Chapter 9: Children Should Know Where Meat Comes from: Problematizing Meat-Eating in Elementary Schools

In this chapter I argue that children should know where meat comes from. Further, children should be engaged in the discussion not only about whether humans should be eating meat, but also how we should be treating nonhuman animals. This issue provides teachers with a series of challenges, not least of which are concerns about how families might react if students decided on their own to give up eating meat. Meat-eating, as I note in the chapter is considered sacrosanct, even while the practices humans engage in to continue to eat meat on the scale that North Americans do raise both challenges and moral quandaries that children should be equipped to grapple with. I provide readers with ways to think about this issue, as well as many resources that can help shape and guide their teaching of this topic in meaningful depth.