You do something. Beforehand, you think, “Maybe I shouldn’t do this” or “I do not feel great about doing this.” Yet you also want to do it, so you go ahead and do it. But you do not feel great and then must manage the combination of knowing you did something and not feeling great about it. In this absorbing and strange book, Josée Johnston, Shyon Baumann, Emily Huddart, and Merin Oleschuk (JBHO) explain the conflicted feelings some people have about eating meat and sensitively explain some attempts some of them make to manage that conflict.

The book discusses some closely related phenomena:

• • People quite like animals, but also raise them, control them, hurt them, and kill them very young for food.

• • People think they should not eat meat, but do it anyway.

• • People like eating meat, but feel bad about meat production.

Mostly, the authors attend to the last one, and I will too.

Happy Meat comprises an introduction, a conclusion, and eight chapters. The introduction and Chapter One bring in some scholarly apparatus, but their main idea is intuitive: people tell themselves a story about meat to resolve or reduce their conflictedness about meat-eating. Chapter Two uses surveys to substantiate that some people indeed are conflicted. Chapter Three uses focus groups to understand some of those conflicts. Chapter Four uses focus groups to understand a particular way of resolving one of the conflicts, namely, the story of “happy meat”—that is, animals that live free-range lives and then, ideally, have painless deaths before being turned into burgers, chicken nuggets, or bacon. Chapters Five and Six use interviews with farmers to understand what it’s like to try to raise free-range animals and why it is a challenge to do so at scale. Chapter Seven gets into the idea that free-range meat is expensive, and so the “happy meat” story involves managing feelings about the expensive meat one aspires to buy and the cheap meat that oneself and others often buy. Chapter Eight uses a focus group to very briefly consider the idea, increasingly popular in America, that maybe meat is amazing and nothing to feel conflicted about. I will return to the conclusion.

As I wrote, Happy Meat is absorbing. It’s full of intriguing ideas and little asides and footnotes that drew me in. It is primarily a work of sociology but also draws on political science, philosophy, and food studies. It’s admirably easy to read. Except for some of Chapter One and a stray paragraph here or there, it is free of academic jargon. It treats its interview subjects and focus-group participants charitably, compassionately, and seriously. JBHO come across as sincere and curious participants themselves, people who are themselves perplexed by their own attitudes and practices.

The focus group material is pleasantly surprising. I would’ve guessed that do-gooder derogation would be key to reducing conflicted feelings. (“If I don’t eat meat, I am one of those goody two-shoes, insufferable, superior vegetarians!”) There was little evidence of that. I would’ve guessed that nihilism or cynicism about individual consumption habits would be another key. (“Sure, production is awful, but one consumer makes no difference to production” or “There is no ethical consumption under capitalism!”) There was little evidence of that either. I would’ve guessed that political polarization was part of it. Wrong again!

Some people are deeply, durably conflicted about meat-eating. JBHO sensitively and quite movingly discusses some such people. The story that those people tell themselves about how to resolve the conflict, the story of happy meat, goes like this: Factory-farmed meat production is terrible. But there is another way. Animals can be raised outside, in conditions simulating their natural lives, in ways that are good for the environment, by caring, expert farmers, and then, when the moment is right, painlessly killed and eaten.

As I wrote, Happy Meat is strange. Mostly what I had in mind was that it is unclear how this story of happy meat would reduce, much less eliminate, the conflict, and why anyone would even think it does. As JBHO details, there are three sources of anxiety about meat: (1) moral issues about our treatment of animals; (2) moral issues about the environmental effects of meat production; and (3) prudential issues about the health effects of meat consumption

For reasons that JBHO’s conclusion (“How Can We Eat Ethically When Meat Is Murder?”) articulates, “happy meat” leaves in place much anxiety about (1). Free-range animals, just like factory-farmed animals, are killed very young purely for our consumption. Free-range animals might well be sent to the same industrial slaughterhouses as factory-farmed animals. The fact that the animals are happy might well make their deaths sources of more discomfort rather than less. After all, death robs happy animals of happy futures, whereas it robs miserable animals merely of misery.

For reasons Chapters Five and Six articulate, “happy meat” does little to tamp down anxiety about (2). Happy and unhappy cows alike produce methane. Happy and unhappy pigs and chickens alike produce waste. Free-range animals take up significantly more space than factory-farmed animals. So to generate better environmental impacts from free-range animals, we would have to raise many, many fewer animals and so eat much, much less meat.

Finally, for reasons Chapter Eight articulates, “happy meat” is neither here nor there with regard to (3). Either meat is poison or it’s the one true superfood or it is somewhere in between. This is true whether or not it’s factory farmed or free range.

So I was perplexed not by the story itself—JBHO tells it well, and they bring out how common it is—but, rather, by the fact that telling themselves this story, inadequate as it seems to be, helps people feel better about their meat-eating.

But perhaps this is just material for a sequel. There are other reasons to wish for one: JBHO has fastened on a common and interesting phenomenon. There are lots of conflicts in the lives of readers of Perspectives on Politics like this: whether to buy fast fashion or some new device powered by conflict metals, whether to eat avocados funded by cartels or strawberries picked by horribly treated workers, whether to stream music and, if so, from where, whether to drive to work… What interests the authors is much bigger than meat.