“Meat-me”: From flesh machines to individualities. A case for an anti-speciesist degrowth

Degrowth, a leading paradigm addressing our socio-ecological crisis, criticizes the highly destructive animal factory-farming industry. However, it does not challenge the commodification of sentient beings and the underlying system that perpetuates the oppression of the “less-than-human”. Animals-as-food, reduced to “flesh machines,” are exploited with institutional legitimacy rooted in societal belief systems. Drawing upon posthumanist and ecofeminist perspectives, this article argues that to achieve a just transformation, the degrowth proposal must gain ethical congruence and dismantle anthropocentric worldviews. Adopting an anti-speciesist framework becomes crucial to overcoming socio-ecological collapse, fundamentally reshaping our interactions with cohabiting individualities within the biosphere.