Elsevier

Appetite

Volume 125, 1 June 2018, Pages 345-355
Appetite

Meat in the post-truth era: Mass media discourses on health and disease in the attention economy

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.appet.2018.02.028Get rights and content

Abstract

The debate on meat's role in health and disease is a rowdy and dissonant one. This study uses the health section of the online version of The Daily Mail as a case study to carry out a quantitative and qualitative reflection on the related discourses in mass media during the first fifteen years of the 21st century. This period ranged from the fall-out of the bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) crisis and its associated food safety anxieties, over the Atkins diet-craze in 2003 and the avian flu episode in 2007, to the highly influential publication of the report on colon cancer by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) in 2015. A variety of conflicting news items was discernible, whereby moments of crisis, depicting the potential hazards of meat eating, seemed to generate reassuring counter-reactions stressing the benefits of meat as a rich source of nutrients. In contrast, when the popularity of meat-rich diets was on the rise due to diets stressing the role of protein in weight control, several warnings were issued. Meat's long-standing and semiotic connotations of vitality, strength, and fertility were either confirmed, rejected or inverted. Often this was achieved through scientification or medicalisation, with references to nutritional studies. The holistic role of meat within human diets and health was thus mostly reduced to a focus on specific food components and isolated biological mechanisms. The narratives were often histrionic and displayed serious contradictions. Since several interests were at play, involving a variety of input from dieticians, (health) authorities, the food industry, vegan or vegetarian movements, and celebrities, the overall discourse was highly heterogeneous.

Introduction

Science-based nutritional policymaking is in the eye of the storm (Fischler, 2013; Harcombe, 2017). Controversies reflect urgency, complexity, and paradigm uncertainty within the applied models (Freidberg, 2016), whereas mainstream dietary guidelines are being defied (Taubes, 2008). Erosion of centralized nutritional dogma parallels rising differences in the valuing of risk between social groups and between scientific communities, as well as a decreasing confidence in institutionalized expertise (Freidberg, 2016; Pollan, 2008). The debate is affected by varied agendas and the rise of dietic individualism, mainly in Anglo-Saxon culture (Fischler, 2015). This evolution is not only post-modern but also post-truth, a term that first appeared in 1992, was declared “an era” in 2004, and became word of the year in 2016 (Keyes, 2004; Midgley, 2016). The scientific method has become subordinated to the amassing of information via cherry-picking, invention, and bricolage, provided that some coherence is present. According to Baggini (2017), Western societies may not be so much post-truth as “post-complexity”, with a need for articulate discourses in a disturbingly uncertain and contradictory setting, in which trust in authorities and unified expertise is historically low.

The case of meat eating is an exemplifying one. As an unquestioned health food, meat has been evoking strength and vitality to most cultures during most of their past (Leroy & Praet, 2015). Yet, its confident image became somewhat vulnerable to criticism in the 19th century, paralleling the rise of animal right movements and vegetarianism (Leroy & Praet, 2017), particularly in Britain, Germany, and the Netherlands. At the same time, reports on tainted or adulterated meat were being picked up by the public (Leroy & Degreef, 2015; Scholliers & Van den Eeckhout, 2011), sometimes leading to actual “meat panics” that initiated legislation (Olmstead & Rhode, 2015). More recently, such concerns have been amplified by a series of food crises involving contaminants and biohazards (e.g., Thévenot, Dernburg, & Vernozy-Rozand, 2006; Boyd, Jardine, & Driedger, 2009). Yet, the crumbling of meat's healthy image is not due to food safety issues only (Holm & Møhl, 2000). The advance of theories on the association between saturated fat and Western disease, especially cardiovascular pathologies, played a pivotal role since the 1950s (Keys et al., 1980). Recent reports linking meat to cardiometabolic diseases and colon cancer have greatly added to this (Bouvard et al., 2005; Micha et al., 2017).

In the slipstream of these developments, dietary guidelines are progressively depicting (red) meat and meat products as damaging to health, applying what is said to be “an evidence-based integrated message” (Wolk, 2017), although (discrete) warnings against too much meat consumption had emerged prior to 1914 (Scholliers, 2013; Scrinis, 2015). Obviously, evidence-based nutrition is not to be considered as static knowledge, being continuously shaped by novel, model-altering data (Baggini, 2017). Some authors, however, are seriously questioning the current consensus (Klurfeld, 2015; Leroy et al., 2018; McNeill, 2014; Taubes, 2008). Their critique generally focuses on the weaknesses of the epidemiological signals and the lack of clear causal associations. Turner and Lloyd (2017) have argued that the available studies either used excessive amounts of meat (components) or neglected the attenuating effects of wholesome diets. Remarkably, authors that take a convinced pro-meat stance generally rely on the same evidence-based methodology as their opponents, using it not only to criticize them but also to re-establish the beneficial role of meat in health (McNeill & Van Elswyk, 2012). Besides being confounded by the data ambiguity, scientific discourses on meat are also driven by dissimilar interests and opinions within the academic communities and their connected networks, i.e., industrialists, farmers, opinion makers, politicians, etc. (Ogle, 2013). This is reminiscent of the science-in-action concept, outlining the junction of conflict and interaction in the creation of scientific theory (Latour, 1987). Indeed, leading nutritional opinion tends to emerge via complex conformity-inducing social forces, agendas, and power gradients, rather than through an objective chain of proof (Baggini, 2017; Tierney, 2007). Herding or information cascades, for instance, induce researchers to abandon their own information in favour of inferences based on earlier actions of others (Easley & Kleinberg, 2010).

To sum up, the debate on meat's role in health and disease is, since long, a rowdy and dissonant one, but became louder since the 1960s. The heterogeneity within the opinion is not entirely clear but is expected to be both influenced by and reflected in the mass media, increasingly through its online manifestations. The present study aims at portraying the health-related image of meat in public narratives by online mass media since the start of the 21st century. It thus spans the boisterous period between the end of the bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) crisis and the bombshell report on colon cancer by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) in 2015. To our knowledge, this is the first study that aims at investigating the dynamics of the nutritional image of meat in the idiosyncratic settings of contemporary mass media, i.e., the post-truth era and the attention economy, both via a quantitative and qualitative (discourse) analysis. As such, it attempts at sketching and understanding one of the primordial societal matrices for both the embedment and shaping of public food choices.

Section snippets

Materials and methods

Analysis of media representations of animal-derived foods has been applied previously to identify underlying societal sentiments and motivations, with respect to both health (Verriet & Leroy, 2017) and disease (Boyd et al., 2009), offering important insights even if this approach is acknowledged as not being a perfect reflection of views and beliefs. For instance, media coverage of cultured meat as a potential meat substitute was shown by Hopkins (2015) to generate a distorted reflection of

Global quantitative analysis

In total, most of the 1310 items (52%) reported on connections to disease, whereas 35% of the items depicted meat as a health-promoting food. Only a minority (13%) mentioned both positive and negative aspects. In about half of the cases, the statements were backed up with a reference to either official health agencies and research institutions (24% of all items) or specific scientific studies (26%) (results not shown). The remaining items did not cite any specific references (18%), remained

Conclusion

Meat has been represented in mass media as a flexible concept, being at the disposition of several agendas. This is not new, and certainly since the late 19th century the qualities of meat have been highly debated. As a predilected study object for nutritional research, a commodity with high economic value, a potential environmental pollutant, a symbol of oppression and violence, and - foremost - a desirable food with strong cultural connotations, meat functions as a potent signifier. Yet,

Declarations of interest

None.

Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge financial support of the Research Council of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, including the SRP7 and IOF342 projects, and in particular the Interdisciplinary Research Programs 'Food quality, safety, and trust since 1950: societal controversy and biotechnological challenges' (IRP2) and ‘Tradition and naturalness of animal products within a societal context of change’ (IRP11).

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