Is it the cow that sells the steak, or the sizzle? Using animal images to sell meat in mid-nineteenth-century Belgium

ABSTRACT

Per capita meat consumption in post-industrial countries is higher today than it has been ever since the transition of hunter-gathering to agriculture, while attitudes toward meat production and animal killing have become increasingly characterized by moral ambiguity and disgust. To contribute to our understanding of the genesis of this meat paradox, this study analyses how mid-nineteenth-century Belgian meat retailers constructed the image of their product. Analyzing 54 porcelain cards, uniquely early pictorial business cards used to advertise, shows how they constructed a very specific image of meat and its production process, an image in which meat itself was almost wholly absent. As shifts in the production process removed the animals behind the urban meat supply further and further from urbanites’ sight, meat retailers deliberately called upon images of idealized healthy living animals in profoundly natural settings. Reminders of the brutal production process were avoided at all costs. Rather, meat retailers sold the idea of meat consumption as intricately linked to a romanticized pastoral life, where animals lived free from human constraints or instrumentalization. This highly paradoxical “naturalisation” process, cutting out all human intervention in the production of meat, still serves to underpin important cultural aspects of the meat paradox today.

KEYWORDS:

• Meat paradox
• meat
• porcelain cards
• advertising
• nature
• animal
• nineteenth century
• history

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the staff of the Archives of the City of Brussels, Liberal Archives Liberas, the House of Alijn, the Ghent City Archives, the Ghent University Library and the Centre for Agricultural History (CAG) at the KU Leuven for their assistance in assembling the dataset. In addition the authors would like to express their gratitude towards the peer reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestion.

Disclosure statement

Declarations of interest: none. The work has not been peer-reviewed previously. No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. City Archives, Brussels, Bulletin des séances du conseil communale, 1ere année – 1845, p. 76 (June 14, 1845).

2. Idem.

3. Belgicapress, Messager de Gand, November 2, 1845, https://uurl.kbr.be/1130438.

4. Liberas, P5018.

5. Bulletin des séances du conseil communale, 1ere année – 1845, p. 76 (June 14, 1845).

6. Liberas, P4995.

7. Liberas, P4991.

8. Liberas, P5011, Brussels City archives, N2673 and Center for Agricultural History (CAG), 00001227.

9. Liberas, P5006.

Additional information

Funding

The authors acknowledge financial support of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel as part of the Interdisciplinary Research Program IRP11: Tradition and naturalness of animal products within a societal context of change.

Notes on contributors

Dennis De Vriese

Dennis De Vriese studied history at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (2014-2018). During these studies he focused on early modern history and the history of consumption. This resulted in 2018 in his masters’ thesis on the relationship between food and social inequality aboard the eighteenth-century Ostend Company ships. For this thesis he was awarded the De Bock-Doehaerd award 2018. In November 2018 he became a member of research groups FOST (Social and Cultural Food Studies) and HOST (Historical Research into Urban Transformation Processes) at the VUB, as part of his pre-doctoral research. Under the supervision of Prof Dr Wouter Ryckbosch, he delved into questions on naturalness, tradition and the quality of meat products during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as part of the interdisciplinary research program ‘Tradition and naturalness of animal products within a societal context of change’. In November 2019, he received a fellowship at the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) to pursue his PhD on the regulation of the urban meat market in late- and post-corporative Brussels. In this research, he focuses on changing regulation, justifications and how both shaped the urban economy.

Malaika Brengman

Prof Dr Malaika Brengman (PhD in Applied Economics, University of Ghent), is Associate Professor at the Business department of the faculty of Social Sciences & Solvay Business School at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), where she leads the research cluster 'Marketing and Consumer Behavior'. Her scientific research generally focuses on consumer psychology, shopper motivations and behavior, as well as on retail marketing and marketing communication effectiveness. Embracing interdisciplinary research, she has recently joined the interdisciplinary research group FOST, conducting Social and Cultural Food Studies in collaboration with colleagues from other disciplines, and is involved in an internally funded Interdisciplinary Research Project investigating the roles of tradition and naturalness of meat products in a changing societal context, focussing more in particular on food labels and consumer impressions. She has presented her findings globally at numerous conferences and has published her work in several well-respected international scientific journals.

Frédéric Leroy

Frédéric Leroy After having studied Bio-engineering Sciences at Ghent University (1992-1997), Frédéric Leroy (°1974) obtained a PhD in Applied Biological Sciences at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in 2002, where he continued his academic career at the research group of Industrial Microbiology and Food Biotechnology (IMDO) as a post-doctoral fellow of the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO). Since 2008, he holds a professorship in the field of food science and (bio)technology. His research primarily deals with the many ecological aspects and functional roles of bacterial communities in (fermented) foods, with a focus on animal products. In addition, his interests relate to human and animal health and wellbeing, as well as to elements of tradition and innovation in food contexts. The research is often of an interdisciplinary nature, involving collaborations with experts in microbiology, animal production, veterinary sciences, social and consumer sciences, cultural anthropology, and food history. He is editorial board member of Foods, the International Journal of Food Microbiology (IJFM), Food, Science and Law (FSL), board member of various academic non-profit organizations, including the Belgian Association for Meat Science and Technology (BAMST; president), Belgian Society for Food Microbiology (BSFM; secretary), and Belgian Nutrition Society (BNS), president of the scientific committee of the Institute Danone Belgium, and effective member of the Advisory Commission for the “Protection of Geographical Denominations and Guaranteed Traditional Specialities for Agricultural Products and Foods” of the Ministry of the Brussels Capital Region.

Wouter Ryckbosch

Wouter Ryckbosch studied medieval history at Ghent University, and subsequently pursued a PhD in early modern history at the University of Antwerp. His doctoral dissertation studied the effect of consumer change on social inequality in eighteenth-century Flanders. As a visiting scholar he stayed at the Universities of Cambridge, Utrecht, and the Bocconi University in Milan. Wouter joined the VUB as an assistant professor in early modern history in 2016. He is currently the executive editor of the Low Countries Journal of Social and Economic History (TSEG), and a board member of the Vlaams-Nederlandse Vereniging voor Nieuwe geschiedenis (VNVNG). At the Vrije Universiteit Brussel he teaches social, cultural and urban history, with a particular focus on the Low Countries in the early modern era. His research is primarily concerned with long-term trends in social inequality and the history of consumer culture, but also touches on the history of economic thought, sociability, and pre-modern globalisation.