Research project

Together, the joint project "FleischWissen" deals with meat as an object in the sense of the reification of the living. A process is traced along the entire value chain in which the object of meat "finds its language" and acquires its specific significance as a thing through various actors and actions, places and objects. The overarching thesis is that over the course of time from industrialisation to the present day, meat has increasingly developed from a symbol of progress, prosperity and a high standard of living into a symbol of malnutrition, environmental destruction and animal suffering. Looking at the processes of change along the entire value chain, it is possible to trace how meat became a cultural symbol. The project partners are investigating this from their respective disciplines.

The sub-project at Fulda University of Applied Sciences is dedicated to "Meat knowledge from a nutritional sociological perspective" and focuses on the connection between semantics and structure. The focus is on the change of meanings and the stratificational consequences of dealing with meat from the middle of the 19th century to the present. The aim is to show how meat lends itself to symbolic charges under which social circumstances and how the previous ones are visibly eroding and being replaced by alternative interpretations and reinterpretations. The starting point for the investigations in the Fulda sub-project are private households and their views on proximity and distance to all other parts of the value creation process.

In a first step, key works from the cooking and advice literature will be used and examined with the methods of sociological discourse analysis and semantic analysis. In a second step, food biographical interviews will be conducted with three generations from ten different families.

In both approaches, semantics will be analysed in order to draw conclusions about changes in the significance of meat and its stratificational potential. The combination of the two project steps will be published in a monograph. An anthology will also be published together with the project partners.

On 28 and 29 November 2019, the nutrition sociology sub-project of the "FleischWissen" research network organised a symposium at Fulda University of Applied Sciences. The aim of the two-day event was to facilitate a cross-project, thematic and methodological exchange between meat experts from science and practice as well as thematically interested students. In four thematic blocks, focal points of the BMBF network were discussed across projects. The core questions were: What developments have taken place in meat as a cultural object, in the tools used to prepare it and in its meaning in production and consumption since the beginning of industrialisation? And to what extent do these developments influence and change current evaluations and practices?

A short report on the event can be found here.

Other partners in the joint project:

University of Regensburg, Department of Comparative Cultural Studies

• Prof. Dr. Gunther Hirschfelder
• Dr. Lars Winterberg

Institute for Social Innovation e.V., Berlin

• Dr René John

German Cookbook Museum (as a branch of the Museum of Art and Cultural History), Dortmund

• Dr. Jens Stöcker
• M.A. Corinna Schirmer

Westerwald Landscape Museum, Hachenburg

• Dr. Moritz Jungbluth
• M.A. Frédéric Gesing