Beyond Meat - Transcript

Intro [00:00:02]

This is the Nordic Asia podcast.

Helene Ramnæs [00:00:10]

Welcome to the Nordic Azure Podcast, a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region. My name is Helene Ramnæs and I am the coordinator of the Norwegian Network for Asian Studies. In this episode, we discuss meat in China, India and Vietnam. Both China and Vietnam have seen dramatic booms in meat consumption and production over the past decades. India has not. In fact, India is one of the clearest cases against a general trend globally that sees meat consumption increase alongside income. Nevertheless, meat is a highly contested topic in contemporary India and in particular the large beef sector that exists in an uneasy relationship with Modi's Hindu nationalist regime. Meat is contested also in China and Vietnam. Although normalised in most people's diets, the negative health effects of overconsumption of meat have in recent years attracted much attention, and voluntary meat production is becoming an increasingly widespread phenomenon in both countries. Due to the large environmental footprint of meat production. These dietary developments are of global significance. To discuss meat in China, India and Vietnam. We are joined by Marius Korsnes, associate professor in science and technology studies at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Kenneth Bo Nielsen, Associate Professor of Social anthropology at the University of Oslo and Arve Hansen, senior researcher and human geographer at the Center for Development and the Environment University of Oslo. Kenneth and Arve also lead the Norwegian Network for Asian Studies and are regular host of podcasts in the Nordic Asia podcast series. Welcome to all of you.

Kenneth Bo Nielsen [00:02:03]

Thank you very much, Helene.

Helene Ramnæs [00:02:05]

Now, three of you organized a panel on meat consumption and meat avoidance at the Asian Conference in Trondheim in June. I would first like to ask, where did this idea of focusing on meat come from?

Arve Hansen [00:02:19]

I guess I can respond to this one. I've been doing work on meat consumption in Vietnam, in East Asia for many years now. I never really planned this, to be honest. It emerged from a general interest in food, new middle classes and changing consumption patterns within the broader development processes. And then meat quickly stood out as a central and fascinating topic. Of course, meat is at the core of global sustainability challenges and changing patterns of production and consumption in Asia always has global ramifications. But meat is also a very useful starting point for analyzing a range of social, cultural, economic and political issues. This led me together with my co-editor, Karen Lucas's to edit the book Changing Meat Cultures, Food Practices, Global Capitalism and the Consumption of Animals, which came out last year. And in it, Kenneth and Marius were part of writing extremely interesting chapters on meat in China and India. And Marius also has a brand new starting grant on meat and milk in China. So in many ways, actually the topic of meat was quite obvious.

Helene Ramnæs [00:03:29]

Now, Marius, first of all, congratulations on your grant. And can you maybe tell us a little bit more about this project and how you ended up studying meat in China?

Marius Korsnes [00:03:40]

Yeah, sure. Thank you very much. So just to say a little bit about myself, I've done a lot of research on energy and renewable energy in China for the past ten years, but I've increasingly become more interested in food and agriculture. And a couple of years ago, we got a research project focusing on Norway, where actually Ottawa also is involved. But my interest has always been on China, so I did try to apply for research project on China, tried a couple of times and finally got this project which actually just started a couple of weeks ago. So we are just starting right now. It's a five year project. The title of the project is "A Middle Way probing sufficiency through Meat and Milk in China". So as you can tell from the title, Meat and Milk are the topics. And the idea is to try to understand how the demand for meat and milk has been gradually developed in China. With a focus on the past 40 years. And if we can understand better exactly what's different, types of factors have been involved in constructing this demand for meat and milk in China. The idea is that we can also say something about how this potentially could reduce in the future, and that's where this sufficiency aspect also enters the picture. I mean, sufficiency is a topic that is become increasingly popular the past years. And the way that it's used in this project is basically as a contrast to efficiency thinking, where you always need to have more of something in a sense that you want to provide the same service using, let's say less inputs, less energy, using things more efficiently. But what happens is that you have rebound effect leading to higher overall consumption. So sufficiency is a contrast to that where we actually want to try to see how things can actually reduce.

Helene Ramnæs [00:05:51]

Kenneth, between China, Vietnam and India. India is obviously the odd one out here. So what attracted you to the Indian meat sector?

Kenneth Bo Nielsen [00:06:04]

I guess you said it yourself in your introduction earlier. India is, I think, perhaps the clearest case against this general trend globally that sees meat consumption increase alongside income. And there's been no such rapid rise in meat consumption in India, despite the fact that the country has seen solid economic growth over many decades. Now, with some modification, of course, India is in fact among the fastest growing markets for processed meat and poultry. But what we often talk about as mystification of diets hasn't occurred on the scale that we would have expected, according to more general theories of dietary change happening alongside growth and incomes. So it's true. India is the odd one out. It's an outlier, and I think that alone would have made it a good case to study and a good case to to think with. Why does India differ so much from other countries on this account? But that's not really what attracted me and my collaborator, Justin Jacobson, to the Indian meat sector. What we found interesting was rather another kind of paradox stereotypically We often think of India as a vegetarian country, a country where the cow is sacred, a country where the cow is revered. And currently India is governed by a Hindu nationalist government that promotes precisely these values and these images of India both at home but also globally. And in spite of this, India is in fact one of the leading global exporters of beef supported by the very same government. So how can we make sense of this paradox? That's what made Justin and me look into the Indian case. And if you want to know what the answer to this paradox is, I suppose you'll have to read our writings on this, including the chapter in the book by Arve, so that he mentioned just now.

Helene Ramnæs [00:07:58]

That is a very interesting paradox indeed. And for those who are interested to learn more about this or read more about this, we will be sure to link the book in the description of this podcast. Now, as we have already touched upon several times, these are three quite different countries and cases. But do you see anything they have in common?

Arve Hansen [00:08:22]

I think, as Kenneth has explained, India is very different from the two others. India is very different from most countries in the world. I guess it does share some traits with the others. For example, the expansion in processed meat and poultry or the increasingly global links feeding local meat production. These are obvious examples. And when you, Stan and I started working on what we called the emerging Asian meat complex, this emerged from us working at different ends of this complex without really thinking about meat necessarily. But he was working on the expansion of maize production in India, and I was looking at changing diets in Vietnam. And then suddenly we realized that these are actually connected in many ways through the meat industry and India's role as one of the biggest buffalo exporters in the world with Vietnam as one of the main markets, maybe then passing on into China. And there are many examples of this. But in general, China and Vietnam share a lot more similarities than than India and the two other do. And China and Vietnam share a wide range of traits. This is hardly surprising. Of course, these are two out of three so-called socialist market economies in the world that are combining could call political Leninism and state capitalism. Also, the fact that they have a shared, if conflicted history and shared deep cultural links. And I think actually the fact that some of the fastest increases in meat consumption in the world have been seen in China and Vietnam, and then combined with the fact that Macau and Hong Kong have among the highest levels of per capita meat consumption in the world, this tells us that food, culture or culture in general perhaps should be given more attention in efforts to understand meat booms, where focus tends to be on just income and globalization and urbanization and so on. And for the similarities here, the centrality of the pig and of pork, it's a very simple example. The same a strong government led protectionist focus on increasing agricultural output, which has been important for feeding this meat boom. So yeah, Vietnam and China have seen many of the same processes develop in similar, if not in the same necessarily, but in similar ways. But everything tends to be bigger and happen faster. In China, for example, the scaling up and industrialization of meat production. It's a quite recent thing in Vietnam and it's been going on for quite some time in China and at a very different scale than what we've seen in Vietnam so far.

Helene Ramnæs [00:10:55]

And talking about scaling up. Many see increased meat consumption in parts of Asia as an outcome of foreign influences, such as the spread of American fast food chains, for example. Do you agree with this assessment?

Kenneth Bo Nielsen [00:11:10]

Well, this is kind of a version of the McDonald-ization thesis, right? That the spread of fast food chains, including McDonald's, will somehow change the world and make it more uniform in dietary terms. But I think probably the world has changed McDonald's as much more than McDonald's has changed the world in the sense that while we find fast food chains, including McDonald's everywhere, they've been compelled to adapt to local circumstances rather than the other way around. In India, there's been quite many hurdles to this spread of Western fast food for obvious reasons. In India, a beef burger was probably never going to be a big hit, nor was pork. So we find that fast food chains, including McDonald's, have had to put fish and chicken, but also lots of vegetables on the menu. This has taken the form of some very interesting and also very tasty fusion burgers like the Megalo Tikki Burger, which has potato and pea filling and no meat or another version, the spicy paneer burger, which has a form of cheese filling, but also the simple challenge of actually convincing Indian consumers that a burger does in fact qualify as a meal was in itself a bit of a challenge. Preparing for this talk, I tried to find some recent figures on the prevalence of fast food stores in India and a figure that popped up from a couple of years back was that India had around 300 McDonald's restaurants. Probably has gone up quite a bit since then. But even then, this is only one McDonald's restaurant for every 4.5 million Indians. And if you transplant these figures to Norwegian soil, that would mean just roughly one McDonald's for the entire country. Pizza Hut, I think, has roughly 500 Indian outlets. Also a very, very low figure. So these, if we call them Western fast food outlets are concentrated in India and typically upmarket spaces in urban centres, and they cater to a particular kind of clientele. And I think on their own they're not challenging dietary habits. But what they may do is of course to introduce new forms of aspirational food that people will aspire to consume more generally, and that of course could have ripple effects on everyday diets at some point in the future.

Arve Hansen [00:13:35]

Yes. Yeah. Agree with Kenneth. I heard this quite a lot, but I think many of these Westernization claims, which is this part of are the outcome of Westerners seeing the West wherever they go rather than necessarily the most important trends going on. And I don't think it's very helpful in Vietnam. While foreign influences are important in many ways, I would say Eastern influences are at least as important as Western. So, for example, Korean and Japanese barbecue places are very important in this meat boom in Vietnam. S are local street food places and just the increasing amounts of meat in fur. For example, Western fast food is only moderately popular, I would say. The most common comment I hear in Vietnam is that it's too creamy. Different forms of Asian food is seen as more suitable also for Asian food. And if you go to a big shopping mall and food courts in Vietnamese cities, there will be people at the western fast food places, but the hotpot places will be crowded and of course, deeply embedded. Food cultures make sure that even though foodways are changing, they don't necessarily change that much. But that said, I think many children growing up in Vietnam today, especially then of the middle upper middle classes, perhaps are much more familiar with foreign fast food and may perhaps be part of driving more dramatic changes in the future. And I think these places are a factor and they have, of course, played an important role in shaping how fast food looks. So even if the Korean chain Loteria is much bigger than McDonald's in Vietnam, it is based on the old McDonald way of producing food. So if you go back to George Ritter's McDonald recession thesis, one of his core arguments was that it's the way in which McDonald's is organized and the kind of standardization and systems of provision and labor regimes that represent that spreads out into the world. And there is, of course, some truth to that, and it may perhaps contribute to a further standardization of the types of meat consume. But then I believe supermarkets are more important than fast food chains in shaping this. And to me at least, to explain increasing meat consumption by foreign fast food is just lazy. There are so many things going on here, and many of them take place in local farms and street kitchens rather than in the restaurants of these global fast food giants.

Marius Korsnes [00:16:07]

I agree with many of the things that you said, but I think we should also acknowledge that there is definitely a correlation between the spread of fast food chains in China and an increase in meat consumption. So for sure, I wouldn't say that there is a causation necessarily, but there is a correlation. If you look at the Kentucky Fried Chicken, which entered China in 1987 as the first chain from from the outside started out, of course, very small, but has today increased to around 5000 restaurants in over 1100 many cities. So Turkey fried Chicken is the largest chain in China today. And some numbers from 2013 show that this total of 2 million fast food restaurants in China. So think it's clear that fast food chains have had an impact on the way in which Chinese people have been eating and particularly meat has been implicated in that. There is, of course, exactly like the two of you have been saying, these fast food chains have adapted to local ways and serving local products. But there is also something to say about this allure of being connected to Western modernity, which think in the beginning, in the 90s had much larger attraction than it has today. However, some work that I've looked at shows that in the very beginning these burgers and deep fried chicken and fries were considered more as snacks. Didn't really fit that well with the Chinese balance that you have between grain and side dishes. But this has also changed recent years. So the way it was in the very beginning is today very different. To sum up, I think that fast food has also been combined with an increased supply of meat and this whole supply chain that has been associated with fast food chains has also transformed Chinese meat production to some extent. So my conclusion is that I think it has had an impact on meat consumption in general, But of course we couldn't say that it's causing the large increase in meat consumption on its own.

Helene Ramnæs [00:18:43]

Now, Kenneth, India is in a way, and as you mentioned, previously known for vegetarianism. But there are many who criticize this view. Why is that?

Kenneth Bo Nielsen [00:18:57]

Oh, this is probably going to require quite a long answer. Many criticize this this view simply because it's not true. Historically, India has not been completely vegetarian country and it isn't today either. I think it's only around a third of the population that can be considered vegetarians in the strict sense of abstaining from all consumption of meat. But given that overall meat consumption remains low, relatively speaking, this means that most Indians do eat meat, but they don't eat it all that often for various reasons. And all of this, all these trends will vary across castes and across communities. Meat is important for Christian and Muslim diets, for example, but also often for Dalits or for indigenous communities or for the poor, for whom meat can be cheap, readily available and crucial source of protein. So one cannot equate vegetarianism with Hinduism and much less with India. But another reason for criticizing this view, I think, has to do with the way in which meat and meat consumption has been increasingly politicized in India under the current regime, in particular, the mission of Hindu nationalism that now stands at pneumonic in India is to turn India into a Hindu majoritarian state. And as part of this political project, a line is drawn between true and patriotic Indians, meaning Hindus and their various categories of anti-national enemies both within and beyond the nation. The prime antagonistic other of Hindu nationalism are typically related to minorities. It can be Christians, but mainly Muslims. And cows and beef meat in particular. They become useful here because they can be used to reinforce this dividing line between true Indian Hindus who Revere and respect the cow versus the anti-national enemies within the Muslims who then eat or slaughter the cow. So under the government that's in power now, there's been periodic high levels of vigilantism targeting most often Muslim cattle traders, Muslim transporters of cattle, but also targeting slaughterhouses, often irrespective of ownership and so on, where people have been beaten up and sometimes killed. Alongside this, we have new legislation being passed in many of India's states that make the slaughter, but also the transportation and sometimes even the consumption of beef meat a criminal offense, both to take forward the Hindu nationalist project. So I think it's important to criticize and also to stress that this kind of what we may call either violent or legislative demystification is in fact part of a political project that seeks to turn India into a Hindu state.

Helene Ramnæs [00:21:54]

Marius, Arve. What about the increasing prevalence of meat avoidance in China and Vietnam? Is this controversial in any way?

Marius Korsnes [00:22:04]

I don't think it's controversial. I mean, you see that there is an increasing trend in big cities in China, for instance, of vegetarianism and veganism. So it's definitely a trend that's increasing, but it's still a very, very small part of the population that is vegetarian in this type of urban, trendy way. But I would say that in the chapter that we wrote for this book that are edited, I wrote that chapter together with Associate Professor Liu Chen at the Sun Yat sen University in Guangzhou. And based on some of her work, we see that those who are choosing to eat vegetarian food in China today, they don't do it necessarily because of this more traditional reasons connected to meat avoidance or Buddhist traditions that it's more connected to an understanding of health and food safety rather than what you see more in a more Western discourse that it's more about, for example, ethical consumption and so on. You don't see so much of that in China, at least according to what I've heard from my colleague Liu Chen.

Arve Hansen [00:23:20]

It's a very interesting trend in Vietnam, I guess, again. There are some traits shared with China, I guess we could say. It may be controversial in some sense, but not in the same ways that we see in India, Vietnam as well. Of course, has deep tradition for meat avoidance or meat like diets. As a majority Buddhist country and as a country where meat quite recently was a luxury. Practicing periodic vegetarianism, as we can call it, is a perfectly normal thing to do. For example, avoiding meat during the first and the 15th day of the lunar month, for example. But still today, many tell me that they find it really hard to be a vegetarian. And one part of the explanation is that meat has in recent decades become embedded in a wide range of food practices, but also because they feel like vegetarians face forms of social stigma. And the hardest part seems to be but like many experienced in Norway and elsewhere as well, convincing the parent generation that avoiding meat is a good idea. And we should remember that these parents are often people that have suffered extreme hardship and who often place great importance in nutritious meals where now the abundance of meat is at least to some extent, as a positive. So it's controversial in these kinds of settings, I suppose. And we see also that many that were quite outspoken on avoiding meat have told us that in family meals they would eat meat even though they would avoid it in all other settings, but they would respect the family and the family meal. But meat avoidance is clearly gaining popularity. And from research that was done so far, we see that there are many different reasons for it. Like Marius talked about in China, many talk about health. Food safety is important here as well. Very few talk about the environment, but there are some and many in different ways refer to Buddhist principles. I would say much more so than I thought when we started out, because, you know what gains attention is often this kind of trendy veganism or trendy meat avoidance, but many of the ones we've talked to are not really part of that. And I think in order to fully understand what's going on, we need to do a deeper dive into the ways in which young generations in Vietnam have an re-engaging with religion in different ways. But guess we'll leave that for now.

Helene Ramnæs [00:25:47]

We are nearing the end of this episode now, but some final questions to round things off. Where are the frontiers of research on Asian meat consumption? And are there any specific topics that, in your opinion, requires new knowledge?

Kenneth Bo Nielsen [00:26:06]

Well, I'm actually not a consumption researcher, to be honest. I'm not even sure where the research frontier lies here. So Marius and Arve will probably give you more useful answers than what I can. But that's one thing for me personally that I would really like to explore. And it's something that Jostein Jakobsen and I have speculated about in our writings on the beef industry so far. These violent and legislative crackdowns that I talked about earlier that hit the beef trade really hit the informal sector badly. It also hit the formal sector involving large scale exporters, but not nearly to the same extent. Many of these large units, they have the paperwork in order. They've continued operating, doing pretty good business even under these difficult circumstances. Does this mean that this formalized large scale corporate sector has acquired an even greater share of the meat business in India? Are we seeing a new form of corporate concentration in meat in India? And if that is the case, what will this mean during the years that lie ahead? This is something that I hope somebody will look into. Really!

Arve Hansen [00:27:13]

Ah, this is such an important topic. In many ways I think it's fair to say that the Asian meat consumption will determine the future of global sustainability, no less. Many things could be said there, but to me it seems a vital one is to understand these new trends of meat avoidance in many parts of Asia. At least it's been done significantly less research on that than on meat consumption. And I'm interested in both the consumers and the more general practices as well as the materials and the economic actors involved in this. For example, the many new meat replacement products that are emerging. How do these compete with very old Asian meat replacement products? I think as the world grapples with finding less meat intensive food waste, there is so much that could be learned from Asian food history as well. Simultaneously. We still know comparatively little about the rapidly expanding and changing Asian meat industry. So think the political economy of meat always represents a research frontier here.

Marius Korsnes [00:28:15]

Yeah. As for me, I think the topics that you mentioned sound very interesting. I wouldn't know exactly myself where the research frontier is on this, but if you'd ask me again, in five years when my research project is over, I probably have a better answer. But based on my impression currently is that there are a couple of things connected to meat consumption that I feel could be highlighted a little bit better. One thing in a Chinese context is that seems that a lot of focus is on dining out and eating in restaurants and street food and so on. But what about home cooking and making food at home? What type of food is implicated in those practices? And for example, in the discussion that you discussed earlier on the role of fast food and influences from abroad, what are the influences from abroad in home cooking, and particularly maybe also in a rural context? I think it's fair to say that the diets also in a rural context in China have changed considerably, but there is not as much research on that as we see today, but at least what I have come across. Another thing that I think would be interesting to understand better is the connection between production and consumption in China. This is very interesting because you know that the Chinese government has supported a lot of different initiatives and actors and businesses and commercials and so on to increase both meat consumption and milk consumption. And we know that this very often leads to very centralized production facilities. There is, for example, a number that I have noticed is that 98% of all farms in China, of all pig farms, have 50 pigs or less. But these farms, which you consider more small scale farms, they only produce one third of all the pork. So this means that two thirds of all the pork is produced by only 2% of the farms. So this centralization and then what that leads to in terms of, for example, cheaper prices, but also how that impacts meat consumption in general, I think could be very interesting. And some of these issues will actually be explored in this project that we just started now. So I think that if we do another episode in a couple of years, we'll probably have some more updates on some of these issues.

Helene Ramnæs [00:30:57]

Which means we can all look forward to a follow up episode with Marius in a few years. Maurice Korsnes, Kenneth Bo Nielsen and Arve Hansen. Thank you for sharing some light on the meat sector in China, India and Vietnam. My name is Helen Ramnæs. Thank you for joining the Nordic Asia podcast showcasing Nordic collaboration in studying Asia.

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