The dominant model of meat production and consumption as a socially acute question for activist education

A food system consists of a set of actors and the inter-related activities they perform with the aim of feeding the population. These activities include methods of production (planting and harvesting crops, livestock rearing, etc.), processing and packaging, transport and distribution, retail, preparation and consumption of food, and waste management. Food systems may be local, regional or global. Whereas local and regional systems generally reflect the traditions, cultures, economic structures, climate, and ecosystems of a particular area or country, the dominant system in our globalized world has emerged from the deregulation and neoliberal policies which have become hegemonic in recent decades, and in this respect it reflects the power wielded by the large corporations that dominate the market and whose primary aim is to maximize profits.

Notably, the dominant food system is characterized by the consumption of large quantities of natural resources such as water (Molden 2013), land, and energy (Poore and Nemecek 2018), resulting in loss of biodiversity and contributing significantly to climate change. In addition, the increasing reliance of many countries on ultraprocessed foods (Monteiro, Cannon, Lawrence, Costa Louzada and Pereira Machado 2019) implies long supply chains from source to processing sites to consumers, and this is associated with pollution and unnecessary food waste; furthermore, the way in which these foods are advertised and marketed encourages overconsumption, a consequence of which is the rise in non-communicable diseases (Springmann, Godfray, Rayner and Scarborough 2016). Indeed, the growth of this food system, which is often the beneficiary of significant public investment and resources (Lazarus, McDermid and Jacquet 2021), has generated serious health problems and is one of the main drivers of environmental degradation worldwide (Fig. 1).

Regarding health consequences, over 2 billion people globally are now overweight, although over 800 million individuals remain undernourished and about 2 billion suffer from micronutrient deficiencies (FAO and WHO 2019). Importantly, it is estimated that dietary risks were responsible for 11 million deaths in 2017 (Afshin, Sur, Fay, Cornaby, Ferrara, Salama, Mullany, Abate, Abbafati, Abebe, and Afarideh 2019), more than any other individual factor. More specifically, research has linked high consumption of red and processed meat to an increased risk of various non-communicable diseases such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and several types of cancer (Bouvard, Loomis, Guyton, Grosse, El Ghissassi, Benbrahim-Tallaa, and Straif 2015). As for the environment, the global industrial food system accounts for a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions and occupies around 40% of the Earth's ice-free land area; agriculture alone is responsible for roughly 70% of freshwater withdrawals worldwide and relies on fertilizers that disrupt the nitrogen and phosphorus cycle and cause water pollution through runoff (FAO and WHO 2019). These figures illustrate how the way in which food is produced, consumed, and wasted has a major impact on the health of both people and the planet (Willett, Rockström, Loken, Springmann, Lang, Vermeulen, and Jonell 2019). A transition to more sustainable food systems is therefore urgently needed if we are to achieve the UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

A key feature of today's industrial food system is its capacity to produce large amounts of animal-based foods (meat and dairy) while keeping costs low. This has been achieved through several means:

The CAFOs, defined as facilities in which over a thousand animals are housed and fed in a confined space for at least 45 days a year, are particularly important here. These industrial-scale farms, which were developed with the aim of reducing the cost of livestock rearing, have several controversial implications:

There appears, however, to be a lack of public awareness about the negative consequences that high levels of meat consumption have for human and planetary health (Marinova and Bogueva 2019), not to mention misconceptions about the environmental impact of different diets (Brocos and Jiménez-Aleixandre 2020) and reluctance among consumers to reduce meat consumption for the purpose of environmental sustainability (Austgulen, Skuland, Schjøll, and Alfnes 2018). Furthermore, there are several important obstacles to reducing meat consumption:

· The centrality of meat in family, social and cultural traditions and its associations with status, masculinity, and a sense of strength and health.

· The ability of the meat and dairy industry (hereinafter, the meat industry) to respond with intense advertising campaigns and lobbying when it perceives that sales and profits may be affected.

· Research studies that are funded by the meat industry with the aim of giving scientific backing to the benefits of meat eating or challenging the wider consensus regarding its negative impacts, with the results of these studies forming the basis of advertising and media campaigns. In some cases, lobbying by the meat industry has succeeded in changing official dietary recommendations so that they do not undermine sales.

· Finally, a defining feature of neoliberal policies is to provide economic support to large corporations, whether through subsidies, tax exemptions or deregulation.

Alongside these attempts by the meat industry to promote consumption, guiding principles for sustainable healthy diets have been drawn by international organizations (FAO and WHO 2019), and there have been several calls to create a healthy, equitable, and sustainable food system (Freudenberg and Nestle 2020). Mention should be made in this context of a recent report by the EAT-Lancet Commission, a consortium of 37 nutritionists, ecologists, and experts from 16 countries (Willett, Rockström, Loken, Springmann, Lang, Vermeulen, and Jonell 2019). The report proposed a flexitarian reference diet for planetary health that aimed to meet three objectives: to provide a healthy diet for an estimated global population of 10 billion people by 2050; to reduce the incidence of non-communicable diseases and overall mortality due to current Western diets; and to increase environmental sustainability so as to prevent the collapse of systems that will occur if changes of this kind are not implemented.

It is important to bear in mind that the dietary changes required will imply doubling global consumption of fruit, vegetables, nuts, seeds, and legumes, while reducing meat and sugar consumption by half (meat would play a greater role in those regions where sufficient nutrients cannot be obtained from other food sources). Moving toward such a diet could reduce food's land use by 76%, including a 19% reduction in arable land, while greenhouse gas emissions would fall by 49% (Poore and Nemecek 2018). The alternative is stark. If, as predicted, the world's population continues to rise and more people follow a Western-style diet, the production of meat, dairy, and eggs would need to increase by about 44% by 2050 (Vaidyanathan 2021), something that is beyond the bounds of possibility for our planet.

How citizens in Western societies respond to the need to reduce current levels of meat consumption will be a key factor in determining the extent to which we are able to tackle many of the environmental and health challenges that humanity is now facing. Science can inform and provide the data, but this alone seems insufficient to drive behavior change (Austgulen, Skuland, Schjøll and Alfnes 2018). Individual values also come into play, and the decisions of policy makers will be influenced by the social, economic, and political implications of change. Clearly, then, this is a socially acute question that, despite already being a topic of debate in the media, parliamentary, and academic spheres, cannot be resolved by experts alone. Indeed, all of us as citizens have a role to play, as what is at stake is our daily diet.

The analysis of the dominant model of meat production and consumption in Western countries, which must be seen against the backdrop of agreed measures for tackling climate change and a sharp projected rise in the world’s population by 2050, is a SAQ involving numerous controversies, among which we consider the following to be noteworthy:

There now appears to be a growing consensus around two issues (Willett, Rockström, Loken, Springmann, Lang, Vermeulen and Jonell 2019):

The goal is not that everybody becomes a vegan but that we reduce significantly the quantity of animal-based products that many of us now eat. At the scale of the food system, this also implies changing our models of production, transformation, and marketing, as well as an acceptance that less consumption will be beneficial for both human and planetary health. It is worth considering, for example, that the traditional Mediterranean diet of the 1960s included just 35 g per day of red meat and poultry combined (Kromhout, Keys, Aravanis, Buzina, Fidanza, Giampaoli, and Pekkarinen 1989), although 50 years later the Spanish population was consuming twice this amount (Del Pozo, García, Cuadrado, Ruiz, Valero, Ávila, and Varela 2012). It is in this context that the aforementioned report by the EAT-Lancet Commission (Willett, Rockström, Loken, Springmann, Lang, Vermeulen, and Jonell 2019) proposes that a daily intake of 43 g of red meat and poultry combined could form part of a Great Food Transformation that would support environmental sustainability (see Fig. 2 for comparative data regarding actual and recommended meat consumption). Mention should also be made here of the emerging controversies around suggestions of cultured–and, in some cases, 3D-printed–meats to overcome many social and environmental problems linked to animal husbandry (Jönsson, Linné, and McCrow-Young 2019).

Although these proposals might seem hard to implement, they are believed to be achievable through a combination of education, taxation, subsidies for plant-based foods, and changes to school and workplace menus. It should also be noted that movements aimed at reducing meat consumption (Meatless Monday 2011) or which call on governments to take urgent action to address global warming and climate change (www.​fridaysforfuture​.​org, School Strike 4 Climate, Youth 4 Climate) are increasingly popular among—and driven by—young people.

Although food, health, and the environment are topics that have been widely addressed in the educational field, it is only more recently that attention has been paid to the relationship between them (Campbell-Arvai 2015). Doing so offers students an opportunity to engage positively with environmental issues and their personal health, while for science educators it is way of expanding learning objectives to include critical thinking and reflection on the problems humanity is facing and to consider aspects such as social justice and environmental values, rather than focusing solely on the acquisition of science and technology knowledge and skills considered useful within capitalist societies. According to Léonie Rennie (2006), the goal of science education is that students become interested in and engage with discourses of and about science, are able to identify questions and draw evidence-based conclusions, are skeptical and questioning of claims made about scientific matters, and are capable of making informed decisions about the environment and socio-scientific issues that impact their lives.

In terms of how these goals may be achieved, a recent study by Christodoulou, Levinson, Davies Grace, Nicholl and Rietdijk (2021) shows how a Cartography of Controversy (CoC) approach can fulfill different educational purposes depending on where in the learning process it is employed. Specifically, these authors illustrate how the task of mapping a controversy may be framed to familiarize students with an SAQ, to allow them to explore it in greater depth, or to consolidate the understanding and knowledge they have acquired. Regardless of how the task for students is framed, it is essential that their teachers have previously conducted a more in-depth socio-epistemological analysis of the SAQ (Simonneaux and Legardez 2011) so as to provide a reference with which to compare the maps produced by students.

In the next section of this paper, we describe two experiences that illustrate how the CoC approach may be applied. The first concerns the development of an activist education project based on our socio-epistemological analysis of the controversies surrounding meat production and consumption. The second involved using cartography as a familiarization task with two groups of preservice teachers so as to explore and visualize their views and ideas about this SAQ. Accordingly, students were introduced to the idea of mapping a controversy and identifying actants, but they were not given specific information about the SAQ or asked to conduct their own more detailed inquiry into it; the aim was merely to obtain a visual representation of their initial ideas by getting them to produce a map showing the network of actants they considered to be involved, and the relationships between them. Simonneaux (2020) similarly describes an abbreviated version of the CoC approach in which students merely have to draw up a map of a controversy. The next step would obviously be for students to engage in a more in-depth inquiry, revising and/or building on their initial maps as they acquire more knowledge and consolidate their learning.

Within the context of our group’s research on teaching science and competences (ENCIC), (http://​encic.​es/​) we decided to address the controversies surrounding the dominant model of meat production and consumption in Western countries through a project, currently ongoing, aimed at encouraging citizens to reflect on the environmental and health implications of this model (Zeyer and Dillon 2014), and then to take action toward change.

The project has the following objectives:

The work conducted so far on this project has fed into a number of experiential activities that we have carried out with preservice early childhood and high-school teachers at the University of Malaga (Spain) (Cabello-Garrido, Cebrián-Robles, Cruz-Lorite, González-García, and España-Ramos 2021). From an educational perspective, the aim of these activities was to introduce students to the idea of mapping controversies as a tool for analyzing complex social problems prior to taking action. In addition, and from a research perspective, we wanted to learn more about their existing mental maps of this SAQ by asking them to map the controversy, after which their responses could be compared with the map drawn up by the research team. The idea here is that discussion of differences between the maps can shed light on and bring into focus previously hidden aspects of a complex social problem (Latour 2005).

The activity with preservice early childhood teachers involved a total of 103 students corresponding to two class groups (of 51 and 52 students, respectively), all of whom were currently enrolled in the same Teaching Natural Sciences module of their degree program. All these students were women and were aged between 20 and 28 years. The aim of the activity was to explore their existing views and ideas about the dominant model of meat production and consumption in Western countries and to introduce them to the CoC approach as a way of exploring the controversy. Accordingly, the cartography was framed as a familiarization task (Christodoulou, Levinson, Davies Grace, Nicholl, and Rietdijk 2021), and students were not given any information or instruction related to the controversy prior to producing their map, nor were they asked to conduct their own inquiry before doing so. Due to restrictions imposed in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, this activity was conducted online using Google Meet and the Miro (miro.com) online whiteboard, with parallel sessions being run for each of the two class groups. Students were first asked to list, individually, 6 actants associated with the issue, the goal here being to encourage personal reflection on the problem. They were then invited to form small groups (3–4 students) with classmates of their choosing. Each small group then had to discuss and choose, from among all the actants listed by group members, the four which they considered were most relevant to an analysis of the problem and which, therefore, should be included in the map. Once each small group had added its actants to the online whiteboard, the class as a whole had to discuss and agree how they should be grouped and distributed across the map, thus enabling the four poles to be established; they also had to agree on how these poles would be labeled. This was followed by further discussion among the class as a whole in which they had to propose relationships between the different actants, indicating whether these were unidirectional or bidirectional, and also the nature of the relationship between the two elements (i.e., did one of the two elements support or challenge the other). The final task for students, once again working as a class, was to propose specific actions that could help to improve certain aspects or problems highlighted by their map.

Figure 5 shows the map produced by one of the two class groups. It can be seen that the poles are labeled Economy (yellow), Environment (green), Health (pink), and Society (blue), and that students proposed primarily unidirectional relationships both between actants and between actants and the controversy they had been asked to consider (i.e., the health and environmental implications of meat production and consumption). The actions proposed by this class group included regulations on advertising, greater emphasis on health education, subsidies for extensive livestock farming and tighter regulation of intensive farming, and challenging myths about food through information and awareness-raising campaigns, both generally and specifically on the topic of vegetarian and vegan diets.

Another activity involved 28 preservice high-school teachers (18 women and 10 men, aged between 22 and 35 years), most of whom had a degree in Biology; the remainder had qualifications in the fields of earth sciences and health. This was a face-to-face activity that took place prior to lockdown in 2020. Once again, students were not given any information or instruction related to the controversy prior to the activity, and hence the cartography was framed as a familiarization task (Christodoulou, Levinson, Davies Grace, Nicholl, and Rietdijk 2021). In a first step, each student produced an individual list of three actants, which were then shared and grouped into poles following discussion among the class as a whole. Students then worked individually to propose relationships between the different actants, followed again by class discussion to agree on those which should be added to the map. The map produced by these students (Fig. 6) was very similar to that created by the class of preservice early childhood teachers (Fig. 5) in terms of the poles it included: Culture/Society, Health, Environment, and Trade/Economy.

A total of 26 actants were identified, some of which (e.g., the price of meat and the issue of animal welfare) coincided with those featured in the map produced by the preservice early childhood teachers. However, the map produced by the preservice high-school teachers also included some actants that, in our view, reflected their greater scientific knowledge, for instance, the risk of colorectal cancer, the amount of water required to produce a kilo of meat, and land grabbing. It is seen in Fig. 6 that these students proposed a total of 15 relationships (9 between actants and 6 between actants and the central controversy), all of which were unidirectional.

In this section we compare the maps produced by the two groups of students with our own. Obviously, our own map was the result of a lengthy and detailed socio-epistemological analysis of the SAQ, and it should also be remembered that the cartography was framed solely as a familiarization task with students, who were not given any information or instruction related to the controversy prior to producing their maps, nor were they asked to conduct their own inquiry before doing so. These aspects should be considered as potential limitations of the present study.

The comparison of maps focuses on the following aspects: the number and type of actants, the number and labeling of poles, the number of relationships established, and the complexity of the relationships established between actants (both within and between poles). Table 1 presents a summary of the results obtained.

The total number of actants provides an indication of the extent of the analysis carried out. Although we expected our own map to feature a greater number of actants, students' maps also included a considerable number (equivalent to 60% and 77% of the total number of actants in our map). Like our own map, students' maps also included four poles, although there were a number of differences in this respect:

- They did not consider the political dimension of the SAQ, neither as one of the poles nor, in general, through the type of actants they included. Notably, their maps did not make reference to government regulations or subsidies related to meat production. Although the map produced by the preservice early childhood teachers did feature 'Policies' as an actant, it was not linked to any others or to the center of the map.

- The students' maps did not consider scientific issues beyond those related to human health, and it is noteworthy the lack of reference to veterinary science, food technology, environmental science, and nutrition.

- The economic dimension in students' maps is limited to production/sales, and issues related to product promotion, advertising, and marketing are almost completely absent (advertising does feature as an actant in the map produced by the preservice early childhood teachers, but it is not linked to others).

- The cultural and symbolic dimension of meat consumption is only referenced in the map produced by the preservice early childhood teachers (it is absent from the map created by their preservice high school counterparts).

The total number of relationships established may be considered an indicator of the depth of analysis carried out, as well as of the extent to which the complexity of the question is appreciated. The total number of relationships established in the map produced by preservice high school teachers was less than half the number in the map produced by the group of preservice early childhood teachers. However, the preservice high school teachers proposed a greater number of relationships between actants of the same pole, which suggests that although the total number of relationships they established was lower, the connections they proposed were more complex.

Based on the type of relationships established in our own and the students' maps, it is possible to identify five levels of increasing complexity, as represented in Fig. 7.

At the most basic level (not depicted in Fig. 7), students included an actant in their map but did not relate it either to other actants or the controversy (center of the map), suggesting that while they sense it to be relevant to the question, they lack the information or knowledge to locate and connect it more precisely. At the next level (level 1 in Fig. 7), direct relationships are established between an actant and the controversy (center of the map). These relationships are usually the first to be established when mapping the controversy surrounding an SAQ, and it is often the case that in doing so, other intermediate actants emerge that begin to reveal the complexity of relationships. In our view, the high percentage of direct (actant–controversy) relationships in students' maps suggests a lack of depth in their analysis, which is likely due to the design of the activity (e.g., the time available, the framing of the cartography as a familiarization task).

The number of relationships established between actants of different poles may be considered an indicator of the extent to which the complexity of the question is appreciated, and in this respect, it is noteworthy that few relationships of this kind were represented in students' maps. The final level of complexity in Fig. 7 refers to actants with a bidirectional relationship to others, whether between or within poles. The presence of actants represented with both incoming and outgoing arrows (i.e., they are both the origin and endpoint of a relationship) results in a denser map, indicative of greater complexity in the analysis of the controversy. Bidirectional relationships of this kind were less commonly represented in students' maps than in our own.

We found the CoC approach to be a useful way of engaging students with the controversies surrounding the dominant model of meat production and consumption in Western countries, and it enabled us to visualize their initial views and ideas about this SAQ. The differences observed when comparing their maps with our own more detailed map help to identify those areas where students' knowledge and understanding of the controversy needs to evolve. For instance, although students' maps commonly included actants related to aspects of human health or harm to the environment, other actants with a less direct relationship to the central controversy, such as economic or policy issues, were often overlooked. It is important to remember, however, that the cartography was framed here solely as a familiarization task for students (Christodoulou, Levinson, Davies Grace, Nicholl, and Rietdijk 2021), and in this respect the present study is merely a first step toward the incorporation of the CoC approach into our science teaching program. As we noted earlier, the next step would involve providing students with more information about this SAQ so that they could engage in a more in-depth inquiry, revising and/or building on their initial maps as they acquire more knowledge and consolidate their learning. If one of the goals of this learning process is that students move toward taking action for change, then coupled with the website we have developed with the aim of engaging and informing citizens about this SAQ, it would be an example of what Hodson (2014) refers to as indirect activism.

To conclude, the CoC approach would appear to be a useful pedagogical method for helping students engage with and develop their knowledge about SAQs of the kind we consider here. In particular, it provides the opportunity to: