Abstract
Turning to sensory and emotional associations with meat and food animals, this chapter begins by situating this part of the book in the broader literature on senses, emotions, and affect. It then demonstrates how participants’ senses inform their determinations of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ meat, conceiving the senses as the link between Foucault’s knowing and pleasure. This leads to the main focus of the chapter, which is how the emotions expressed and identified by participants contribute to an embodied mapping, or ‘making sense’ of ‘food’ animals and ‘meat’. Noting how particular emotions, associated with comfort and discomfort, become associated with different animals and meat, the chapter examines where and how an embodied knowledge of ‘food’ animals is challenged and how their edibility is maintained.
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Notes
- 1.
Acknowledging these are the senses most associated with human experience and that other animals may have many others.
- 2.
Elisabeth Hsu (2008: 436–437) notes that ‘sensory experience’, rather than ‘sensory perception’, is often used to avoid the traditional conception of the mind-matter dualism that originated in the natural scientific framework.
- 3.
Importantly for qualitative research, Beekman highlights that the reverse is also true—that there is also knowing in pleasure, and argues for using emotional perception as a source of knowledge about food by “listen[ing] to the aesthetic or cultural knowledge embedded in people’s emotional responses” (2006: 309).
- 4.
- 5.
In relation to my third objective, I conceive emotional discomfort to be indicative of challenges to an embodied knowledge of animals’ normalised edibility. My explorations of emotional associations are thus framed in terms of comfort, which maintains, and discomfort, which challenges this edibility. As well as avoiding the binary perspective of positive and negative emotions, these terms reflect the terminology used most frequently by my participants. I conceive them as my empirically supported variation on Foucault’s conception of ‘pleasure’.
- 6.
Also known as cultured meat, Miller defines in vitro meat as “meat that is grown by proliferating cells in a nutrient-rich medium without the necessity of an animal’s slaughter” (2012: 42). Some production methods rely on ‘donor’ animals and animal products, notably calf serum, although animal-free media are starting to be used. Much debate and contention surrounds this developing technological field (Pluhar 2009; Stephens 2010; Chiles 2013), and for many, the perpetuation of a ‘carniculture’, where ‘meat’, even animal-free meat, is prioritised “remains in need of careful thought” (Miller 2012: 43).
- 7.
I conceive this comfort as associated not only with other meaty practices, or elements thereof, but also with, and constituted by, the worldwide nexus of practices—environmental, social, economic, medical, educational, and so on—by which meat consumption and the use of ‘food’ animals have been universally, and systemically, normalised. This aggregate comfort is set against, and enhanced by, the discomfort—the “unpleasant negative feelings, a state of tension” (Williams and Irurita 2006: 408)—associated with plant-based dietary practices situated within or alongside practices where meat has been normalised. Admittedly, at the time of writing, this discomfort is being unsettled to a greater degree in Westernised nations than at any other time in recent history.
- 8.
One participant informed me six months after our interview that she no longer ate meat. Having not followed up with the rest of my participants, I cannot say with any authority that they all continue to eat meat, or even that this one participant continues to not eat meat.
- 9.
I acknowledge here that the production and/or consumption of ethical and sustainable meat were my main recruitment criteria and therefore this is not surprising.
- 10.
As a teenager, Joyce spent two years following a vegetarian diet and 6–12 months following a vegan diet. With respect to her current practices, she explains, “my body seems to be a body that needs to eat meat”.
- 11.
I do not count reducing meat consumption as defection because it still involves the persistence of practices relating to eating animals and their constitution as food.
- 12.
The findings of this US study, involving 11,429 people over 17 years, have recently been critiqued by Lockwood (2019), specifically the aggregation of vegetarians and vegans (veg∗ns) into one group, the question of whether dietary veganism is a ‘plant-based diet’ as opposed to veganism (i.e. an ethical commitment to oppose all animal exploitation), the relatively small sample size, and the underlying research design. A much larger UK study, conducted by EPIC-Oxford between the 1990s and 2010 with approximately 65,000 people over 35, found much smaller rates of recidivism over time (15%–27%). Further questions could be posed of both studies regarding the reliability of data from self-reporting participants, the risk of virtue signalling, and the contribution of age and ageing populations to the findings (Massow et al. 2019), all of which point to a need for more qualitative research to explore understandings and everyday practices surrounding both dietary and ethical veganism.
- 13.
This point relates to a large body of literature on social conformity.
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Arcari, P. (2020). Sensory Connections and Emotional Knowledge. In: Making Sense of ‘Food’ Animals. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-9585-7_6
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