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In the nineteenth and early-twentieth century, traditional diets, based mainly on starchy staples, underwent a fast revolution revolving around meat, especially red meat. The growing importance of meat and its increased production and consumption marked what is today known as the nutritional transition in Western Europe and in North America and Australia. Meat was considered the food of the progress, «the food of the future», as contemporaries said. But what produced this transition? And, most of all, what so special about meat? In the literature, such transition is rightly related to the economic and social changes brought by the industrial revolution: population growth, urbanization, increasing productivity of agriculture… However, this descriptive account naturalizes the transition as a direct outcome of these factors, drawing a straight line between “more people” and “more meat”. It does not explain why exactly meat was to have this role, that is, what was the structural dynamics related to capitalist society that brought to the reorganization of meat production and consumption, to the commodification of meat. In my paper, I address these questions drawing on a Marxian-Foucauldian hybrid approach. My claim is that the nutrition transition is best understood in terms of what I call dietary dispositif, i.e. the network of institutions and mixed practices, authorized by correlated scientific knowledges, with subjectivation effects that makes it possible the exploitation of nonhuman animals for human feeding. Its most distinctive elements are centralized slaughterhouses and intensive farming. Other knots of the network are the state with its government regulation and public health reforms, the market, family, zootechnical practices, culinary practices together with the practices connected to nutrition science and dietetics; and on the side of individuals, related practices of responsible self- regulation through consumer choices. First, I will analyze the context of the formation of this dispositif, thus answering the task of connecting the advent of meat-based diet to structural characteristics of the capitalist social formation. Then, I will focus on a major knowledge involved in the dispositif and its role in underpinning the dietary change, i.e. the emergence of nutrition science in the mid-nineteenth century and the consequent process of «nutritionalisation of modern food system» (Dixon 2009), which was based at the time on the role of protein as the “master nutrient”. The idea of nutrition transition that we speak of today is itself a product of this process. As my perspective will make clear, the meat-based diet transition is an outcome of a specific trajectory, involving different elements within specific sets of power-knowledge relations and not at all a neutral and natural outcome of “more people demanding more meat”. Chiara Stefanoni(Transcultural Studies in Humanities, University of Bergamo) Comments are closed.
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