Re-enchanting meat: how sacred meaning-making strengthens the ethical meat movement

Anthropologists have long documented rituals that reinforce the social and spiritual aspects of killing and eating animals. The historical processes of modernization, industrialization, and the spread of market capitalism have driven many such references to sacredness out of meat production in North America, leading dominant social relations around meat into what Max Weber famously termed “disenchantment.” In this article, I argue that re-enchanting discourses are one technique being used to develop the alternative production models of ethically raised meat—animals raised for human consumption with priority on sustainability and well-being. As people redesign a food system that resists the meat industry’s churn of pigs, cows, and chickens from feed lot to factory, they are not just rearranging the material structures of production. They also foster discourses and practices of sacredness, mutuality, and wonder. Ethical meat advocates use these discourses particularly to make sense of conflicts regarding the non-commodifiable nature of mortality and harmony. This article draws on ethnographic research among Southern Wisconsin butchers, farmers, and customers as well as public discourse analysis to trace meaning-making strategies that powerfully counter the commercial meat industry by re-enchanting meat.