Everyday food consumption as multiple relations of care. A study of food practices involving meat
Calls to care about the contentious aspects of meat eating abound: its detrimental effects on the environment, the adverse health implications of red and processed meat and the difficult ethical questions related to animal welfare and rights within (industrial) animal production are all issues demanding attention. However, at the same time meat is also embedded in pleasures of eating, providing hospitality, and nourishing and pampering yourself as well as others.
In my PhD, I approach this complex dynamic around meat eating as a relational phenomenon. I’m interested in how everyday food practices involving meat create, maintain, dissolve, or cut off relations between humans, animals intertwined in food production, and the environment. More specifically, I ask what happens if these practices are approached as multiple relations of care.
This aims to open up the paradox inherent in caring. Without caring, none of us would be here. All beings are more or less vulnerable and fragile, needing care to make life not only liveable but also flourishing. Yet, caring about everything is impossible – the multiple care relations we are entangled in encompass some things while leaving others outside. At the same time, the multiplicity also refers to care inside these relations: our ways of caring and their consequences are not uniform.
What does caring then look like in relation to the meaty foods we eat nowadays? What do we in fact care about when we shop, cook, and eat foods involving meat? Or is there a lack of care, disinterest or indifference? What about when caring around meat seems to pull in contradictory, even incompatible directions?
On my PhD journey, I hope to find answers to these kinds of questions. If you’re also interested in exploring issues like this, don’t hesitate to contact me!
The PhD process in action.
PhD articles
Article 1: Moderating contentious care relations: Meat consumption among Finnish consumers
Abstract: In the global north, meat eating is both an integral part of everyday diets and under increasing pressure to be reduced, due to its various harmful effects. Much research has studied the motivations and practices that forestall less meat-dominated diets. Based on interview and participant observation data of consumers with a wide variety of meat relations in Finland, this article extends these discussions by framing the issue as navigating contentious relations of care. This enables a two-fold contribution. First, the article brings together previously disconnected research on these themes and makes explicit the benefits of combining meat and care. Second, it demonstrates how this combination contributes an understanding of the persistence of meat on our plates, as it shows how contentious relations of care within meat eating are navigated through moderation: varying degrees of engagement with care, defined by distances and realignments as well as disconnections in the processes of caring.
Keywords: care, eating practices, meat consumption, meat reduction, phases of care
Article 2: Introducing affective practices: Disgust in Finnish consumers’ everyday meat consumption
Abstract: The affective turn has highlighted the need to study emotions, visceral reactions and embodied experiences within social sciences, and its importance has also been recognized within theories of practice. However, practice theoretical discussions of affects, especially empirically grounded ones, are still sparse and fragmented. This article seeks to further these nascent discussions by arguing that affective practices present one fruitful avenue forward. Originally introduced by Margaret Wetherell within social psychology, affective practices are theoretically developed further in this article within sociological research on consumption practices. This is done by suggesting that affective practices can be operationalized as meanings, materials and competences, following Shove, Pantzar and Watson’s work. To explore how these three interdependent elements fit within affective practices, the article utilizes examples of disgust as an affective practice from a research project on everyday meat consumption practices among Finnish consumers. This provides a rich area of enquiry, since meat consumption mobilises many affects in these times of mounting sustainability, health, and animal rights concerns, and disgust within it entangles with visceral reactions as well as moral aversion. Altogether, the article provides a conceptualization for studying how affects themselves are constituted practically (affects as practices), to compliment previous research that has considered affects or emotions as parts of certain practices (affects within practices). Approaching affects as practices makes it possible to see affects’ ontological variability and trajectories over time, as well as their relations to cultural and social values and feeling rules.
Keywords: affect, affective practices, disgust, meat consumption, theories of practice, sociology of consumption, sociology of food
Article 3: The logic of choice and the logic of care: Conceptualizing ethics within everyday food consumption practices
Outi Koskinen & Mikko Jauho
The choosing consumer has been a prominent figure within research on consumption, alternatively celebrated as enabling the expression of lifestyles and tastes or criticized for overlooking consumers as embedded in interconnected mundane practices. While sociologically oriented consumption research has explored the multiplicity of consumer roles beyond “chooser”, the figure of the choosing consumer is prominent in research (especially outside social sciences) and in our shared cultural imagination. This article joins previous research on the ethics of consumption that has explored these tensions between consumer choice and consumers as embedded in social, cultural, and material surroundings. It does so by introducing the logic of care and the logic of choice to consumption research. Developed by Annemarie Mol (2008), these logics can be seen as ideal types representing contrasting styles of navigating decision-making, ethics, and questions of good life. The logic of care emphasises attentive doings that aim to improve conditions in specific situations, seeking moderation rather than control, whereas the logic of choice starts out from sovereign individuals making clear-cut decisions based on facts. Using examples from a research project on everyday meat consumption, this article develops a conceptualization of the central dimensions of these logics within food consumption. It is argued that the logic of care and that of choice afford a double exposure on food consumption: alongside choices, there are also intertwined sayings and doings of care, and noting these tangles of care and choice reveals valuable viewpoints into the ethics of consumption.
Keywords: ethics of care, consumer choice, consumption, food consumption