Defund Meat Conference

Publications

Building on the Defund Meat conference in January 2025, Verfassungsblog is curating a blog symposium with contributions from conference speakers and further experts in the field. The contributions will be published successively between 1 October and 20 October 2025. 

Press

The local Heidelberg newspaper Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung published an article on the conference written by attendee Steffanie Richter, downloadable in the box on the right. The attendee Tobias Leenaert published a conference report in the vegconomist. During the conference, Esther Molenwijk conducted a series of interviews in English and Dutch with several conference speakers for the podcast Studio Plantaardig.

Conference Brochure

The conference brochure can be downloaded (see box on the right).

Date and venue

A public launch event was held at the Deutsch-Amerikanisches Institut in Heidelberg on Wednesday evening, 15 January 2025.

The conference took place at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Heidelberg on Thursday and Friday, 16 - 17 January 2025 and online via Zoom.

Conference theme

This conference revisited the ‘meat question’ in the contemporary social, political, and legal context. Meat is an embodied symbol of the mounting and interrelated environmental and public health crises that have become characteristic of our era (which may be best described as the Anthropocene and One Health era): climate change, biodiversity loss, deforestation, pandemics, food insecurity, unhealthy and unsustainable diets, and institutionalised animal suffering. While (not) eating meat has long been cast as a private choice, it is increasingly turning into a public and political issue, as the social, ecological, and ethical costs of industrialised meat production are becoming more visible and prominent. Overwhelming scientific evidence indicates the need for sustainable food transformations and, concomitantly, a dietary transition away from animal-based foods. In consequence, the idea of a new – a transformative – meat governance with the aim of reducing overall meat production and consumption is gaining traction.

Nevertheless, meat remains the elephant in the room – or the sacred cow – especially when it comes to climate change and global public health strategies. Moreover, meat-reduction policies have not yet been instituted as integral part of the sustainable food transformation. While buzzwords such as the ‘decarbonisation’ of the economy and ‘fossil fuel divestment’ have become mainstream, comparable calls for a ‘deanimalisation’ of agriculture or for ‘defunding meat’ remain marginal. Considering livestock’s ‘long shadow’, it is time to drop the taboo: we need to talk about meat.

This interdisciplinary conference moved the meat question from the margins into the spotlight of the ongoing debates on One Health, sustainability, climate change, food security, and public health. The objective was to launch a multi-disciplinary and multi-perspective scholarly debate about meat in the Anthropocene that also contributes to the public debates in society. We sought to understand better the impacts of meat production and consumption on humans, animals, and the environment, to scrutinise traditional regulatory approaches, and to envision the future shape and instruments of a transformative meat governance.

Programme

The conference programme is online.