Social aspects of meat eating.

The present paper explores the way that culture conditions our dietary behaviour, and also, conversely, how what we choose to eat can inform us about our own identities as members of Western society and as human beings. Understanding the value system that underpins our society (however little we may be conscious of it in our daily lives) is necessary to illuminate a true social science of food, to explain why we endow animal flesh with its unique status and, thence, to suggest whether our rapidly changing view of this singular substance is a fashion or a trend. But first, a brief history of the social science of food may be useful. The influence of diet on human health and behaviour has been discussed since time immemorial. However, only relatively recently has a systematic body of theory emerged that considers the culture of food selection. acquisition, preparation, and consumption as a significant social phenomenon. Engels (1844) did write at length one and a half centuries ago on how poor diet contributed towards the condition of the working class in England, but really only as an indicator of what was to him a more significant economic analysis. By and large, all the classic sociologists such as Marx, Durkheim, and Weber tended to mention food habits only in the context of their deeper concerns, although Hcrbert Spencer (1898-1YcH)) considered such issues as religious and military aspects of foods, and corpulence as a sign of affluence. Veblen (1899) took this further in The Theory ofrhe Leisure Class, detailing how food and drink are routinely employed for conspicuous consumption. Simmel’s (1910) essay on the sociology of thc meal stressed the use of food in ritual and religious ceremony, and the meanings of communal cating. Perhaps it is here that we begin to see the first real appreciation of how both the form and content of a meal can denote much more than its actual food value, although W. Robertson Smith (1889) had commented several years earlier that ‘thosc who eat and drink together are by this very act tied to one another by a bond of friendship and mutual obligation‘. As the 20th century progressed, appreciation of food’s centrality to human bchaviour advanced rapidly. Radcliffe-Brown (1922) proposed that for the Andaman Islanders ‘by far the most important social activity is the getting of food‘. and within a decade Audrey Richards (1939) was producing pioneering work in which she placed the food and nutrition of her African peoples in thcir social and psychological contexts. One of the most interesting publications, however, is Norbert Elias’s (1939) treatise on Western table manners. The Civilising Process, not least for his discussion of how the scrving of meat in European society has developed in a consistent dircction since the Middle Ages. For many years, however, most analyses remained largely descriptive and utilitarian, scrutinizing the functions and curiosities of ‘other’ people’s feeding, but without recognizing that our own ‘normal’ habits can be equally revealing. This tendency is strikingly exemplified in a genre which typically treats vegetarians and other nonorthodox eaters with barely disguised suspicion, as if their subversive beliefs and behaviour threaten more than just conventional nutritional wisdom (which, I argue, is