“I Do Still Love the Taste”: Taste as a Reason for Eating Non-human Animals

… never meat sweet-savor'd in thy taste, Unless I spake, or look'd, or touch'd, or carved to thee. The Comedy of Errors 2 ii, 89–90 Patterns of food production and consumption have immense environmental impact. While much public discussion of meat eating centers on economic, environmental, and ethical issues and is based on reasoned arguments and facts, the contention of this article is that justifications of meat eating also have a more physical and less rational element which is more fully captured in the discourses of literature, marketing, and reflection on personal experience. Many people do not confront the ethical and environmental implications of their meat eating. The impact of industrial farming, or even the fact that meat is dead animal flesh, are often either not considered in justifications of meat eating, or treated as less significant than meat eating as a physical, personal, and social experience. Meat eating for many remains solely a matter of taste, in both the biological and social senses of the word.