Are animals and nature one exploited underclass? And if so, where does organic food fit in?

�Youse are looking down at us�. That was the moment the audience on the Late Late Show finally stopped sitting on the fence and burst into a round of applause for Alo. Alo is an intensive chicken farmer, and he was sharing a platform with Hugh Fernley-Whittingstall.

Hugh is the driving force behind an unusual sort of farming reality TV show called the Chicken Run, which features side-by-side comparisons of conventional and free range chicken meat production.

Free range meat sales are up, but consumer sentiment, when sentimental, can be foppish and fickle in the extreme. There is an argument that the life blood of organic and other ethical food sales is in fact food scares.

The basic point Alo was making was that wealthy people can afford �that sort of food�, whereas less wealthy people can�t. This all reflects badly on the wealthier people and their attitude to others. Is this true, and what does it mean if it is?

First off, there is some truth in the idea. Take the example of organic food. It stands to reason that those on higher incomes can afford to spend more. But is it always so stark? Research suggests that class is important in defining what people eat, but class is defined by more than just wealth. Income, but also education and occupation come into it.

In other words, the better educated the person is, the more likely they are to make ethical food choices. Wealth, while important, levels off at a certain point. Interestingly, a large scale study done in Australia a few years back found that those with a 3^rd level science education were the most likely to eat organic food.

People also behave differently with organic food � far less organic food goes to waste in people�s cupboards. They also reprioritise their spending, lowering other consumer good to increase the organic ones.

However, the media and marketers love pitching to the middle class organic food consumer, as it is in both their interests: you cannot make as much money from vegetables or meat as you can from the organic cereal bars stuck to the front of the latest lifestyle magazine.

But there are other ways of looking at the same dynamics: Are middle class people self-taxing? Are they charging themselves a fee for protecting the environment? Are working class people so disempowered by Celtic Tiger Ireland that they cannot consider animal ethics? What does this say about the Celtic Tiger?

Here�s another way of looking at the situation, inspired by Carolyn Merchant�s 1980 book, called, cheerily enough, The Death of Nature.

In order to feed the working classes, the awful terms and conditions of urban, industrialised capitalist life in the era from about the 1850s to the 1950s was transferred over to nature, including animals.

So we gradually industrialised, capitalised and urbanised nature. We changed our conceptualisation of nature: Mother Nature went from being a thing we respected and were a part of, to a thing we controlled.

People who first started mining in the 16^th Century washed their forearms before going underground to be clean for Mother Earth. They thought the stuff they took would grow back in her womb.

With science and technology�s development, we started to dominate nature, and urban, industrialised life (70 hour working weeks, children in coalmines) emerged.

War played its part in a war on nature: Spam came from the Napoleonic Russian offensive, tractors came from tanks, fertilizers from (left over) explosives, pesticides from the insect lotions of soldiers in the trenches.

Intensive chicken meat production emerged to feed the troops in the second world war. People�s living standards started to rise, just as animals went into factory farms. Along with the welfare states and the growth in the functionality of oil, farming went industrial to feed people meat almost every day, despite the environmental and animal welfare consequences.

So now, to some extent, we all fight a class war on animals and nature. Animals and nature can be seen as one massive oppressed underclass. We are all looking down, but nature and animals are the victims. What does this say about organic food?