Making meat moral: A comparison of rearing and killing practices in Swedish cattle farming

Abstract

To eat or not eat meat? That has become a central sustainability question. This article zooms in on the moral sustainability of cattle farming and does so from an on‐farm perspective: through an ethnographic study of two Swedish cattle farms, we explore how rearing animals for food is made moral. The farms represent two distinct styles of farming, and discursive and non‐discursive methods are used to analyse differences in narratives and practices. We combine insights from the farming styles literature with affective and multispecies approaches to theorise farming moralities as situated, embedded and relational beliefs that pertain to practices of work. Our study demonstrates how scale and endogeneity are key factors shaping farming morality by generating different on‐farm notions of animal agency and interspecies relationships. We discuss the implications of this conclusion for a potential shift in meat practices.