The Moral Economy of Plant-Based Futures

The Moral Economy of Plant-Based Futures explores the complex interplay between plant-based social movements and the evolving global economy, offering a timely exploration of how these movements respond to and shape calls for reduced meat and dairy production.

While meat and dairy production and consumption are increasingly being held responsible for climate change and general environmental destruction, questions of how social movements respond to and are affected by global calls for a reduction of meat and dairy products remain underexplored in relation to markets. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in Telangana, India, and California, USA, the author adopts a multi-sited, sociomaterial approach to investigate how moral issues intersect with economic arrangements, revealing how movements influence markets and vice versa. It establishes an empirically-based, interdisciplinary research agenda for exploring how the plant-based moral economy is understood, practised and contested at different social levels across both the Global North and South, and advances a broader theorization of the moral economy of plant-based futures.

An examination of the interaction of moral issues with economic arrangements, which combines a social movements perspective with a moral economy approach, the book offers a compelling lens for exploring how movements make markets. It will therefore appeal to scholars and students of sociology, anthropology, geography, development, movements and globalization with interests in food, the environment and the moral economy.