Reducing Climate Killer Meat Consumption: Actors, Narratives, Workers in Germany After the Re-Regulation of the Meat Industry and its Employment Model

Food production is a huge perpetrator of climate-damaging gases, together with energy, traffic and industry. Within food production it is meat, milk, cheese and other animal products that stand for the bulk of problematic production and consumption modes. To be able to achieve the Paris climate goals, a significant reduction in meat and other animal production is necessary – the German Think Tank Agora Agrar claims a cutting by half in meat consumption in the next 25 years in the EU. That reduction would include major consequences for the industrial producers along the entire production chain – for farmers, the fertilizer industry, animal breeding, and the dairy, cheese, and meat industry – and would entail substantial transformations of companies and workplaces. But more than a technical question of transforming a complex industrial production chain and the workplaces and the government funding in the agro-industrial complex on national and EU-level, it is the narrative and positioning of meat and individual consumption models, that has to be taken in consideration. The attachment to meat consumption makes it necessary to analyse that relationship, its powerful images, promoters and political positioning. With “Petro-Masculinity”, Cara New Daggett analysed that close relationship of extractivist energy industries and a certain type of masculinity. We depart from this concept and test it for the meat consumption-masculinity-complex, to make it fruitful for our context. Here we analyse how the meat industry has deliberately tried to create an affective attachment to meat consumption. We will concentrate on the meat industry in Germany, one of the biggest production and consumption markets in Europe, with a turnover of 50 Mill Euro in 2025 and 150,000 people working in the industry alone. Recently, in 2021, a substantial cut in the former business model of Germany´s meat sector – relying before on cheap migrant work, subcontracting – reordered this model and led to a ban on subcontracting and direct employment of 35.000 migrant workers. Does this very recent changeover contribute to a future transformation of workplaces and production modes in the meat sector? How did the meat industry react and what images did it try to create of itself? Finally we ask: what are key actors and institutions in any future transformation of the technical and narrative/affective aspect of meat production and consumption in Europes biggest meat production and consumption market, Germany.