Beyond happy meat: Body mapping (dis)connections to animals in alternative food networks

Abstract

This paper explores the use of body mapping methods in the study of human–animal relations in alternative food networks. While research on alternative food networks is prolific, it has paid little attention to the bodily intimacies of eating‐as‐relational, particularly regarding meat. As recent scholarship on visceral geographies of food claims the body as central, meat and accompanying human–animal relations remain in the shadows. How do conscientious meat eaters relate rationally, affectively and metabolically to animals in consumption practices? Building on current work in geographies of food and feeling, I argue that body mapping serves as a device to probe the visceral realm of practices and feelings in meat consumption. Drawing on focus group fieldwork in Austria, I illustrate how body mapping brings attention to the intertwined material‐affective dimensions of food by eliciting data on both representational and material (dis)engagement with animal life. Furthermore, it facilitates individual and group reflexivity of uncomfortable practices. As a performative method, body mapping opens space for new considerations of the “animal” in relation to food practice. For geographers of food and feeling, body mapping addresses the call for critical methods that illuminate the complexity and contradictions of how bodies respond to – and care for – others within the food system.