Harvard Divinity School
Luna Patience is a first year Master of Theological Study student at Harvard Divinity School, with a specialization in the intersection of environmental studies, ethics, and folklore. She is interested in addressing issues of Self/Other identity, the formations of humanness through environmental abstraction and reconstruction, and the ways in which culture is led and affected by religion. Her work seeks to deconstruct definitions in a manner useful for the furthering of both philosophical and practical investigation into religious structures.
This essay discusses the history and implications of meat production in order to make the argument that factory farming is a form of industrialized ritual slaughter, the product of which reifies the individual’s human identity and ideological bearings. It proposes this argument based on scholarly definitions of the components of ritual sacrifice, and the way these components appear throughout the process of factory farming. It delves into the role of food in reaffirming vitality and identity among human communities, and of separating these human communities from animal communities. In response to these arguments, it suggests that, in order to rediscover a more ecologically sensitive relationship with food and with animal life, the realities of slaughter must be understood in relation to an individual's lived experience and must be placed at the forefront of the human relationship with meat. This is not a regression to past practices but rather a modernized step towards a more sustainable and sensible future.