ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we trace Norwegians’ culinary habits over the last 150 years, using minced meat – now Norway’s most popular meat item – as a recurring theme. While mincing meat used to involve hard, tactile labor – where the consumer herself had to transform animal parts into an indistinguishable mass – today’s consumers find this job already done. Norwegians’ growing appetite for minced meat and other easy-to-cook or ready-to-eat meat dishes is indicative of a culinary culture that dispels traces of the animal from which meat derives, a culture that relates to meat not as an animal but as an ingredient. This change has been driven forth primarily by practical need, specifically for foods that are fast, safe, and cheap to prepare, as a growing number of households had two breadwinners. Various household technologies were key to this development, not least the freezer, which allowed double-working women to engage in serial cooking. But over time, an equally important change is how the use of the freezer itself has changed: Whereas it used to contain quarters or halves of animals bought in season, now it contains mostly ready-to-eat meals to be prepared as “20 minute meals.”
