LPE of Meat – LPE Project

Antimonopoly Is About Democratizing the Food System (and the Rest of the Economy)

Caroline Parker — Thu, 03 Jun 2021 11:00:00 +0000

This post was written in response a recent post titled “Don’t Trust the Antitrust Narrative on Farms” In their post last month, Nathan Rosenberg and Bryce Stucki challenged narratives commonly used to advocate for antitrust enforcement in agriculture that broadly paint farmers as an aggrieved and struggling class. While we agree that sweeping generalizations of farmer insecurity can be misleading...

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Don’t Trust the Antitrust Narrative on Farms

Caroline Parker — Mon, 10 May 2021 13:58:24 +0000

This post is part of our symposium on the Law and Political Economy of Meat. The antitrust critique of U.S. agriculture that is dominant in progressive politics is based on a flawed analysis of the farm economy that insists farmers are in dire straits. In her new book, “Break ‘Em Up,” Zephyr Teachout uses the metaphor of “chickenization” to relate the plights of chicken farmers using feed supplied...

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Environmental Justice is Climate Justice is Justice for Animals

Caroline Parker — Wed, 02 Dec 2020 07:00:00 +0000

This post is part of our symposium on the Law and Political Economy of Meat. In North Carolina, environmental justice communities have been fighting the rise of industrial animal agriculture for thirty years, and they are used to losing. They lose in the courts, in the permitting and enforcement offices of state bureaucrats and, above all, in the Capitol. Even so, these community advocates used to...

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We treat animals as legal objects. We should treat them as legal subjects instead.

Caroline Parker — Thu, 26 Nov 2020 07:00:30 +0000

This post is part of our symposium on the Law and Political Economy of Meat. The legal and political economy of agriculture is connected to one of the deepest and widest shortcomings of current United States law: our denial of basic legal standing to more than 99% of our population. In particular, we currently classify nonhuman animals as legal objects, without the capacity for legal rights.

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At the Cost of an Animal

Caroline Parker — Wed, 25 Nov 2020 07:00:30 +0000

This post is part of our symposium on the Law and Political Economy of Meat. A growing movement is challenging our collective failure to meet our ethical obligations to farmed animals, who are sentenced to what Jacques Derrida called “an artificial, infernal, virtually interminable survival, in conditions that previous generations would have judged monstrous, outside of every supposed norm of a...

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Break Up the Modern Meat Trust

Caroline Parker — Tue, 24 Nov 2020 07:00:37 +0000

This post is part of our symposium on the Law and Political Economy of Meat. America once had a competitive meat industry. Not anymore. For four decades, the U.S. government has watched idly as a handful of largely foreign-owned meat corporations grew horizontally by killing off or gobbling up their competitors and vertically by gobbling up their supply chains. Today four massive companies – JBS...

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The LPE of Meat: A Symposium on Food & Agriculture

Caroline Parker — Mon, 23 Nov 2020 07:00:00 +0000

This is the introductory post for our symposium on the Law and Political Economy of Meat. This week, many Americans are celebrating one food tradition that is rooted in violence. Here on the blog, we are talking about another: the factory farm. Meatpacking has always been a grim business for the animals whose deaths are its central project. The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed other expressions of...

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