In 2013, the Norwegian Armed Forces decided to introduce a meat reduction scheme in its military mess halls, for both health reasons and environmental concerns. This article explores Norwegian soldiers' reactions to the introduction of Meat free Monday, and their attitudes towards reducing meat consumption. As of yet, Meat free Monday has not been implemented due to both structural and contextual challenges. We explore both the process and potential of the Norwegian military's Meat free Monday initiative to promote sustainable and climate friendly diets. We found significant barriers preventing the military from implementing Meat free Monday. The main reason behind the resistance to reduce meat consumption among Norwegian soldiers was meat's associations with protein, masculinity and comfort. Our results underline the importance of acknowledging the social and cultural role of food. The study is qualitative and uses focus group interviews as its main methodology.

In this article, our starting point is that people who are plagued by the so-called meat paradox must find ways of making meat consumption safe from the realities of meat production. They do this by way of various mechanisms of denial, which obfuscate contemporary industrial meat production. We focus on how advertisements become one notable vehicle of such denial, and select three examples for close reading. Focusing on the rhetorical techniques employed in three Norwegian ads for meat and how they mediate meat production to consumers, we argue that these ads all present an image of meat producers as progressive and caring proponents of animal welfare. This leads us to suggest that they exemplify a variant of greenwashing that we dub “welfare washing”—the main message of which is to keep calm and carry on consuming meat.

This qualitative study asks farmers in Alberta, Canada, what are their motivations for using a practice in beef production called management-intensive grazing (MIG). By adopting this practice, these farmers engage in strategies of diversification and co-production that increase the autonomy and resilience of their farms. MIG allows farmers to defy conventional agricultural practice and engage in what can be labelled a repeasantization process, a process that contributes to the discussion about conventional farming versus agroecology.

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