Towards Plantification: Contesting, Negotiating and Re-Placing Meaty Routines

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.Unauthenticated | Downloaded 08/10/23 05:42 AM UTC 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 sociomaterial 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 expoundedThe 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 (