ABSTRACT

Food and commensality are important aspects of most ethnographic fieldwork, and of creating and solidifying social relationships not just between our ethnographic subjects, but also between anthropologists and informants. This chapter explores the difficulties that may arise when anthropologists have very different ideas about food and eating to those of their informants, through a focus on author's own experiences of being vegan whilst conducting fieldwork in a rural farming community where meat constitutes a way of life. Trans-biopolitics brings other animals into this dynamic arena of social action based on the human desire for meat, and facilitates the exploration of inter-species power relations that are integral to processes of food production. It goes without saying that dietary preference can be a hugely important marker of identity. While people choose to become vegan for a whole host of reasons, including health associated in popular consciousness with extreme ideological views in relation to animal rights and environmentalism more generally.