[Original event published by frenchculture.org]
Join Ronan Larue for an enlightning talk on veganism, animal welfare and more.
While most French people condemn factory farming for either ethical or environmental reasons there is a small minority within this group who advocate for plant-based diets.
For those who either enjoy the taste of meat or don’t want to put too much thought into realities of husbandry and/or slaughterhouses, the above mentioned position appears to be too extreme.
Hence the prominence of public figures like Jean-Pierre Coffe, Périco Legasse or Jocelyne Porcher (the French equivalents of Joel Salatin and Michael Pollan) who promote yesteryear’s small-scale farming and blame vegans for advocating for the abolition of animal agriculture altogether.
Melanie Joy, amongst others, named this new attitude “neocarnism.” Within the span of a couple of years, neocarnism has become hegemonic in French (as well as US) media. The concept “happy meat” or “viande bio” is a perfect example of “passive revolution” (Gramsci) as:
- nothing changes fundamentally for the environment and farm animals
- the animal-industrial complex manages to tranquillize people’s conscious while buying and eating animal products.
The Speaker
Renan Larue is a writer and teacher of French literature at the University of California in Santa-Barbara, where he created a Vegan Studies program which explores the intersection between vegetarian and vegan food choices and philosophy, touching on politics, economics, religion, and psychology.
In 2016, Dr. Larue published Vegetarianism and Its Enemies. In his Académie Française La Bruyère prize-winning book, he explores the history of vegetarianism in the Western world, from antiquity to the present day. In 2017, he published with Valéry Giroux Le Véganisme in the collection Que Sais-je ?. Dr. Larue is also the author of La pensée végane. 50 regards sur la condition animale (Vegan thoughts. 50 ways of looking at the animal welfare) in which he discusses speciesism and animal prejudice, among other issues.
View the talk
Seminar open to the general public. This event is co-sponsored by the Department of French and Italian and the Center of Excellence at The Ohio State University.
Bridges to the Future: 100 Years of French Thought
Renan Larue's talk is part of the series "Bridges to the Future: 100 Years of French Thought" celebrating today’s bright thinkers who have been published by the Presses Universitaires de France. All events take place online and in collaboration with outstanding American universities.
