1,721,079 research outputs found
Global carcass balancing: horsemeat and agro-food network
No full textThe discovery by European forensic science laboratories of horse DNA in food labelled as beef meat products has brought renewed public scrutiny and interest to meat supply network activities and associated politics and policies. These have included concerns about food safety, horror from national and religious communities who have been sold food that contained meat from animals that are culturally unacceptable for them to eat, and questions about the nutritional quality of low-value processed meat products. It is within cheaper-end processed meat products, including frozen beefburgers, meatballs and frozen beef lasagnes, that traces of meat other than beef (including the headline-grabbing horsemeat) have been found. In the first instance the revelations led to claims of a mislabelling scandal. However, as investigations have deepened there have been more serious allegations about the existence of fraudulent practices in a complex international production, supply and distribution network of processed meat products. The horsemeat story brings to light some of the challenges of commercializing animal bodies for edible meat products within a globalized agro-food network
How do food and nutrition services provided by The Matthew Tree Project FoodPlus Centres influence the diet of clients in food poverty?
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Ethics and the non-human: The matterings of animal sentience in the meat industry
No full textThis chapter considers ethics and the non-human in the empirical context of animal production and meat processing. There exists a long-standing interest within non-representational theory in non-human agency (Thrift 1996), influenced at its outset by among others the work of sociologist of science and technology, Bruno Latour. As Thrift writes on Latour’s work:[This] has meant a concern with a ‘new classification of things’ (Latour 1993) in which the bounds between the subject and the object become less easily drawn, … because the things we have conventionally depicted as objects, for example machines, are allowed into the realm of action and the actor (Thrift 1996, 2)
Experimental partnering: interpreting improvisatory habits in the research field
No full textThis paper proposes that established research techniques can be developed in new directions by becoming attentive to the ways in which novel epistemological and ontological frameworks can shape the production of research knowledges. Drawing upon ideas from performance theory and science studies, and two brief fieldwork examples – archival research on the MRC’s Common Cold Unit and participant observation of the challenge of moving a herd of cattle – we argue that habits are also always to extent improvised; shaped by the capacities of human bodies to sense and respond to the nonhuman agentive world around them, including methodological habits. We propose a new term, ‘experimental partnering’ to define an interpretative approach that is attentive to how practice can illuminate the improvisatory or unstable temporary alignments that underlie some habits. ‘Experimental partnering’ is not offering a new way to access the research field, but a term to express a particular interpretative mode that draws attention to human-nonhuman relations and assemblages, fostering new apprehensions of how these more than social relations modify and interrupt the habitual.<br/
Things becoming food and the embodied, material practices of an organic food consumer
No full textThe challenge to study the embodied, practical experience of consumption is attracting increasing interest in agro-food studies (Lockie 2002). This paper argues for attention to be turned towards the bodies of animals, plants and humans, materially connected through the agro-food network, to enable a study of the embodied, practical experience of consumption. This paper apprehends the relationship between humans and nonhumans in two empirical examples from the agro-food network through applying a 'relational materialist' (Thrift 1999) approach. This approach is worked through by drawing upon the concepts of 'affordances' (Gibson 1979; 1982) and 'intercorporeality' (Weiss 1999) and through introducing the concept of 'things becoming food'. A live art performance of sushi being made is discussed to show how embodied practices materially transform the fish into sushi, from production to consumption. Excerpts from the video diary of an organic food consumer and his talk are compared to explore the practice of eating or not eating between potato and human. The findings contribute to debates on nonhuman methodologies, embodied consumption practices, food quality and the intimate material connections between bodies that eat and bodies that are eaten
Researching masculinities and food protein practices: A trio of more-than-human participatory workshops
No full textWhilst there is research around men and masculinities as they relate to practices of caring in the ecological crisis, less is written about methodologies that can address intersectional challenges, and ways of engagement that can support behaviour change. A process-based workshop methodology is discussed for researching the male-gendered and material performances of environmental caring related to personal food protein consumption practices. It works creatively to address relational inequalities in status both between different masculine positionalities and different food proteins. It contributes to more-than-human participatory methodologies by exploring male-gender - food protein relations, via positioning and inviting practical-engagement with foodstuff as a process for destabilising social and cultural hierarchies attached to thinking about, as well as preparing, cooking and eating, different food proteins. We argue that novel research findings can emerge around individual, collective and community responses to the ecological crisis through the careful methodological attention to masculine inequalities
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