Women, Animals and Food Sovereignty

Towards an Ethical-economic Rationality to Put Life First

Abstract

This paper analyzes the issue of using animals as food for humans from a critical perspective that sets out from the question of power relations and the rationality that supports them and that consider life and all that sustains it as mere instruments. The analysis focuses on the role of women as creators of civilization, especially in relation to the production and transformation of food, and on their historically-determined responsibility for “reproductive work”; that is, the so-called “caring economy” (Esquivel, 2011). The aim of the paper is not to resolve the carnivore/vegan debate, but to place the discussion in the context of the search for sustainability and food sovereignty, as urgent priorities in the face of a model based on unsustainable economic growth that preys on nature while producing hunger and malnutrition. In this framework, the oppression of animals is regarded not as an isolated phenomenon, but as one profoundly related to the “exacerbation of all limits” wrought by a global market economy on the natural world, and linked as well to the oppression of women; the actors de facto responsible for providing most of humanity’s food.