignominious expression of greed, indifference and heartlessness,’ it’s hard to hear the nuanced understanding of the conditions that make it necessary for some of us to eat meat at its worst.

The truth is that meat isn’t cheap. Returning to the $55.00 chicken, the true cost of raising animals and crops to bring to our tables includes labour, land, lives that are valuable and not just resources for extraction. Economist and activist Raj Patel urges us to be alert to the ways that capitalism is a system that does not pay its bills in order to produce cheap food (and a whole lot of other cheap stuff). So, the happy animals raised on boutique farms do become drumsticks and hamburgers with price tags that include all, or at least most, of their costs of production.

However, there remains the problem of how to pay for that meat and the only way to even begin to consider the imperative to pay more for food is to begin by talking about paying more for workers. That is, cheap food is premised on cheap labour — it’s a strategy. A peanut-sized history of this dynamic comes out of Patel’s work with Jason W. Moore in The History of the World in 7 Cheap Things:

Capitalism’s agricultural revolutions provided cheap food, which lowered the minimum wage threshold: workers could be paid less and not starve.

This is how it works, still.

A food system that encourages overproduction above health, safety, and welfare — more calories produced with less labour costs and wage stagnation of workers — is not broken at all. It is exactly how it is designed to work. The ethical omnivore’s intervention and reimaging of an alternative food system is not only tone-deaf to the economic forces that deprive consumers of choices, but offer options that are pre-determined by how much someone with an appetite can spend and where they live.

Thinking oneself righteous for purchasing ethical meat is not nearly enough. Making a virtue out of economic privilege pushes the crisis of living at the scorching point of capitalism into a struggle between eco heroes and eco monsters. Shouldn’t we start asking why the eco heroes have a French wicker basket full of heirloom breed animals and the eco monsters are stocking up on the vac packed discounted sausages before they are chucked?

Image: Osias Beert the Elder, Still Life of a Roast Chicken, a Ham and Olives on Pewter Plates with a Bread Roll, an Orange, Wineglasses and a Rose on a Wooden Table (detail)