Bypassing the animal: Plant-based meat and the communicative constitution of a moral market

Abstract

The food industry occupies a large portion of the plate in the study of moral markets. Moral markets for food include fair trade goods, organic products, family farmers initiatives, as well as plant-based meat alternatives, the focus of this paper. Driven by a growing concern for animal welfare, sustainability and the responsible use of resources, various companies launched products that successfully duplicate the taste, look and overall experience of meat eating, without the dire impacts of the meat industry on human, animal and environmental health. In this paper, we explore the formation of a market for plant-based meat as a communicative accomplishment. To do so, we analyse the rhetoric of one of its leading companies: Beyond Meat. By tracing the development of this food-tech company, we show that Beyond Meat’s activist-like rhetoric has contributed to the formation of a market based on the moral criterion of efficiency, which is achieved by bypassing the animal in meat production and by creating a transcending collective identity for meat-eaters of all sorts. Contrary to the more common process where moralized products move from social movement to market, we here theorize the formation of a moralized market that is depicted as a movement.

Keywords:

• plant-based meat
• moral markets
• rhetoric
• communicative constitution of markets
• food technology

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to the participants of the session on ‘Moral markets: Actors, meanings, and institutions’ held at the virtual 2021 EGOS Conference, and to those who attended the 2021 Organization Group’s Research Seminar Day in Lund University School of Economics and Management, for their feedback on an earlier version of the paper. We especially want to thank Panikos Georgallis, Björn Mitzinneck, Philip Balsiger, Paul Langley, the three anonymous referees, the editorial board members of Economy and Society and journal manager Dawn Bailey for their valuable engagement and help with our paper. We would also like to thank photographer Arianne Clément for providing the pictures included in this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research was partly funded by Jan Wallander’s and Tom Hedelius’s foundations [grant number P20-0069].

Notes on contributors

Mathieu Chaput

Mathieu Chaput is Professor at Université TÉLUQ, where he teaches organizational communication and public relations. He is an associate member of the RECOR, the Research Group on Communication as Organizing. His research focuses on the communicative constitution of organizations, organizational rhetoric, food technology, animals in public life and organizational identity.

Alexander Paulsson

Alexander Paulsson is an Associate Professor at Lund University. He teaches and writes about organizations, the politics of sustainability, and the making and consequences of science and technology. Being trained in the fields of history, politics and business, he combines the study of the urban environment, administrative devices and ecological processes with the history of economic and political concepts.