I wouldn’t be the first person to write an essay on the sense of identity that meat-based food traditions offer diasporic communities, and the failure of the vegan movement to take that identity into account. But what essays on this subject sometimes miss are the changes that have occurred in meat consumption, as an act, over the last fifty years.
These changes, which are now pitting ethics and identities against each other, can be collected under the umbrella of industrial farming.
To demonstrate the impact of the rise of industrial farming on diasporic communities, we can track the history of one quintessentially traditional meat product – chicken soup – within the traditions of one Ashkenazi Jewish family: mine.
