Animal Consumption and Cultural Responsibility: A Journal Entry

By Théa Jacquand, CAS ’26

This is one of two student selections from the Georgetown undergraduate course, Environment and Society, a foundational, survey course in the Environmental Studies program, covering theories and applications in science, policy and humanities. The course is taught by Professor Randall Amster and Professor Rebecca Helm. 

My father’s side of the family is French, and I went to French school my whole life. The culture prides itself on delicious foie gras, exquisite filet mignon and to-die-for dairy products. I will not lie — they are all of those things. My mother’s side of the family is Japanese. In that gastronomy, meat is not the main attraction; rather fish, or even completely vegan options like tofu and beans, are more central. 

Early in my life, I lived in Kenya, where meat consumption was always tricky for me to understand: it was a luxury for most in the cosmopolitan world and always cooked as well done as possible, but it was also a staple in the diet of the small communities of Maasai people, embedded in the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. 

I mostly grew up in New York City, however, where my political consciousness was nurtured as environmental movements gained traction, where veganism was predominant in public discourse and where all these cultural gastronomies always mixed. 

Given my background, the question of how we can find a compromise between sustaining cultures and gastronomies, while also reducing the consumption of foods whose production causes harmful environmental effects is often top of mind for me.

At Thanksgiving, my family invited our close friends, a French-Palestinian family. My mother cooked two kinds of meat: steak and lamb. I have not consumed red meat in about a year, so I did not take any myself, but everyone else was thrilled at the idea of having both. 

For my family at least, the meat options represented a respite from our otherwise mostly vegan diet. About a year ago, my sister had the idea of switching from a general food delivery service to a plant-based meal preparation company called Purple Carrot. 

Purple Carrot delivers four meals to your door each week, exposing you to different cultures in all entirely vegan dishes. And we have loved it. My sister’s whole reasoning was why not? Our family could not be more aligned with this optimism. However, at Thanksgiving, this was more of a point of contention than celebration. My father claimed that we were 70% vegan as a family, which I staunchly disagreed with. 

Although four vegan meals per week is a great start, it is most certainly not enough to make us 70% vegan given that we still consume cheese — essentially second nature for our French blood. This launched a debate at the dinner table amongst both families as to what extent we were willing to give up the cheeses, wines and meats so closely associated with our culture for the larger objective of scalable individual action. I argued that we are so disconnected from where our food is sourced. Although it might make sense to consume meat when that meat is sourced very locally in a pocket of the French countryside, it is certainly a different situation when it is consumed en masse in New York City. 

The eight of us around the table, all from different cultural backgrounds, engaged in a very long reflection. We asked each other: To what extent can we stay connected to our heritage through food, especially if we live abroad, in a planet-friendly way? How much does the world really change if I change my diet? How many people can actually afford to change their diets in such a way? 

Some of these problems are discussed by Richard Niesenbaum in “Sustainable Solutions,” a central text for our Environment & Society course. He writes, “Consumption of meat and animal products in the United States is a major component of the factory farm agro-economy that exploits both the environment and lower wage, immigrant workers.” It perpetuates deforestation, trophic inefficiency and exploitative industries.

It is easy to get caught in the illusion that industrial development is a stronger alternative to growing food locally to solve questions of world hunger. Furthermore, the consumption of meat is inextricably intertwined with issues of access to food in general.

However, a more relevant point for my family is raised by Leah Penniman in her essay in “All We Can Save.” She writes that many people in the U.S. suffer from an “estrangement from soil” in terms of accessibility to foods that fall within their cultural heritage. 

Of course, we could all agree that reducing our meat intake was one of the first tools and methods that was scalable to our lives in addressing some of these issues. As Niesenbaum specifically discusses, eating less meat addresses the “trophic or feeding-level efficiency argument,” helps reduce “energy and water consumption, pollution and land degradation” and carries positive health implications. 

In addition, reducing meat consumption as French people could influence how other people with cultural backgrounds heavily reliant on animal consumption view their own behaviors. This is not to say that the entirety of French gastronomy needs to be reevaluated, but rather that a shift toward a more responsible dietary behavior can begin at the individual level.

Responsibility was one of the main discussion topics of a philosophy course called Moral Agency I took earlier this year. We learned that responsibility requires a retrospective component in acknowledging perhaps limited past behaviors, but also requires an outward, prospective component in being effective and agentive in future actions and behavior. This approach turns guilt into a productive ethical commitment, in line with Niesenbaum’s theory of planned behavior. 

Niesenbaum argues that if culture is foundationally social-relational and sustained by individuals at the most basic level, then that culture can jumpstart scalable change, especially if the change can occur at the psychological and mental level. He writes, “As we engage the people we know in this positive way, collective change can begin to occur as individuals become invested in causes at a personal level.” In the long run, cultural ideology could shift to be more sustainable. 

Moving one step forward, if the influence of household sustainable action is intertwined with government incentives or disincentives, then individual shifts in behavior could impact both cultural and structural systems. 

Still,  reducing meat consumption or subscribing to a delivery system like Purple Carrot come with a certain financial privilege. Since racial minorities and other vulnerable groups are often exposed to more environmental challenges, we must remain conscious of these dynamics to not further perpetuate inequality.  

Although I do not have an answer about any definitive solutions, I think that this extensive debate over a Thanksgiving meal is a critical first step in an intense reflection of the relationship between consumption and culture.