On today’s show, host Douglas Haynes is joined by philosopher and writer, John Sanbonmatsu to talk about his book, The Omnivore’s Deception: What We Get Wrong about Meat, Animals, and Ourselves,  published last month from NYU Press. Sanbonmatsu says that there’s a better way to be on this planet than approaching animals with dominion and violence.

Sanbonmatsu felt compelled to write this book after studying the politics of the Left and reading works like Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation, in which Singer says we have to take animal suffering into account. People don’t think of our animal-food system as political, but it is, says Sanbonmatsu. When the animal-food system comes up, it’s framed as the terrors of animal agriculture from an environmentalist lens. But we kill 80 billion land animals and three trillion marine animals every year, and there’s no way to do this killing nicely.

His book riffs on the title of Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, but Sanbonmatsu says “you can’t have your meat and conscience too.” Pollan created an intellectual scaffolding for food movements that were already underway: new agrarianism and organic foods. While this “new meat renaissance” hasn’t made a dent in the scale of industrial animal agriculture, it has made the meat consumer feel “conscious.”

Sanbonmatsu takes listeners through the centuries of different responses to humans’ relationship with animal life, talks about how humans developed an ethical objection to killing and eating animals, and unpacks the language people use when they describe trying to eat ethically.

John Sanbonmatsu is Professor of Philosophy at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, MA. He is the editor of Critical Theory and Animal Liberation and author of The Postmodern Prince: Critical Theory, Left Strategy, and the Making of a New Political Subject.

Featured image: the cover of The Omnivore’s Deception, available from NYU Press.

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