Changing Meat Cultures: Food Practices, Global Capitalism, and the Consumption of Animals

This collection explains changing meat cultures through studies of both everyday food practices and the political economy of industrialized animal husbandry. We do this through case studies from 'affluent' and 'developing' countries. These contributions will shed light on global food connections and show how global, industrialized food and fodder systems have changed the way we relate to animals, their meat, and what kind of animals’ meat we eat. In the past few years, controversies around meat have arisen around industrialization and globalization of meat production, often pivoting around health, environmental problems, and animal welfare issues. Although meat increasingly figures as a problem, most consumers’ knowledge of animal husbandry and meat is more absent than ever. How is meat produced today, and where? How do we consume meat, and how have our consumption habits changed? Why have these changes occurred, and what are the social and cultural consequences of these changes? This book takes the reader on a geographic, ethnographic and historical journey to rural and urban areas and arenas across the world, and tells a series of stories of the dramatic changes in meat consumption.

Table of Contents:
Chapter 1: New Meat Engagements: Cultures, Geographies, Economies Arve Hansen and Karen Lykke Syse Chapter 2: Ritual Loss Of Life And Loss Of Living Rituals: On Judicialization Of Slaughter And Denial Of Animal Death Karen Lykke Syse and Kristian Bjørkdahl Chapter 3: New Geographies Of Global Meatification: The BRICS In The Industrial Meat Complex Arve Hansen, Jostein Jakobsen and Ulrikke Wethal Chapter 4: From Pastures To Feedlots, From Beef To Soybeans: Changing Meat Cultures In Argentina Kristi Anne Stølen Chapter 5: Meating Demand in China: Changes in Chinese Meat Cultures Through Time Marius Korsnes and Chen Liu Chapter 6: ­­Eating A Capitalist Transformation: Economic Development, Culinary Hybridisation And Changing Meat Cultures In Vietnam Arve Hansen Chapter 7: Bovine Contradictions: The Politics Of (De)Meatification And Hindutva Hegemony In Neoliberal India Jostein Jakobsen and Kenneth Bo Nielsen Chapter 8: Reconnecting life and death in the British alternative halal meat movement Hibba Mazhary Chapter 9: Meat We Don’t Greet: How ‘Sausages’ Can Free Pigs Or How Effacing Livestock Makes Room For Emancipation Sophia Efstathiou Chapter 10: What Happens When Cultured Meat Meets Meat Culture? (Un)Naturalness And (Un)Familiarity In The Meat Of Today And Tomorrow Johannes Volden and Ulrikke Wethal About the Authors Index

About the Author :
Arve Hansen is a researcher at the Centre for Development and the Environment, University of Oslo, Norway. Karen Lykke Syse is an associate professor at the Centre for Development and the Environment, University of Oslo, Norway.

Review :
This book goes right to the heart of the most wicked issue in addressing climate change - getting people to change their consumption habits. The authors' global reach shows us how this common problem has deeply diverse roots in local cultures, economies and cuisines. A groundbreaking contribution to current discussions in human-animal studies, Changing Meat Cultures advances understandings of the revolutionary transformations under way in the cultivation and satisfaction of humans' taste for flesh. Syse and Hansen lead an interdisciplinary team of contributors in investigations that range across Europe and key emerging economies, situating meat as at once an index of global consumerism as well as a significant contributor to the burden humanity places on the environment. Overall, the book makes a compelling case to understand meat in the present and its role in the future. Rising meat consumption on a world scale bears heavily on a range of urgent problems. This important collection considersthe structural dimensions of dietary change, including the industrialization of livestock production, while also emphasizing the need to understand how animal flesh has been prized within diverse cultures and culinary traditions, and the different ways that attitudes and practices surrounding meat are changing. The net result is a complex picture of meatification as a global trajectory with highly variegated features, which offers many valuable insights for those working to contest it. In this volume, ten articles supply a coherent narrative about changing global markets related to meat production and consumption, transformations and conflicts of cultures through practices such as ritual slaughter, and possible future directions that industrial meat production can take, including lab-grown meat and plant-based meat alternatives. The text presents topics such as the "meatification" of China, India, and Brazil along with Russia and South Africa, comprising the BRICS economic framework and more; comparisons between standards of halal and kosher ritual slaughter versus humane secular slaughter; and case studies situated in Argentina and Vietnam. Philosophical discussions about ethical consumerism, erasure of the animal in meat products, cruelty, and disgust are also explored. Anthropology and geography primarily inform the works collected in this volume, with historical, ethical, and scientific contexts included. Some articles report on fieldwork data from on-site research in several countries... Some background in cultural studies, geography, or animal studies will be helpful for readers but is not required. This text will be an effective source of case studies for courses in related academic disciplines. Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates. Graduate students and faculty.