ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we tell the story of how the presentation of meat in retail has changed over time. In the first decades of the 20th century, most consumers bought their meat from a butcher shop, where they were explicitly reminded of where meat came from, and where they also engaged in quasi-professional conversations with an expert whose job it was to transform animals to meat: the butcher. Over time, animal parts and the butcher alike would disappear from the retail situation, as butcher shops were overtaken by self-service supermarkets offering meat in plastic-wrapped, ready-to-use packs. A complex set of factors contributed to this shift, including innovations in packaging, labeling, store planning, chainification, and advertising. Rather than conversing with the butcher, the new, modern consumer was tasked with becoming an adept reader of labels – which increasingly became the prime source of information about what one was buying when one bought meat. This was a precarious situation, since labels were the site of brands, and thus of advertising. Consumers with dwindling knowledge about animals and meat were thus at the mercy of the meat industry, whose main message – even in the midst of animal welfare scandals – has been to “keep calm and carry on consuming meat.”
