Food for Thought: Changing Norms on Eating Animals in the Netherlands.

Abstract

Calls for transforming food systems towards sustainability include the need to reduce meat and fish production and consumption. To understand how food norms on eating meat and fish have evolved in the Netherlands, we collected longitudinal data spanning 90 years from a Dutch women’s magazine. Moreover, we reviewed an Intranet discussion of a real-life event in which the absence of meat at an organisation’s staff event led to disagreement. We applied concepts from figurational sociology to make sense of the discussion on food norms. Our magazine dataset, shows a visible change in both the representation and the weekly frequency on the inclusion of meat or fish. Meals and recipes portraying eating meat as the norm increased significantly over time, a trend confirmed by the real-life event. This may shed light on how norm changes take place; by explicating the current norm, there is occasional room for acceptable deviation. However, to successfully move towards sustainable eating, given the many and diverse figurations of people, changes may need to take another, mediated form, incorporating situational specifics.