In her contribution to the inaugural edition of this journal, Bente Halkier (2022: 52) noted that ‘[f]ood consumption is an exemplar of the intermingling of a highly routinised but simultaneously normatively contested kind of consumption’. This special issue proposes that meat is especially well-suited to elucidate the complex dynamics of contested consumption, spanning scales from globally connected markets to individuals’ guts (Neo and Emel, 2017; Hansen and Syse, 2021; Ibáñez Martin and Mol, 2022). Meat is more than food. Meat is animal flesh, landscapes, farming systems, culture, taste, affect and emotions (see Efstathiou and Ibáñez Martin, 2023). And, importantly, meat is embedded in a range of different, often taken for granted, everyday practices – or what Sundet, Hansen and Wethal in this issue call ‘meaty routines’.
In this issue, changing meaty routines is examined primarily as incentivised by climate change and sustainability discourses. There is widespread scholarly agreement on the environmental benefits of plant-rich diets. In a much-cited article published in Science, Poore and Nemecek, based on what was presented as the most comprehensive analysis to date of the impact of farming, find that reducing meat consumption can ‘deliver environmental benefits on a scale not achievable by producers’ (Poore and Nemecek, 2018: 991). Based on their research, Joseph Poore has argued that eating less meat is ‘the single biggest way’ consumers can reduce their environmental impact (in Carrington, 2018). Much attention is now also given to the sustainability and health impacts of meat in public discourse in many countries, and consumers are frequently called upon by environmental organisations, scientists and a range of businesses to reduce their meat consumption to help save the planet.
However, changing consumption routines is no straightforward exercise. As Nikolas Rose and Peter Miller (1992) note, responsibilising individuals as ‘informed’ consumers or citizens offers a mode of governing by deflecting direct responsibility from business and government. And decades of consumption research have revealed how consumption is deeply embedded in ‘wider socioeconomic, political and cultural configurations’ (Welch et al, 2022: 3). This special issue unpacks the complex ways in which, despite the contestation of meat’s sustainability, articulated motivations become entangled with systems of provision and habitual and normalised aspects of food in everyday meat consumption. Joining approaches from different disciplines, the issue identifies several factors that co-shape meaty routines, including the construction of meat reduction controversy (Loeng and Korsnes, 2023), conventions and socio-material scripting (Sundet et al, 2023), embodied knowledge and personal biographies (Godin, 2023), marketing strategies (Fuentes and Fuentes, 2023), products and food competences (Volden, 2023), and ‘foodyism’ and existing ideas of good and proper food (Koponen et al, 2023). Before discussing these outcomes in more depth, we situate this research within an emerging field of meat studies moving from a focus on processes of meatification and de-meatification to what we identify as ‘plantification’.
Meatification and carnophallogocentrism expounded
The concept of meatification, coined by geographer Tony Weis, describes how meat has moved from the periphery to the centre of human diets (Weis, 2013). Consumption is intricately implicated in this process (Hansen and Jakobsen, 2020). Globally, meat consumption has increased at an alarming rate, as we eat on average twice as much meat per person today compared to 60 years ago, and the global population has doubled in the same period. While middle income countries, mainly in Asia, have driven significant parts of this boom (Jakobsen and Hansen, 2020; Hansen et al, 2021), affluent societies in the ‘West’ are significantly more meat intensive than the rest of the world (Parlasca and Qaim, 2022). Associated with extensive resource use, environmental degradation, and detrimental effects on animal and human health, excessive meat production and consumption are at the core of global unsustainability (Weis, 2013; Godfray et al, 2018; Bonnet et al, 2020; Parlasca and Qaim, 2022).
Meatification is a complex phenomenon. Scholars in the humanities and social sciences have identified how meat is deeply embedded in food cultures (Potts, 2016; Chatterjee and Subramaniam, 2021; Hansen and Syse, 2021; Volden and Wethal, 2021; Bjørkdahl and Syse, 2022), and bounded by the political economy of capitalist food provision (Weis, 2013; Neo and Emel, 2017; Hansen, 2018; Winders and Ransom, 2019; Blanchette, 2020; Hansen and Jakobsen, 2020). Meatification is driven by both changes in everyday consumption patterns and the industrialisation of agriculture, including profound changes to how humans relate to animals – ie. how animals are kept, treated, killed, sold and eaten (Syse and Bjørkdahl, 2020; Bjørkdahl and Lykke, 2023; Efstathiou and Ibáñez Martin, 2023).
Meat has been analysed as a symbolic signifier of power, masculinity and virility, based on the idea that humans are superior to nature and thus have the right to dominate it, including animal bodies (Fiddes, 2004; Adams, 2015). According to Melanie Joy (2020) eating meat is conditioned by an ideology, and associated politics, for how to encounter, classify and treat animal bodies: what she calls carnism – the underlying invisible belief system that allows us to eat animals because it is considered the given, ‘natural’ thing to do (Joy, 2020: 18). In a similar vein, Jacques Derrida (1991) claims that carnophallogocentrism characterises the ideal modern subject: someone is ‘properly’ human if they are consuming other-than-human animals (carno-), espouse masculinist goals of maintaining virility and exercising power over others (phallo-) and prime the value of reason, speech and rational behaviour over the often contrasted power of feeling and the body (logo-). Carol J. Adams and Matt Calarco discuss carnophallogocentrism as reiterated through the sexual politics of meat in modern ‘Western’ societies: both women and animals operate as ‘absent referents’, becoming objectified and made ‘consumable’ in similar often overlapping ways. In sum, “[t]he carnophallogocentric subject is granted privilege, and this privilege is experienced as pleasure” (Calarco and Adams, 2016: 54). Or, as put by Weis and Gray (2022: 144), ‘[a]nimal-heavy consumption patterns are perceived with a deep sense of entitlement in many places’.
Indeed, meat eating has become expected and appropriate in a range of different settings, where notions of what is ‘proper’ are bounded by dominant carnist scripts for social interactions and material arrangements (Bugge and Almås, 2006; Potts, 2016; Hansen and Wethal, 2023). Meat consumption is considered gendered, intimately connected with masculine values and ideals (Adams, 2015; Kildal and Syse, 2017), and strongly shaped by conventions and social expectations in different settings (Wendler, 2023). Moreover, meat consumption is closely associated with the increasing dominance of convenience food (Jackson et al, 2018; Hansen and Wethal, 2023), facilitated by changing labour markets, gender norms and the decreasing availability of cooking time (Bugge and Almås, 2006; Bjørkdahl and Lykke, 2023). At the same time, meat-eating can be stigmatising and offer grounds for oppression in ideological-cultural settings like those of Hindu nationalism in contemporary India, where the banning of cow slaughter legitimates violence against Muslims by Hindu cow protection groups (Chatterjee, 2021; Jakobsen and Nielsen, 2023).
Meat consumption also involves cognitive dissonance and denialism, often assisted by provisioning actors and marketing campaigns (Bjørkdahl and Syse, 2021), which allows consumers to uphold meaty diets while at the same time expressing ever increasing concerns for both animal welfare and the environment (Rothgerber, 2020). ‘Strategic ignorance’ has been used to conceptualise the process of avoiding getting information that conflicts with dietary preferences, in this case meat eating, for instance by avoiding information about food animals’ minds and feelings (Leach et al, 2022) or concerns of the welfare of food animals (Rothgerber, 2020). This has in turn proved powerful for sustaining the so-called ‘meat paradox’, used to describe how most people care about animals, but still (paradoxically) contribute to their suffering and death through meat eating (Loughnan et al, 2010; 2012; Piazza et al, 2015). Moreover, scholars have argued that a web of different actors, such as think tanks, contribute to manufacturing such ignorance by avoiding discussing the interlinkages between climate concerns and animal-based diets (Almiron et al, 2022). An upshot of this ignorance is that it, ironically, makes animals more easily replaceable – for example, by plants (Efstathiou, 2021). By intersecting cultural, gendered, economic and sustainability discourses, and playing an important role in the daily lives of many consumers, meat consumption is contested from different perspectives in the humanities and social sciences.
Reducing meat eating (on whatever grounds) then becomes interesting also as a practical case of challenging dominant carnist cultures. In this context, alternative meat practices can be dubbed emotional, irrational, weaker, inconsistent, and so on. Reactions to meat replacements as weird, artificial or unnatural (for example, Varela et al, 2022), may be interpreted as reactions also to carno-normativist scriptings of ‘real’ or ‘good’ food (cf Willey, 2021; Efstathiou, 2022; Hurley and Roe, 2022). Still, even vegan and vegetarian practices that oppose carnism seem to retain, and perhaps even strengthen, phallogocentric attitudes (see for instance Brady and Ventresca, 2014; Greenebaum and Dexter, 2018; Mycek, 2018). Perhaps threatened by the removal of a carno-normative privilege modern vegan and vegetarian subjects affirm their prowess by identifying with masculinist, or logocentric identities, entering into practices that reinscribe vegan and vegetarian identities within the dominant status quo, as ‘rational’ and ‘plant-strong’ hegan identities (Adams and Calarco, 2016: 44). The influence of carnist and carnophallogocentric food culture is in other words fundamental to the meaty routines we are interested in.
Demeatifying food practices
Meat’s place at the center of food consumption patterns is contested. The number of people with dietary preferences toward decreased meat consumption, from vegans to those trying to cut back on one meaty meal a week, has increased significantly in many parts of the world. A recent survey including 7590 respondents from ten European countries found that 37 per cent of respondents reported as either vegan, vegetarian or flexitarian. Almost 50 per cent stated that they eat less meat than in the past and that 40 per cent planned to cut back on meat consumption (ProVeg, 2021). Similar trends have been found in other studies in affluent societies (see, for example, Dagevos 2021 for an overview), and trends towards cutting back on meat consumption can also be observed in countries currently undergoing processes of meatification, such as China and Vietnam (Hansen, 2021; Korsnes and Liu, 2021).
Demeatification captures a resistance or response to meatification (Sage, 2014; Morris et al, 2018; Weis and Ellis, 2022): what we may call a ‘negative’ response to meatification, as it emphasises a removal, reduction or ‘undoing’ of meat. However, if meat consumption is contested, cutting back on meat certainly is as well. Few consumption topics are as polarising as the question of whether one should eat animals. New insights on the negative impacts of meat production and consumption on health, climate, the environment, and animal welfare fuel already heated discussions around the consumption of animal flesh and the treatment of animals in industrial livestock production (see for instance Pachirat, 2011). In theory, the imperative for reducing – if not removing – meat consumption seems fairly straightforward, offering a possible ‘win-win-win’ situation; ensuring more sustainable food systems while also improving public health and animal welfare. Still, decades of research on the socio-economic, cultural and political configurations of consumption demonstrate the many factors that can make meaty routines stubborn (see, for example, Hansen and Nielsen, 2023).
Research on meat reduction has – not unlike consumption research in general – often emphasised the role of attitudes and motivations of individuals (Lea and Worsley, 2008; Tobler et al, 2011; De Boer et al, 2013; Collier et al, 2021). This special issue, however, builds mainly on theories of social practice to explore meat consumption and reduction as embedded in practices. Social practice theories have recently been applied to identify factors complicating meat reduction such as deep-seated food habits and cultural understandings of food, embodied competences, social networks and social expectations, and material surroundings and contexts (see, for example, Daly, 2020; Halkier and Lund, 2023; Hansen and Wethal, 2023; Wendler, 2023; Wendler and Halkier, 2023). The articles in this special issue contribute directly to this emerging scholarship on social practices of meat consumption and reduction.
If we want to understand the potential for less meaty futures, we can start with ‘already existing’ practices (Browne et al, 2019), ie. already demeatifying or demeatified diets. One option is to study cultures where such diets dominate, with India as a prime example. Although the extent to which the country is ‘vegetarian’ is often contested and, for example, parts of the new middle classes are eating more meat than before, decades of economic growth has seen no increase in per capita meat intake (for example, Jakobsen and Nielsen, 2021). Another option, which has been more popular, is to study demeatified diets in meat-intensive countries. Much attention has been given to vegetarian and vegan eating practices in affluent societies, located by Ruby (2012) a decade ago as a ‘blossoming field of study’. These practices come in many varieties and often represent very different ideologies. As the most radical, veganism represents a rejection of the use of animal products altogether and a ‘counter hegemonic practice’ that creates strong tensions within meat-intensive cultures (Twine, 2016: 256, see also Twine, 2017; 2018; Hodge et al, 2022; Laakso et al, 2022). Indeed, and going back to the discussion of carnophallogocentric ideals about what constitutes a ‘proper’ human subject, reactions to both vegetarian and vegan practices can illuminate the taken for granted consumption of meat/dairy products, for instance by how vegans are constructed as abnormal, awkward, extreme, feminine - or even opposed to human nature (Twine, 2014; 2016; Bogueva et al, 2020; Sahakian et al, 2020). Moreover, such findings pinpoint the value and need of a supportive environment for making dietary transitions, also discussed by Godin (2023) in this issue.
Recently, ample attention has also been given to meat reducers, or flexitarians, and the many challenges they face when trying to cut down on meat eating without stopping to eat meat altogether (Verain et al, 2015; 2022; Mylan, 2018; Dagevos, 2021; Kanerva, 2021). This is an important turn, as diets containing some meat, whether explicitly labelled ‘flexitarian’ or not, are much more common than pescetarian, vegetarian, or vegan diets and would be crucial for achieving the desired reductions in meat intake. Flexitarianism is particularly interesting to study through a practice lens given the ongoing negotiations it requires, and how it allows for studying demeatification as occurring through the interlinkages between practices in the different bundles that make up everyday life.
With this in mind, another dynamic emerging more clearly through articles in this issue is re-placing plants in human diets – or what we dub plantification – understood as a process where plants return towards the centres of diets and meal structures, whether in the form of meat analogues or quite simply as traditional plants and plant-based food. Plantification may be happening at the same time as de-meatification, or may even be considered part of it (see also Volden, 2023), but we use the term ‘plantification’ to highlight the potentials of reappropriating focus from meat to plants.
Plantification: towards more planty futures
The idea that protein coming from conventional (animal) meat can be efficiently replaced with alternative forms of protein, including meatless meat, is prevalent in the alternative protein industry, where livestock are seen as inefficient vehicles for protein production (see Dal Gobbo, 2023). This idea is also central in the conceptualisation of re-meatification (Weis and Gray, 2022). Here, the dominant position of meat – or a meat-like materiality – is explicitly assumed. Weis and Gray define the re-meatification of diets as a process where the ‘conceptions of meat, dairy products, and eggs continue to occupy a central place in modern cuisines but get increasingly composed of processed plants rather than animals’ flesh and reproductive outputs’ (2022: 145). This is a useful approach to a field where the very concept of meat is increasingly challenged, notably also by corporations who have started manifesting their meat analogues as plant-based meat (see Efstathiou, 2021). Yet, thinking of this process as re-meatification may risk confusing more than it reveals, while also holding onto meat, even as a concept. We would instead like to open up a conceptual space for plantification. Identifying a process of putting plants, including grains and legumes, back at the centre of dietary practices offers a possibility to engage with and criticise the many interests involved in the ongoing marketisation of vegan and vegetarian products. But it also offers a more radical response to meatified, or carnophallogocentric, culture by reclaiming a focal, valued (though not exclusive) position for plant-based foods within human dietary practices.
Scholars are untangling the complex field of alternative proteins, studying the potential role of insects (House, 2019), cultured meat (Bryant and Barnett, 2018; Volden and Wethal, 2021) and plant-based meat substitutes (Fuentes and Fuentes, 2021; White et al, 2022) in food practices. As Fuentes and Fuentes (2023) discuss in this issue, these alternative proteins are marketed and ‘qualified’ as acceptable food in the quest for new market segments (see also Fuentes and Fuentes, 2021). Large investments of capital in this market subdivision have led to the rise of ‘corporate veganism’ (White, 2018) or ‘Big Veganism’ (Sexton et al, 2022), involving what is often experienced as the commodification of vegan ideals by corporate interests (see also White, 2018; White et al, 2022). Indeed, we are witnessing growing investments in, and an expanding market for, plant-based meat analogues aimed not only towards meat avoiders, but also ‘designed’ for the carnivore (He et al, 2020). The ontolology of these products and how they open up the possibility for fluid ‘meat’ identities is another generative topic (cf. Efstathiou, 2022; Lonkila and Kaljonen, 2022). Given the uncharted territory represented by such novel foods, we need more knowledge on how consumers engage with these products and the processes that may facilitate meat substitution in everyday life. How such changes relate to ideologies regarding who are proper human subjects and what pleasures they are entitled to remains to be seen.
Exploring the integration of meat substitutes in broader food and eating practices is necessary to gain a more nuanced understanding of their role in changing diets. Meat substitutes are often pointed to as central to reducing overall meat consumption levels (for example, Mylan, 2018; Twine, 2018; Daly, 2020; Fuentes and Fuentes, 2021; Kanerva, 2021), and substitution seems to be a key strategy among meat reducers (Schösler et al, 2012). However, as Morris et al (2018) note, exactly how substitution occurs and how substitutes are used is in many ways a ‘black box’. Even with a rising market for alternative proteins, there might not be a ‘one-to-one’ relationship between the alternatives and the products they intend to replace in consumers’ diets (Slade, 2023: 114). There is, for instance, some evidence problematising the ability of plant milks to replace the consumption of cow’s milk, the worry being that it might instead add to it (see Büchs et al, 2023; Slade, 2023). Similar concerns may apply to meat substitutes. House (2018: 88) found that new insect products in The Netherlands were ‘overwhelmingly consumed instead of plant-based convenience foods rather than meat products’. Moreover, Elzerman et al (2022) found that meat substitutes were seen to be appropriate in different contexts, and for different uses, than animal-based meats (see also Volden, 2023). Clearly, then, and as argued by Büchs et al (2023), the adoption of new products into food practices is less straightforward than what is often suggested in accounts of product substitution. Indeed what may be emerging is a multiplication versus a substitution of meat.
There are further still uncertainties about the impacts of plant-based meat analogues on climate (for example, Shanmugam et al, 2023), nutrition and health (for example, Toribio-Mateas et al, 2021; Mayer Labba et al, 2022). Particularly related to the latter are concerns about ultra-processing. Indeed, Anastasiou et al (2022: 12) urge that, ‘while the evidence supporting meat reduction for sustainable and healthy diets is well established […] future studies should carefully consider dietary substitutions to avoid unintended environmental and health consequences’. There is also the risk that production of highly processed plant-proteins might fuel equal or greater environmental impacts than conventional meat production (Smetana et al, 2023), or that it could offset the use of healthy and sustainable plant-based proteins from ‘whole’ sources of plant protein such as nuts and legumes (see, for example, Jallinoja et al, 2016).
Some might think of substituting meat with meat analogies as a form of what Clay et al (2020) call ‘palatable disruption’,1 in that such a simple transition ‘(i) maintains continuity in taste experience; (ii) performs a politics that feels good to citizen-consumers; and (iii) works to sustain or even amplify elements of the political economic status quo that are palatable to corporate interests’ (Clay et al, 2020: 953). However, Efstathiou (2022) has analysed meat replacement as drag, that is, as a practice opening up a space for considering meat as fluid and as performatively constituted, by analogy to how drag has challenged cis-and-heteronormative concepts of gender (Butler, 1991; 1999 [1990]). This aligns well with other scholars challenging what meat means, such as Yates-Doerr (2015: 319) who from a multispecies perspective has argued that meat ‘cannot be defined through a universal, genealogical taxonomy but is a category that emerges through specific, situated practices’ (see also Efstathiou and Ibáñez Martin, 2023).
If we envision broader changes in food cultures and practices in the future, we might need to be open-minded about how animal-based proteins can be replaced over time. This allows us to suggest the concept of plantification. Going beyond re-meatification, plantification opens up the possibility of escaping a meat script when transitioning to more sustainable, just and healthy dietary practices and routines. While processes of plantification are surely contested and negotiated and open up new commodity frontiers for corporate interests, they simultaneously hold transformative potential towards futures with less harm to animals and the environment.
Introducing the special issue
The literatures outlined above are enhancing our knowledge of the ways in which meat is embedded, and can become dis-embedded or differently embedded in contemporary foodways. The recent focus on flexitarian practices is gradually improving our understandings of the motivations for cutting back on meat consumption and the challenges associated with eating less meat. However, both policy and research continue to ignore or underscrutinise the importance of social and material contexts in co-shaping consumption patterns. This special issue takes this as a starting point, building knowledge on how social, material and cultural configurations co-shape the ability of consumers to reduce their meat consumption.
The idea for this issue emerged from the research project MEATigation – Towards sustainable meat-use in Norwegian food practices towards climate mitigation (www.meatigation.no). The project focuses on meat as culture and on how meat is ‘founded’ in social practices in Norway. Particular attention is directed at how food-related practices contribute to meat consumption, and the conditions that facilitate and complicate meat reduction in Norwegian households. Three articles in this special issue have emerged directly from this work (see Loeng and Korsnes; Sundet, Hansen and Wethal; and Volden). While the empirical focus in these papers is on Norway, the issues raised resonate with ongoing discussions in many other countries and touch on some of the core issues of contemporary consumption research. Studying how demand is shaped through production, provision and consumption, how social and material factors ensure consumption patterns remain resistant to change as well as how and to what extent animal products can be replaced are core challenges for research on sustainability. To understand how to amplify and stimulate change, it is necessary to explore how moments of ‘fracture’ (see O’Neill, 2019) in contemporary meat consumption patterns can spread or shake the broader structure of meat consumption, and to identify where and why such ‘factures’ happen.
The contributions engage with the theoretical frontiers of consumption research, with many of the articles employing theories of practice and engaging directly with key theoretical questions regarding for example agency, culture, materiality and political economy (Evans, 2019; 2020; Welch et al, 2020; Warde, 2022). That said, the authors do also look beyond practice approaches, and fruitfully draw on insights from a wide range of theories, in line with Schatzki’s (2018) call for practice theorists to build ‘theoretical alliances’ with other approaches. Together, the contributions in this special issue add to the growing scholarship concerned with the dynamics of meat consumption, reduction and avoidance — or meatification, de-meatification and plantification — in everyday life in affluent, meat-intensive societies. As food connects to many, if not most, of the practices that make up daily life (Warde, 2016) – and, as we have established, meat is central to contemporary food practices – meat is inextricably woven into the fabric of everyday life. It is, arguably, via the performance of everyday practices that meat becomes natural, normal, necessary, and nice (Loughnan et al, 2012; Piazza et al, 2015) – and, as this issue shows, negotiated.
The findings from the articles in this issue have significant policy implications. Policies for healthy and sustainable eating have tended to lean heavily on motivation, information and individual choice, failing to address broader socio-cultural factors (Kwasny et al, 2022). However, the articles presented below add to an emerging body of research that demonstrates that individualised interventions will be inadequate to tackle the complex mix of factors that contribute to upholding unsustainable meat consumption patterns. If significant meat reduction is to be achieved, the easiest target would be to support the high proportion of people in meat-intensive societies who are already willing to cut back on meat. This could be done in a wide variety of ways, for instance by making healthy meatless options more convenient and more affordable. The next step would be to encourage the recruitment of more people to the overall practice of meat reduction. The probably most efficient way would be to support the ongoing normalisation of less meat-intensive diets. Much could also be achieved through changing institutional practices, such as serving less meat in public canteens and institutions.
No matter how it is done, any ambition towards significantly reducing or transforming meat consumption needs to acknowledge that the focus must shift from the choices of individual consumers to the social, material and cultural context in which these choices take place and in which these choices make sense.
This special issue zooms out to consider the dynamics of meat demand, and zooms in to consider the workings of food in everyday life and embodied experience of eating, via the marketplace/provisioning space in the ‘middle’. Martin Loeng and Marius Korsnes (2023) build on controversy studies from science and technology studies (STS) (Jasanoff, 2019) to explore how controversy unfolds through the heavily polarised debates on meat reduction in Norway. In doing so, they contrast what they label a ‘conventional’ approach to meat reduction with ‘post-productivist’ meat reduction, arguing that the latter may help us move past the identified meat reduction controversies. Loeng and Korsnes effectively unpack the societal embeddedness of consumption, which Øyvind Sundet, Arve Hansen and Ulrikke Wethal (2023) continue by combining theories of practice with the idea of scripting, emerging from STS (Akrich, 1992). They demonstrate how social sites can be understood as socio-materially scripted towards specific ways of eating in their study of performances of and challenges to meat-reduced diets in Norway. Laurence Godin employs the concept of fracture from the multi-level perspective (O’Neill et al, 2019) to study transitions to vegan and vegetarian diets in Quebec, Canada. Her analysis focuses on the intersections between individual biographies and their social context and shows how these come together in shaping vegan and vegetarian trajectories. Two of the articles combine a practice approach with a focus on ‘qualification’, a concept emerging from marketing research. Christian Fuentes and Maria Fuentes (2023) empirically examine and conceptualise how marketing and markets shape the formation of edibility in the context of alternative proteins. They show how strategies of ‘productising’ and ‘animating’ are employed to make alternative proteins ‘edible’ and thus part of consumers’ everyday diets in Sweden. Johannes Volden (2023) explores the ways in which substitution is accomplished in everyday life by Norwegian consumers, demonstrating how substitution is a contextually contingent process rather than the outcome of a product swap, and how ways of ‘qualifying’ food as substitutes go well beyond the material reconstruction of meaty qualities in products. The last article by Sami Koponen, Mari Niva, Senja Laakso and Niina Silander (2023) combines a practice theoretical approach with notions of foodyism and foodie culture (Johnston and Baumann, 2010). They focus on the reconciliation of foodyism and meat alternatives already evident in the food-related practices of Finnish consumers, and show how ways of ‘doing foodyism’ may be changing in the wake of the current ecological crises. In her commentary, Alice Dal Gobbo (2023) employs a political ecology lens to discuss the future of meat. Through the case of recent political debates in Italy, she discusses the discourses surrounding cultured and ‘traditional’ meat and argues for nuanced approaches that go beyond the dominant dichotomy between ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’. Finally, in their conversation piece “For the love of meat”, MEATigation PI, Sophia Efstathiou, and Rebeca Ibáñez Martin (2023) discuss loving animals, and their meat, and how changing attachments make space to perform meat differently, multiply, and less violently.
Note
We would like to thank one of the reviewers for the special issue for suggesting the relevance of this concept.
Funding
This research is part of the research project MEATigation and the research centre Include, both funded by the Research Council of Norway (no. 303698 and no. 295704).
Conflict of interest
The authors declare that there is no conflict of interest.
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