Ironically, our culture associates eco-consciousness with higher socioeconomic status, as though greater wealth denotes greater character. But in my experience, environmental impacts are most keenly felt and understood by the poor and unheard.
In fact, as I have climbed out of poverty and into a class of highly educated, financially comfortable liberals, I have found that for all their supposed interest in justice and claims of being on the right side of history, most of my peers give little thought to animal suffering in their eating decisions.
Of course, wealth and class play a role in what food and products you can afford. Socioeconomic barriers to values-based eating choices undeniably exist, particularly in urban areas cut off from healthy food options. But one doesn’t have to afford expensive grass-finished beef or frozen patties engineered from pea protein to make effective food decisions, and white male chief executives didn’t invent plant-based living. Bougie restaurants serving charcuterie boards sure as hell didn’t invent local venison salami, which we made from the deer we hunted.
To be certain, many middle-class and affluent consumers far removed from agricultural work have learned about the problems of factory farming, including its contribution to climate change, and altered their habits. I applaud their important efforts. For some people, though, working near the bottom of the class ladder provides not just knowledge but a knowing, and that knowing deserves respect.
As a young adult, I lived in poverty and faced food insecurity. These conditions limited my choices, but they did not negate my affection for the earth. I grew up driving a farm truck with wheat kernels on the floor of the cab and an “Eat beef” license plate on the front bumper. I knew people maimed by farm machinery and disabled by agricultural chemicals. Regarding the conditions of farm animals and farmworkers, I had no option but to understand.
For me, there is no taste of meat without bodily memory — the heat of a newborn calf in my cold arms, the smell of the mother’s cascading excrement, the danger of her heavy hooves. I could see the cows on our farm from my upstairs bedroom window and the pigs and chickens from our front door.
My early proximity to animals did not cause my empathy for them, I suspect, so much as it starkly revealed it. To be sure, similar experiences did not make animal rights activists out of most of the people in my farming community. But in general, I observed more environmentally conscious behaviors among the rural working poor than in other socioeconomic spaces I’ve inhabited.