Project Meat

With all of the perks and advancements of modern-day society, the world’s population has grown enormously. More and more people are getting a higher standard of living, which is great, but not entirely. All these people need to be fed, and a higher standard of living means a higher demand on many foodstuffs – meat, in particular. However, the meat industry isn’t coping with this very well. Conceivably, there are three main problems with it; it’s inhumane, environmentally unfriendly and unhealthy. However, there have been so many campaigns about this already that I believe most people are already informed enough about the situation that livestock are kept in (based on the amount of commercials and media coverage it gets). A survey I conducted shows that a little over 6% of grade 10 students at my school are actually vegetarian, despite the fact that most are informed about the cons of eating meat. This must therefore mean that the problem lies not with logic (statistics, facts, etc.), but peoples’ emotional perspective on the meat industry. And so I set myself the challenge of having an impact on this, through my personal project.

- The personal project is something all grade 9-10 students in the MYP have to complete. In it, students can choose to do anything, as long as they have a goal, product, journal and report. -

After some brainstorming, I came to the conclusion that I wanted to achieve this by means of photography and Photoshop, so that I could introduce the concept of human meat to my audience. I imagine this would be effective because I know that cannibalism is a taboo, looked down upon by society, but it is essentially just eating another type of animal meat. One of the reasons that people are against it is because we see our fellow humans as individuals, so I figured that if I try to make people think of animals as individuals too, they might reconsider their perspective on animal meat.

This is the final series of photos I submitted for this project.