The Political Economy of Meat (original) (raw)

Meat and social change. Sociological perspectives on the consumption and production of animals

Österreichischen Zeitschrift für Soziologie , 2021

Meat is a crucial object of sociological research. The consumption of meat plays a significant role in the food supply of modern societies. The importance of meat is not, however, limited to its nutritional value. Rather, the preparation and consumption of meat dishes is linked to cultural traditions and norms, collective and individual identities, as well as to gender relations and conceptions of health, purity, or naturalness. The production of meat is connected to numerous ecological problems, the breeding and killing of billions of animals, precarious working conditions and issues of public health (as, for example, the current pandemic demonstrates). Moreover, both the consumption and production of meat are linked to various dynamics of transformation and conflict: Technical and scientific innovations as well as political and economic decisions transform agriculture and meat production, leading to an unparalleled productivity but also to unprecedented environmental consequences. While the "normality" of meat consumption spreads further around the globe and is no longer exclusive to the Global North, in Western societies problems related to meat increasingly become the subject of public debates and social struggles. Despite the diverse and far-reaching implications and consequences of meat production and consumption, the sociological debate on meat is rather new. At first sight this may be surprising since important aspects of meat production and consumption are addressed by classical sociological authors. Norbert Elias ([1939] 2000, p. 100),

“We do this because the market demands it”: alternative meat production and the speciesist logic

Agriculture and Human Values, 2018

The past decades’ substantial growth in globalized meat consumption continues to shape the international political economy of food and agriculture. This political economy of meat composes a site of contention; in Brazil, where livestock production is particularly thriving, large agri-food corporations are being challenged by alternative food networks. This article analyzes experiential and experimental accounts of such an actor—a collectivized pork cooperative tied to Brazil’s Landless Movement—which seeks to navigate the political economy of meat. The ethnographic case study documents these livestock farmers’ ambiguity towards complying with the capitalist commodification process, required by the intensifying meat market. Moreover, undertaking an intersectional approach, the article theorizes how animal-into-food commodification in turn depends on the speciesist logic, a normative human/non-human divide that endorses the meat commodity. Hence the article demonstrates how alternative food networks at once navigate confines of capitalist commodification and the speciesist logic that impels the political economy of meat.

Our Discourse of Meat: What Are We Really Doing?

2008

In this essay I will look at the symbolism that meat holds within our ‘modern’ ‘Western’ society. I will begin by briefly introducing the study of food in general within the social sciences, setting a framework of reference for the exploration of meat specifically. In examining meat I will firstly set the context by turning to the global livestock sector and its relationship with the environment, before probing meat’s physical properties and their ensuing symbolism, which, as we will see, is the basic foundation for meat’s high culinary and dietetic value in our culture. I will then continue to investigate meat’s symbolism by asking what place, if any, may meat hold within our wider cultural cosmology, within our systems of social and moral ideas, before drawing some conclusions.

Unpacking Lunch: Political Ecology & The Meat Industrial Complex

2010

Nature builds no machines, no locomotives, railways, electric telegraphs, self-acting mules etc. These are products of human industry; natural material transformed into organs of the human will over nature, or of human participation in nature. They are organs of the human brain, created by the human hand; the power of knowledge, objectified. The development of fixed capital indicates to what degree general social knowledge has become a direct force of production, and to what degree, hence, the conditions of the process of social life itself have come under the control of the general intellect and been transformed in accordance with it.

'Happy Cows', 'Happy Beef': A Critique of the Rationales for Ethical Meat

The ethical food movement signals a significant transformation of cultural consciousness in its recognition of the intimate politics of what we eat and what kind of socio-political systems we sustain. The recent resurgence of economic localization exemplifies a grass roots attempt to undermine the hegemony of transnational corporations and build ecologically and economically sustainable communities. Social justice plays a key role in the guiding philosophies of these movements, and yet, while many ecocritical discourses examine the uncomfortable relationship of anthropocentricism and sustainability, some contemporary texts of the ethical food movement evidence a reluctant embrace of omnivorous eating, while simultaneously indicating a gendered, if ironic, machismo at odds with the principles of ethical eating. An analysis of the rhetoric of three popular nonfiction books that construct a similar narrative of the story of meat—Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Susan Bourette’s Meat, a Love Story, and Scott Gold’s The Shameless Carnivore—reveals an attempt by these authors to naturalize what is essentially an economic and lifestyle activity. Working within a vegetarian ecofeminist framework, though recognizing that multiple compelling philosophical positions exist for considering the ethics of meat eating, this paper intends to argue, not that “ethical” and “omnivorous” are contradictory terms, but rather that a moral ambivalence prevails in these texts despite these authors’ claims to the contrary. In elucidating these authors’ reactions to their own participation in “the omnivore’s dilemma” this paper pinpoints those areas where a resistance to a deeper examination of human-nonhuman relations is in operation.

The Ethics and Politics of Cultured Meat: Food Transition, Big Business, 'Humanewashing'

Transforming Food Systems: Ethics, Innovation, and Responsibility, 2022

Cultured meat is increasingly being touted by animal industry players and leading animal advocates alike as a viable alternative to flesh from slaughtered animals. At first glance, cultured meat, which is made from stem cells collected from ostensibly harmless biopsies of living animals and grown in vats, seems like a logical and even ingenious solution to the otherwise seemingly insurmountable problem of balancing the growing global demand for animal flesh with urgent concerns surrounding the massive environmental and animal welfare costs intrinsic to industrial animal food production. Unfortunately, however, upon closer examination it quickly becomes clear that this optimism is unfounded: cultured meat is far from a panacea to the ills inherent to animal agriculture. In fact, by working hand-in-hand with some of the biggest food corporations and meat producers to develop and promote cultured meat, and by shifting focus away from the development of sustainable plant-based alternatives to animal protein, the cultured meat project perpetuates those very ills.

The Future of Meat Without Animals (Rowman and Littlefield International, 2016)

The Future of Meat Without Animals, ed. Brianne Donaldson and Christopher Carter (Rowman and Littlefield International, Summer 2016) Plant-based and cell-cultured meat, milk, and egg producers aim to replace industrial food production with animal-free fare that tastes better, costs less, and requires a fraction of the energy inputs. These products are no longer relegated to niche markets for ethical vegetarians, but are heavily funded by private investors betting on meat without animals as mass-market, environmentally feasible alternatives that can be scaled for a growing global population. This volume examines conceptual and cultural opportunities, entanglements, and pitfalls in moving global meat, egg, and dairy consumption toward these animal-free options. Beyond surface tensions of “meatless meat” and “animal-free flesh,” deeper conflicts proliferate around naturalized accounts of human identity and meat consumption, as well as the linkage of protein with colonial power and gender oppression. What visions and technologies can disrupt modern agriculture? What economic and marketing channels are required to scale these products? What beings and ecosystems remain implicated in a livestock-free food system? A future of meat without animals invites adjustments on the plate, but it also inspires renewed habits of mind as well as life-affirming innovations capable of nourishing the contours of our future selves. This book illuminates material and philosophical complexities that will shape the character of our future/s of food. To review an advanced copy, please contact Brianne Donaldson.

Modern Meat, Industrial Swine: China And The Remaking Of Agri-Food Politics In The 21St Century

2013

Meatscapes in China China is awash with meat. On most any street in Beijing, there is some combination of meat on sticks, meat in soups, meat on platters, meat in tubes, meat on hooks. These items are sold fresh and processed from street vendor carts; in mom and pop stores; in wet markets, supermarkets, and hypermarkets; and at restaurants that range from a grill and a few stools on the sidewalk, to regionally-specialized dining spots, to domestic and transnational fast food stores, to ultra-modern palaces of haute cuisine. In the almost two years I spent living in Beijing between 2008 and 2011, I found meatscapes 1 composed of chicken, duck, beef, mutton, horse, deer, 1 By "meatscapes," I do not intend a direct connection to Arjun Appanduri's (1996) five "-scapes" of global cultural flows. A "meatscape" can be considered to include the various forms of meat (types, cuts, sources, markets, relations) available at a particular time and in a particular place. project as an analytical framework. This approach combines Weis's description of meatification with Philip McMichael's articulation of development-as-project-in which "the meaning and practice of development changes with changing political-economic and environmental conditions" (2012, p. 15)-and his elaboration of food regime analysis, which "prioritizes the ways in which forms of capital accumulation in agriculture constitute global power arrangements, as expressed through patterns of circulation of food" (2009 p. 140). My argument is that meatification is an important component of notions and trajectories of modernization and development, and that the logics, mechanisms, and relations that animate it need to be understood in context. This approach teases out what is general and what is particular, and suggests ways that the general-or the global-is being reconstituted. The meatification project also exposes consumer demand as a social construction, and denaturalizes the idea that economic growth necessarily leads to growth in meat consumption. Research makes clear that in the present historic moment, demonstrable relationships exists between rising income, rising meat consumption, and rising levels of pollution and greenhouse gas emissions 7. This is certainly the case in China, where scholars see a livestock-revolutionfueled-nutrition-transition taking place that is associated with far reaching implications for human health, the environment, and trade (Du, et al., 2002; Waldron et al., 2007). These methods, however, take for granted that consumer demand for meat is a natural outgrowth of increasing urban populations, leaving questions unanswered about the ways in which consumer demand and desires are structured, what these structures conceal, and how urbanization is 7 The classic FAO study from 1970 first demonstrated that countries with high GNP levels were associated with diets higher in animal protein and fat (as opposed to plant-based diets based on complex carbohydrates). The joint FAO-LEAD (Livestock Environment and Development Initiative) report from 2006, Livestock's Long Shadow: Environmental Issues and Options, is perhaps the most well-known and oft cited publication on the contribution of global meat production to environmental and climate crises, though the topic is now the subject of substantial and growing literatures both in academic and popular contexts.