Pigs in Paradise

local happy people raising (happy, local) pigs?

Vaughn B. Myles Baltzly

Texas State University

Colleen C. Myles-Baltzly

Texas State University

pp. 23-39

in: Andrea Borghini, Nicola Piras & Beatrice Serini (eds), Philosophy of Food, East Asian Journal of Philosophy 1 (2), 2022.

Abstract

This paper approaches the topic of local, ethical, and sustainable food, an alimentary conception that is particularly salient at present, given recent trends regarding thoughtful, environmentally-sensitive consumption. And yet each of these concepts – local, ethical, and sustainable – can have multiple interpretations. In this paper, we articulate and defend a somewhat surprising claim about some potential implications of such alimentary commitments – namely, that they may lend support to some varieties of “conscientious carnivorism.” We focus on an especially illustrative instance of (potentially) moral meat-eating: the case of Cinta Senese, a once-endangered pig that holds a special place in the cultural and environmental landscape in Tuscany, Italy. In Tuscany, Cinta Senese constitute a robustly local food product (in a genealogical sense), where they, plausibly, lead quite happy lives (in a welfarist sense), and the recent revival of their dwindling populations clearly represents a “sustainability success” (in a conservationist sense). Thus, we argue that locavores with welfarist and conservationist proclivities may actually find that they have considerable reason to support (rather than to oppose) this form of animal agriculture – as well as others relevantly like it.