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This essay examines the symbolic construction of meat consumption in U. S. culture. Commodity fetishism in marketplace exchange removes the production process from the meaning of meat and, thereby, silences the slaughter of animals. Through the critical employment of a Burkean associational analysis and the identification of symbolic alignments, this essay traces the rhetorical transformation of a live animal into a consumer product. In so doing, product, food, meals, tradition, and masculinity emerge as meat's core cultural meanings.
A popular advertising campaign for the beef industry emphasizes the slogan, "Beef. It's What's For Dinner." This advertising campaign stresses the central role meat, particularly red meat, should play in our daily meals and dietary habits. However, besieged by challenges from meatless nutrition plans, ecological concerns about meat production, association with mad cow disease, and most recently, the E. coli threat, meat's place at the dinner table is no longer taken for granted.
The aerobics and whole-grains popularity of the 1980s and the low-fat, lowcholesterol sensibility of the 1990s contest the wisdom of meat consumption, particularly red meat consumption.l The growing number of vegetarians in the United States, estimated at 12 to 15 million, also potentially threatens meat's cultural position (Delahoyde & Despenich, 1994; Friedmann, 1994). Report of diseases associated with meat, such as BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy or "mad cow disease") and E. coli contamination reduce meat's consumer appeal. The United States experienced the nation's biggest-ever meat recall when 25 million pounds of ground beef were recalled in the summer of 1997 because of E. coli contamination ("Norfolk beef plant," 1997). Some environmentalists denounce meat production as an ecologically unsound practice that inefficiently produces protein and unwisely accelerates deforestation (e.g., Opie, 1993).
Not surprisingly, then, meat producers worry about sustaining high levels of meat consumption. Meat producers rise to the challenge by aggressively promoting meat as a natural, healthy part of daily food intake. Cattle producers alone spent over $200 million in the last few years "developing new products, advertising, improving export markets and counteracting animal rights activists and improper health documentation" (Travis, 1996, p. 52). An estimated $14.4 million of the $44 million budget approved by the National Pork Board was earmarked for its national advertising campaign in 1995; a total of 65 percent...