• Tuesday, April 17, at 4:30 p.m.
• Lasry 237

The Philosophy Department presents:

John Sanbonmatsu

on

The Omnivore’s Distraction: Locavorism, Capitalism, and the Politics of Killing Animals  

 “Think globally, eat locally” has become the rallying cry for a new food politics, as middle class consumers embrace bestselling books like Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma that depict locally grown organice product and do-it-youself animal slaughter as the progressive, ecologically sustainable alternative to a ruinous system of industrialized agriculture. But does locavorism really make for a good ecological politics and ethics?

Analyzing the presentation of animals in recent works of Pollan, Barbara Kingsolver, Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith, and others, Sanbonmatsu argues that far from being a radical alternative to corpoarate agricutlrue, locavorism is in fact its ideological complement. With its spectacle of “good” killing, he suggests, locavorism naturalizes and legitimates our continued domination of other animals, while its proponents fail to question the deeper structures of inequality and violence that have placed our species on a collision course with the planet’s biosphere.

John Sanbonmatsu is professor of philosophy and politics at Worcester Polytechnic Institute.