“There is always resistance, but no one says you have to eat a lot of meat anymore”

2023-08-19 10:01:46

Professor of medieval history, specialist in the history of food, Bruno Laurioux co-edited the works For a history of meat. Manufactures and representations from Antiquity to the present day (Rennes university press and François-Rabelais university press, 2017) and The French Culinary Model (Francois-Rabelais University Press, 2021).

To improve its carbon footprint, for the sake of animal welfare or for health reasons, meat consumption is increasingly questioned. Are we still in a golden age of meat eating?

There are several times in history of high meat consumption. Prehistory in its terminal period, the Paleolithic, is one of them. Then, at the end of the Middle Ages, the 14th and 15th centuries were carnivorous centuries. After an episode of generalized cereal growing, we see the development of livestock farming in pastures which are increasing in area, at a time of climatic cooling and demographic decline. Then a new demographic boom brings back, from the 16th to the 18th century, a strong cereal growing.

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In the 19th century, meat consumption increased again, uninterruptedly, until it reached the 80 kilos of meat consumed today per person per year in France. At the beginning of the 19th century, we ate 20 kilos of meat per year and per person. Today, the trend is for a gradual, slow decline. The latest FranceAgriMer report [l’établissement national des produits de l’agriculture et de la mer] shows a slight upturn, but the overall trend is down.

If we wanted to reduce our meat consumption by 75% to 80%, as certain reports recommend, would we therefore return to the level of the beginning of the 19th century?

We are still far from it, but more and more people say they eat less meat than before. There is also a reclassification of meats. Beef progressed a lot from the 19th to the 20th century, but since the 1980s its consumption has been declining, while that of pork has increased since the Second World War, followed by that of poultry, two categories driven by the development of factory farms. . The downward movement that we observe will continue. Of course, there are always resistances, but no one says you have to eat a lot of meat anymore.

But this food remains essential for a majority of people in France…

There are not only nutritional motivations behind the consumption of meat, far from it: whole peoples do without meat, others still eat only that. Questions of status, of representation, come into play. The meat category itself is a construction. In old French, meat is a term that designates any food, it means “that can serve for life”. The term used in the Middle Ages is “flesh”: human or animal flesh, it is more concrete.

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