The Meaning of 'Meat': Boundary Objects in the Promotional Cultures of Plant-Based Meat

Abstract

<p>This dissertation interrogates the use of boundary objects in the rhetorical framing strategies of plant-based meat companies. I address the framing, categorization, and boundary work of foods such as ‘vegan’, ’meat’, and ‘burger’ from a Bourdieuian, class-focused perspective. I use rhetorical framing analysis to critically engage with the Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods burger campaigns—including CEO interviews (with Patrick Brown and Ethan Brown), trade journal articles (Fortune and Business Insider), company websites (Beyond Meat, Impossible Foods, A&W, and Burger King), Twitter posts (@AWCanada and @BurgerKing), and consumer engagements on Twitter—between 2014-2018. This project contributes to the theoretical refinement of boundary objects by demonstrating how they can be used to rhetorically situate non-dominant social actors within the categorical boundaries of dominant groups. In this case, plant-based meat companies redefine ‘meat’ along chemical and nutritional lines in order to situate themselves and their products within the privileged socio-cultural category of meat. I also enhance the usefulness of rhetorical framing analysis as a method of studying communication by adding agenda-dismissal to the methodological repertoire of agenda-setting theory. I find that, while vegetarianism and veganism have historically constituted anti-consumerist subjectivities, Beyond Meat, Impossible Foods, and the rhetoric of plant-based meat serve to reinforce a dominant ideological frame of individuals-as-consumers by encouraging people to consume more ‘good’ food. From a class-based perspective, this rhetorical strategy places the consumerist logic of plant-based meats at odds with the conspicuous and distinguished consumption ideals of bourgeois veganism. Beyond Meat, Impossible Foods, and plant-based meat rhetorics thus perpetuate neoliberal hegemony by emphasizing a nutricentric framing of food products, which dismisses other relevant social, cultural, and economic elements of food. Finally, I use this project as an interjection into the larger field of cultural studies in order to identify and name an emerging sub-discipline of critical analysis: ‘meat studies’. Ultimately, I argue that the rhetoric of plant-based meat companies reinforce rather than challenge both meat’s privileged cultural status and the foundations upon which consumer capitalism exists.</p>