Consuming with Conscience? The Moral Privilege and Narrative Scale Paradoxes of Happy Meat

Josée Johnston; Emily Huddart

doi:10.60923/issn.1971-8853/23648

Authors

Josée Johnston Department of Sociology, University of Toronto https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4886-1809
Dr. Josée Johnston is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto (Canada), where she currently serves as Graduate Chair of the Tri-Campus Department of Sociology. Her research explores how culture, consumption, and environmental issues intersect with politics and inequality, with a particular focus on food as a lens into broader questions of class, gender, and power. She is co-author of Happy Meat: The Sadness and Joy of a Paradoxical Idea (Stanford University Press, 2025), with Shyon Baumann, Emily Huddart, and Merin Oleschuk, which examines the cultural contradictions and ethical tensions shaping how we eat animals today. Much of her work investigates ethical consumption and food politics, and she is recognized for her scholarship on foodie culture. Dr. Johnston is also co-author of Introducing Sociology Using the Stuff of Everyday Life (Routledge, 2026), with Kate Cairns and Shyon Baumann, a book that brings core sociological concepts to life through everyday material culture. Dr. Johnston is currently a co-investigator on an SSHRC-funded project led by Dr. Emily Huddart Kennedy, exploring affective polarization and climate action in Canada.
Emily Huddart Department of Sociology, The University of British Columbia https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6723-4210

Emily Huddart is Professor of Sociology at the University of British Columbia (Canada), where she studies environmental politics, culture, consumption, and social inequality. Her research examines the motivations underlying environmental engagement and the ways that environmental beliefs and practices are shaped by social class, gender, political ideology, and collective identities. She is the author of Eco-Types: Five Ways of Caring about the Environment (Princeton University Press, 2022) and a co-author of Happy Meat: The Sadness and Joy of a Paradoxical Idea (Stanford University Press, 2025). Her current work focuses on the cultural dimensions of climate polarization in Canada, including how emotions, identities, and social divisions shape climate attitudes and policy preferences. She is currently leading research on affective climate polarization and the social barriers to building solidarity around climate action.

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.60923/issn.1971-8853/23648

Keywords:

Happy meat, Green consumption, Moral privilege, Scale, Paradox

Abstract

Class critiques of ethical consumption function as conventional wisdom, and green goods are often dismissed as luxuries for the affluent. While these critiques have merit, they can obscure the paradoxes at the heart of sustainable consumption, where moral aspiration is entangled with material constraints. To examine these dynamics, we use the case of “happy meat”, a shorthand for ethically branded animal products marketed as humane, local, or sustainable. Drawing on a broad Canadian multi-site study, we develop two analytic paradoxes that likely extend beyond food. The moral privilege paradox captures how ethical consumption organizes care through forms of distinction that also reproduce exclusion. The narrative scale paradox highlights how reassuring cultural narratives of happy meat make ethical consumption feel meaningful and achievable in ways that can also narrow recognition of the structural limits of small-scale solutions. Together, these paradoxes show how sustainable consumption can generate meaningful ethical actions while also reproducing the exclusions and limitations that undermine its broader promise. Seeing sustainable consumption through this lens helps move beyond the familiar cul-de-sac where consumption is cast either as empty performance or as a hopeful path to sustainability. Instead, it reveals sustainable consumption as a project shaped by enduring contradictions and illuminates how people navigate competing moral, material, and cultural demands within contemporary food systems.

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Consuming with Conscience? The Moral Privilege and Narrative Scale Paradoxes of Happy Meat

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