ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses representations of various foods for vegetarians which constantly refer to meat and may be found on the supermarkets’ shelves in both the US and Europe: meatless burgers, chicken- and turkey-free breasts, salami meat-free sandwiches, and even “Tofurkey Italian Sausage.” All of them do not contain meat but continually refer to parts of the animal and to meat, rhetorically underlying the presence of what is absent: meat. The chapter applies visual and discourse analysis to the packaging and the promotional messages of these products, and to the comment on them on the social media, focusing on those parts relating to meat and parts of the animal adopted to promote products which do not contain any animal ingredient. The results show that for many vegetarians the flavor of these products is irrelevant. Rather, they focus on the fact that they resemble meat and can replace it. This means that, for people rejecting meat, they are cultural products, rather than simple items of food. Moreover, the willingness to replace meat can be linked to Derrida's theory of the hiatus between signified and signifying. Finally, as suggested by Lacan, in this apparently incomprehensible relationship between vegetarians and meat, we can find the human unconscious desire for the absent Other, in this case the vegetarian unconscious desire for meat, and the ability to give meat its name.
