ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we describe how the act of killing animals for food has changed over the last 150 years or so. Traditionally, slaughter was a small-scale, seasonal activity carried out all over the country, on innumerable farms in every nook and cranny of the long Norwegian territory. It was a solemn act, couched in ritual and magic. Over time, however, slaughter gradually disappeared from farms and would increasingly be performed by professionals (and later, largely by machines) inside large-scale slaughterhouses. This industrialization of animal killing dramatically changed the relation between those being killed and those doing the killing, since there was no longer any bond, or history, or shared household, to speak of. Over time, animals up for slaughter became rather more like raw material to be processed in factories – epitomized by the conveyor belt, which would become a key slaughtering technology. The various factors that have removed slaughter from our everyday lives have led, we argue, to a situation where consumers are seldom reminded of the animal death required to maintain our contemporary carnivorous lifestyle.
