Who is the meat? - Olivier Assouly

How is the possibility of eating meat products fundamentally in crisis and compromised today? In the logical continuation of his work devoted to food and food prohibitions, Olivier Assouly undertakes a reflection on what has led our societies to use the bodies of animals for food purposes.

But meat, far from being extracted like an ordinary raw material, refers to living beings and their suffering. The emergence of so-called "cellular" meat, a meat product derived from the cultivation of stem cells, is currently paving the way for "de-animalized" meat, that is to say, meat freed from the life cycle and domestication of an animal.

However, this option, which is moral in principle, encounters social resistance which indirectly reveals the symbolic function of meat: the animal, by substitution of a human victim, would be responsible for curbing the excess of violence and cruelty.

That is why the question of what meat is matters less than that of "who" it is.