Meat at the butcher's

‘When you go into a butcher's shop and see how beautiful meat can be and then you think about it, you can think of the whole horror of life’. Francis Bacon Scholarship on meat in the humanities and social sciences has burgeoned in recent years (Gewertz & Errington 2010; Specht 2019). However, whilst much attention has been paid to the slaughterhouse (Blanchette 2020; Pachirat 2011), the butcher’s shop has evaded investigation. This project fills this research gap. While meat may be a ‘quintessentially global object’ (Chatterjee & Subramaniam 2021), winding through unequal transnational geographies of empire, in this project we contend that it has simultaneously been a quintessentially local object, defining the spaces, daily routines and practices of high street localism. We take a novel and ambitious approach to studying local meat, delving into textual, audio-visual and oral history archives to reconstruct the history, geography and politics of the high street butcher's from the late 19th century to the rise of the supermarket in the 1990s. We will generate new ways of thinking about meat historically and geographically, reconceptualising the meat supply chain from a different social and spatial position and providing a springboard for new research agendas. We approach the butcher's shop as an overlooked space of articulation in the meat supply chain: a place where meat meets the consumer, and where global supply chains meet local spaces of retail and consumption. However, we propose that the butcher’s shop is much more than this. We understand it as a ‘contact zone’ (Pratt 2012) where gender is produced in the meeting between the ‘masculine’ butcher and the feminised ‘housewife’ consumer, where class is negotiated and remade in acts of butchering labour and consumption, where race is materialized in the killing, selling and buying of imperial, halal and kosher meat, and where ecologies are incorporated into domestic space and social reproduction through modes of consumption. Focussing on the intimate geographies of this contact zone, our analysis will be organised around four architectural features that mark the butcher’s as a distinct kind of place: the block, the counter, the window and the cold room. We will trace these forms and their shifting meanings across the twentieth century by reading across public, administrative and cultural archives to reconstruct the social world of the butcher’s. This period encompasses dramatic changes in the material geographies of meat, as British meat becomes a global product, and as purchasing power ebbs and flows with historical transformations and crises in food supply (Otter, 2020). Looking at these transformations from the perspective of the butcher's offers a lens for re-thinking meat in the colonial and post-colonial metropole. We will write two peer-reviewed journal articles and organise an academic workshop. We will also undertake public outreach through collaboration with the London Museum on an open access ‘meat map’ of London. This visual and cartographical tool will open the social, historical, urban and cultural geography of meat to wider audiences. References Blanchette,A. Porkopolis: American animality, standardized life, and the factory farm. Duke,2020. Chatterjee,S & Subramaniam,B(eds). Meat!: a transnational analysis. Duke,2021. Gewertz,D & Errington,E. Cheap meat: flap food nations in the Pacific Islands. UCPress,2010. Pachirat,T. Every twelve seconds: Industrialized slaughter and the politics of sight. Yale,2011. Pratt,ML.'Arts of the contact zone.' Negotiating academic literacies. Routledge,2012. pp.171-185. Specht,J. Red meat republic. Princeton,2019.