Introduction: Consumer and Consumed

Abstract

In introducing the papers in this special issue, the authors draw attention to the changing relationships between humans and animals-as-food in the context of rapid increases of meat consumption and the intensification and globalisation of meat supply systems. Many of the challenges faced, including to food safety, human health and animal welfare, are familiar across contexts and indeed are often connected. Responses to these challenges have similarly involved movements spanning regional and national divides. Yet the changing relationships between consumer and consumed, it is argued, are not unidirectional but replete with contradictions and diversities. The purpose of this special issue is to improve our understanding of these diversities and contradictions. This requires an ethnographic and comparative approach that seeks to overcome distinctions routinely made between the material and the symbolic and between the local and the global.