RSF: Protein pressures

The Research Support Funding scheme supported 13 short (six-month) projects that complemented and extended the Centre’s research themes: Transforming Institutions, Transforming Engagement, Transforming Health across the life course and Transforming Relations.

Protein pressures and carnivorous crises: human health, animal welfare and the global growth of nineteenth- and twenty-first-century meat markets

This project explored how health, welfare and environmental issues concerning the phenomenal growth of the global meat complex in the twenty-first century can be better understood and addressed through an interdisciplinary engagement with the formative development of globalized meat markets in Britain between 1850-1920.

We held a two-day symposium that:

– Used the Centre’s research themes to shape and develop how scholars with expertise in the relevant history, archival materials and literary and cultural forms can forge links with scientists, social scientists, policy-makers, commercial organisations and advocacy groups involved and interested in the contemporary meat industry.

– Began to identify interdisciplinary research questions, archival resources and impact pathways that will develop in a transformative way Paul Young’s monograph Carnivorous Empire: Adventure Fiction, British Culinary Culture and the Growth of Global Meat Markets, 1865-1914 as an application to the AHRC’s Leadership Fellow scheme.

– Started to build a network of researchers from non-cognate disciplines alongside non-academic stakeholders and orient it towards ongoing collaborative work – within the academy and beyond – on the historical, cultural and environmental dimensions of meat markets as they pertain to issues of human and non-human health and wellbeing.

Read Paul Young’s article in The Conversation: The Victorians caused the meat-eating crisis the world faces today – but they might help us solve it

Watch the Centre seminar: Meat-eating and globalised modernity, with Paul Young, Chris Otter and Usman Mustaq from the EAT Foundation

Project Partners

Paul Young
Steve Hinchliffe
Chris Otter