Abstract
Simple SummaryIn various contexts, people talk about the farming and consumption of animals using different arguments to construct and justify their (non-)acceptability. This paper reports on a qualitative research among consumers with different backgrounds in urban and rural areas in The Netherlands and Turkey. We present an elaborate methodology for qualitatively researching everyday-life talk about animal farming and meat consumption. We explain how we collected and organised topics people refer to, and looked at the possible relation of complete argumentations with the researched contexts. The resulting long list of topics includes animal welfare arguments, but shows that in everyday-life many others are used, such as health, taste, money, religion, and environmental impact. Our research indicates several ties between mentioned topics and the researched contexts—the most noticeable pattern being the difference between respondents in cities and rural areas. However, in contrast to what literature suggests, single contextual features, like country or gender, offered relatively little insight into the differences that showed up in the complete argumentations. This, we argue, does not imply that context does not matter, but rather that so many cultural and personal contextual aspects play a role that singular contextual features cannot sufficiently explain framing.In various contexts, people talk about animal farming and meat consumption using different arguments to construct and justify their (non-)acceptability. This article presents the results of an in-depth qualitative inquiry into the content of and contextual patterns in the everyday-life framing regarding this issue, performed among consumers in various settings in two extremes in the European sphere: the Netherlands and Turkey. We describe the methodological steps of collecting, coding, and organizing the variety of encountered framing topics, as well as our search for symbolic convergence in groups of consumers from different selected demographic contexts (country, urban-rural areas, gender, age, and education level). The framing of animal farming and meat consumption in everyday-life is not a simple one-issue rational display of facts; people referred to a vast range of topics in the categories knowledge, convictions, pronounced behaviour, values, norms, interests, and feelings. Looking at framing in relation to the researched demographic contexts, most patterns were found on the level of topics; symbolic convergence in lines of reasoning and composite framing was less prominent in groups based on single demographic contexts than anticipated. An explanation for this lies in the complexity of frame construction, happening in relation with multiple interdependent contextual features.
Highlights
The farming and slaughter of animals and the related consumption of meat are increasingly being contested in our current society [1,2,3,4]
The resulting—elaborate but finite—list of topics is provided as List S1: Categories and codes: topics used to talk about animal farming and meat consumption
Mdpi.com/2076-2615/8/2/17/s1) that emerged when organising the framing elements within these categories, show that there is a large variety of topics used to talk about animal farming and meat consumption, that can be about oneself, other humans and culture, about the production chain, system and institutions, as well as about animals, and environmental issues
Summary
The farming and slaughter of animals and the related consumption of meat are increasingly being contested in our current society [1,2,3,4]. Research in Western countries—mostly focusing on animal welfare perception—indicates that contexts within societies, such as urbanization level, cultural value systems, the kind of production system under scrutiny, group membership like gender or age, and personality traits such as empathy, influence the perception of animal farming and meat consumption [1,3,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20]. Though Turkey currently strives for a more innovative and competitive rural economy that complies with the EU’s
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