PhD project: The Role of Emotions in Public Discussions on Meat Reduction
In current discussions around how to reduce CO2 emissions, meat reduction is often mentioned as a key solution. To make sure that such initiatives work, we need a better understanding of the public discussions surrounding them. Amalie Scheel Nielsen’s PhD project ‘Everyday Politics and Cultural Feelings in Danish Meat Controversies’ explores the discussions around meat and meat reduction in Denmark. Feelings play a large role in these discussions, and even something as simple as what we eat might be more wrapped up in politics and personal identity than we’d think.
What is your PhD project about?
“My project has two main parts. The first is about examining how meat and meat reduction are discussed on Facebook, in a Danish context. For this purpose, I’ve gathered data from different comment sections on Facebook. The second part examines the same topic, but from a different angle. Here, I’m organizing workshops at 10 different libraries all over Denmark where participants are asked to make collages based on their thoughts and feelings about meat and meat reduction."
"Central for my project is examining the ‘cultural feelings’ associated with meat and meat reduction. Earlier in the project, during my analysis of the Facebook comments, I found that feelings are very much associated with discussions around meat. Both for people who are anti meat reduction, but also for people who are pro meat reduction. On both sides, feelings play an essential role.”
How did you get interested in this subject?
“I used to work as a student-assistant in the social media department of Naturli’, a company which produces vegan and plant-based food. I was tasked with answering the comments people left on the company’s social media posts. Early on, I noticed how posts about meat alternatives specifically seemed to garner a lot of engagement, compared to other posts about, for example, dairy alternatives. It seemed that there was something about meat alternatives which specifically made people prone to chime in on the discussion, which I found really interesting.”
What are you working on at the moment?
“Right now, I’m getting the last details in place for the workshops. I’m using an ‘arts-based’ approach, where the participants of the workshops will be put in groups and asked to make collages, producing their own art. It’s not so much the art itself I’m interested in, but more the process of making these collages and what sort of conversations they spawn. Because I’ve found that meat is so heavily associated with feelings, I wanted to use an arts-based approach to access these feelings. This taps into something different than if I were to, for example, only do interviews asking people how they feel about meat and meat reduction.”
What findings from your project do you find the most interesting or surprising so far?
“It’s interesting just how much feelings play into the discussions around the topic. One of the things I found in my analysis of the Facebook data was that feelings affected how people imagined what consumption of meat might look like in the future. It’s interesting how something so seemingly mundane, like choosing what to eat every day, something often taken for granted, has so many political implications and is very much tied to our identity and self-image.”
What do you look forward to working with in the future?
“I’m generally interested in food culture and specifically food culture on social media. Particularly, I think it would be interesting to look at what TikTok does to food culture. While TikTok and social media allow people to share and discover dishes from all over the world, I wonder if something essential to experiencing the food itself is lost when communicated through social media. Just seeing a photo or a video of sushi does not encapsulate the mood, the smells or other things experienced when actually eating at a sushi restaurant. In this sense, it would be interesting to look at what is gained and possibly lost, when something such as food culture is transferred to a digital space.”