Mediated Meat: Buying and Selling Beef in Canadian Supermarkets

Revealing supermarkets as significant mediators of food ethics, this dissertation delves into the contemporary “beef” with beef. Critics wonder if ethical beef consumption is possible, since dominant beef systems have been associated with environmental deterioration, health crises, and unsafe work. As supermarkets are primary places where people encounter beef, they are valuable sites for research on these deliberations.

The ubiquitous role that supermarkets play in beef distribution is indicative of the power they hold at key junctures of the material and affective networks that facilitate foods’ movements. To assess the extent to which supermarkets promote ethical beef consumption through these “infrastructures of feeling”, the dissertation presents a case study of beef shopping in supermarkets owned by Canada’s largest food retail company, Loblaw Companies Limited. The study compiles evidence from promotional materials, in-store observations, expert interviews with management, and focus groups with shoppers. Using critical discourse analysis, it investigates the relationships between beef shopping participants that are expressed in the data.

The project builds on the literature of “cryopolitics” (the governance of frozen time-spaces between life and death) to characterize Loblaw’s supermarkets as “cryopolitical mediators” that shape conditions for flourishing in Canada’s cattle-beef infrastructure. Chapters address central themes that emerge from the data—trust, choice, ghosts—to depict multiple interpretations of the (un)ethical beef futures that Loblaw offers: from support for Loblaw as a credible risk manager; to critiques of Loblaw’s activities that have been reinvented as corporate social responsibility initiatives; and rejections of Loblaw’s plans for beef provisioning, as inspired by haunting signs of organic mutability. The study finds that Loblaw approaches ethical beef consumption through a logic of freshness, whereby profitable elements of the current cattle-beef infrastructure are preserved based on perpetually deferred promises of nourishment.

The dissertation reimagines the apparent gap between eaters and food sources that has been blamed for perpetuating the harms of the beef industry. Whereas an emphasis on separation invokes corrective efforts to fill in missing information, the framework of mediation shifts attention to the work of adjusting perceptions in the interest of finding responses to the relational entanglements of eating and being meat.