Burning Questions
Fellowship Award Winners

Allison Gray, Tony Weis

Location: Canada
Academic field: Sociology (Gray); Geography (Weis)
Award category: PhD Team

Guidance Memo

• Title: “The meatification and re-meatification of diets: The unequal burdens of animal flesh and the urgency of plant-meat alternatives”
• Keywords: Meat consumption; plant-based “meat”; multinational meat corporations; U.S., Germany, Brazil, China, India, Nigeria.
• DOI: 10.15868/socialsector.38939
• What We Learned From It:
  • The trajectories of meat consumption is shifting from the periphery to the center of human diets (in what Weis has called “meatification”), as seen in the case studies of six countries (two high-income ? U.S., Germany; two upper middle-income ? Brazil, China; two lower middle-income ? India, Nigeria).
  • Plant-based ingredients that resemble meat (i.e. “plant-meats”) could play an crucial role in reversing meatification although they should not be seen as a silver bullet.
  • These six countries are chosen as case studies to illuminate the highly uneven character of global livestock production and meat consumption. This unevenness indicates the need to prioritize certain countries in efforts to address the negative impacts of meatification.
  • Some critically important points to bear in mind when trying to address meat consumption and production concerns: 1) A handful of huge transnational corporations dominate livestock slaughter and processing, and exert significant influence over meat production and consumption on a world scale. 2) The rise in global meat consumption is not only influenced by consumer preferences and demand, but also affected by agrarian changes and powerful actors in the agro-food system seeking to expand livestock production and absorb chronic grain and oilseed surpluses. 3) Meatification has triggered serious environmental problems.

Links

• Read the Guidance Memo
• Read the Annotated Bibliography

Some of the Things We Really Liked when We Read the Application

• The comparisons of six countries will be very useful for understanding the big global picture.
• The issue of plant-based meat is a hot topic right now.