Naturecultures and the affective

(dis)entanglements of happy meat

Heide K. Bruckner, Annalisa Colombino

& Ulrich Ermann

Agriculture and Human Values

Journal of the Agriculture, Food, and
Human Values Society

ISSN 0889-048X

Agric Hum Values

DOI 10.1007/s10460-018-9884-2

1 23
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 Author's personal copy
Agriculture and Human Values
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-018-9884-2

Naturecultures and the affective (dis)entanglements of happy meat

Heide K. Bruckner1   · Annalisa Colombino1 · Ulrich Ermann1

Accepted: 4 September 2018

© Springer Nature B.V. 2018

Abstract
In recent decades, there has been a proliferation of alternative food networks (AFNs) which promote an agenda of recon-
nection, allegedly linking consumers and producers to the socio-ecological origins of food. Rarely, however, does the AFN
literature address “origins” of food in terms of animals, as in the case of meat. This article takes a relational approach to the
reconnection agenda between humans and animals by discussing how the phenomenon of animal welfare and “happy” meat
are enacted by producers and consumers in mundane, embodied, and nuanced ways. Utilizing hybrid conceptualizations of
human–animal relations through “natureculture” and “being alongside”, we demonstrate that consumers and producers of
AFNs perform natureculture entanglements daily, often considering humans and animals as part of one another and the eco-
logical system. Nonetheless, we also point to how participants in AFNs set boundaries to distance themselves from moments
of animal life and death, explaining away uncomfortable affective naturecultures through commodification logics. Drawing
on qualitative data from consumers and producers of food networks in Austria, we introduce the concept of “human–animal
magnetism” to illustrate that the draw for humans to care about other animal lives exists within a spectrum of attraction and
disassociation, engendered through specific human–animal interactions. Ultimately, we offer a cautiously hopeful version
of alterity in AFNs of meat in which more caring human–animal relations are possible.

Keywords  Human–animal relations · Alternative food networks · Visceral · Meat · Natureculture

It would be a mistake to assume that the ‘externality’ Introduction

of nature can be suspended, on the sole grounds of its
metaphysical or ontological implausibility: in empiri-
cal practice, it takes a lot of work to establish relations
between environmental entities and social practices or
assemblages. (Asdal and Marres 2014, p. 2057)
For me what’s important is that animals are multidi-
mensional, living beings. There’s this emotional rela-
tionship they have with us, where you really under-
stand the animal…farming is fundamentally about
being with animals as living creatures, the key is mak-
ing those human–animal relationships more visible.
(Interview, Austrian pig farmer)
* Heide K. Bruckner
brucknerhk@gmail.com
Annalisa Colombino
annalisa.colombino@uni‑graz.at; colombino@gmail.com
Ulrich Ermann
ulrich.ermann@uni‑graz.at
1
Department of Geography and Regional Science, University
of Graz, Heinrichstrasse 36, 8010 Graz, Austria
Feminists, geographers, and Science and Technology Studies
scholars have long heralded the need to dispel of a nature-
society dualism. That nature and culture, society and biol-
ogy are intricately entangled has been the message of many
social scientists for the last decades, arguing for research to
rework the public understanding of nature as a “pure” cat-
egory distinct from society (Haraway 1991; Latour 1993).
However, in the quest to re-tie the natural and social knots
together, scholars have neglected to think through how and
when the overlaps, or entanglements, of nature–culture are
enacted by the public. This paper draws on research con-
ducted with alternative food networks (AFNs) in Austria to
show how for farmers and consumers, the “externality of
nature” (Asdal and Marres 2014, p. 2057) may have already
been suspended through the ways in which they engage with
the origins of meat from the animals they rear and eat. In
illuminating how producers and consumers of meat enact
(but also separate) nature–cultures through their encounters
with farm animals, this paper contributes to scant literature
on the question of what it means to “know” or “connect to”
the origins of food, when the food in question is meat.

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Vol.:(0123456789)
 Author's personal copy
Globally, more than 60 billion chickens, cows, and pigs
are slaughtered for meat each year (FAO STAT 2014),
though many Western consumers pay scant attention to
issues of animal welfare. The societal denial of linking the
availability of cheap, abundant meat with exploitation in ani-
mal agriculture partially arises from systems which make
farm animals geographically and discursively invisible.
Farm animals are kept increasingly indoors in dense hold-
ings and processed in slaughter facilities away from urban
centers (Joy 2010; Pachirat 2011; Vialles 1994). A grow-
ing awareness of exploitative relations within industrialized
agriculture has led to a small niche of “alternative” food
systems. Our findings suggest that within such niche food
systems, concern for animal welfare manifests itself when
farmers and consumers understand their lives as entangled
with the animals they rear and eat. By probing into how
humans express these connections—and disconnections—
to animals, we aim to bring attention to the possibilities of
more compassionate human–animal relationships within
systems of meat production and consumption.
This article responds to the call from critical food schol-
ars to examine hidden relationships within AFNs, includ-
ing those with more-than-human actors (Goodman 2016).
We demonstrate that existing AFN literature on reconnec-
tion presupposes a nature-society boundary, assuming that
human-nature dichotomous thinking is held by a Western
public. When “happy” meat or animal welfare is discussed
by scholars, it is often presented as a superficial market-
ing tool (Stanescu 2010). However, our findings point out
that an interest in animal welfare is complex, dynamic and,
at times, contradictory. This article employs relational
approaches to the human–animal by combining Haraway’s
(2003) idea of “natureculture” with Latimer’s (2013) notion
of “being alongside” to explore nuanced conceptualizations
of “happy” meat from the perspective of producers and con-
sumers in Austria.
We show how participants of AFNs perform elements
of a natureculture entanglement, considering humans and
animals as part of one another and the same ecological
system. This highlights that the alleged “Western” sep-
aration of human and animal does not always occur in
practice; instead, how humans and animals relate is var-
ied and context-dependent (Yates-Doerr and Mol 2012).
Nonetheless, we also illustrate how producers and consum-
ers set boundaries to distance themselves from emotionally
uncomfortable moments of animal life and death. Here we
invoke Latimer’s critique of Haraway, arguing the notion
of “being alongside” helps theoretically navigate the divi-
sion and partial connections that come from human–ani-
mal relatings. Finally, we acknowledge that the logics of
commodification employed by participants in AFNs (to
connect to, but also separate from animals) arise from
specific spatial–temporal configurations. Participants in
13
H. K. Bruckner et al.
our study describe feeling emotionally and metabolically
interlinked with animals at certain moments, while the
distancing themselves from moral responsibility to ani-
mals in other instances. This finding complicates exist-
ing literature on commodification of animals as whole-
bodied organisms (Barua 2016; Lorimer 2007), indicating
that certain aspects of even the same farm animal can be
ascribed conflicting characteristics (Yates-Doerr and Mol
2012). Ultimately, we contribute to cautiously optimistic
literature on AFNs (Harris 2009) to show how within the
market for animal welfare, people express an ethics of care
and responsibility towards non-human others (Whatmore
1997), albeit in bounded ways.
The paper proceeds by providing an overview of the
reconnection agenda in AFN literature. It discusses the lim-
ited ways animals have been featured in debates of AFNs
and industrial farming more broadly. It points out the litera-
ture’s failure to interrogate the nature–culture binary, namely
by the omission of studies which address nuanced, affective
dynamics of more-than-human food networks (but see Buller
and Roe 2018 for work on farm animal welfare). Scholarship
on affect and the “more-than-human” has begun to revital-
ize critical research on food by highlighting how emotional,
embodied, and material aspects of food become intertwined
when we eat (Goodman 2016; Sarmiento 2017). Scholars
detail how consumption practices take place in a simultane-
ous rational, emotional, and bodily realm, the so-called “vis-
ceral” geographies of food (Hayes-Conroy and Martin 2010).
However, while visceral and more-than-human approaches
have begun to take hold in critical food studies generally,
their potential to elucidate complex emotional attachments
to animals in/within AFNs of meat remains underexplored.
To fill this gap, we draw on empirical data from consum-
ers and producers in Austrian AFNs to demonstrate, first,
how care for farm animals is enacted as a partial connection
through a sense of shared wellbeing. Second, we discuss
how farmers and consumers disconnect themselves from
these animals in specific moments; a process of distancing
resulting from asymmetrical power dynamics that shape
human–animal relations in agriculture. Previous scholarship
on the roles of affect and commodification of animal bod-
ies has conceptualized animals as whole-bodied organisms
or entire species, meaning that animals on a species-level
are characterized as “cute”, “disgusting” or “charismatic”
(Barua 2016; Lorimer 2007). In our analysis, we find that it
is less the farm animal category of pig or cow which leads
participants in AFNs to care (or not) about them, and instead
a question of which moments of an animal’s life become
more comfortable for humans to relate to. Finally, we argue
that the orderings of human/animal and nature/culture pre-
sent in “happy” meat are best understood through the lens
of partial and “contingent relationalities” (Goodman 2016),
rather than on totalizing and binary terms.
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Naturecultures and the affective (dis)entanglements of happy meat
The missing animal bodies in AFN: “happy”
meat and its shortcomings
Since the 1990s, there has been a proliferation of academic
work dealing with the emergence of food networks which
position themselves as “alternative” to conventional agri-
culture (Goodman et al. 2012). Scholars have discussed
how these AFNs characterize themselves as different from
conventional food systems in their goal of reconnecting
consumers and producers to the socio-ecological origins
of food, which the complexity of conventional food sys-
tems, through marketing and branding apparatuses, have
concealed from consumers. The question of “origins” of
food has been debated extensively, but primarily in terms
of spatiality, as in the places where food comes from. The
multiple aspects of “where” food comes from have been
discussed in terms of geographical origination (Ermann
2005), food localization (Blake et  al. 2010; Hinrichs
2003), food miles (Harris 2009), and from which farmers
or retailers (Jarosz 2000) or farmers markets (Holloway
and Kneafsey 2000). Critical food scholars, including
several geographers, hesitate to blindly endorse concepts
like “local” or “food miles”, highlighting that to capture
shifting definitions of the spatial, dynamic approaches to
the relationships between people and places are neces-
sary (DuPuis and Goodman 2005; Feagen 2007; Good-
man 2016; Treager 2011; Winter 2003). Nonetheless, this
discussion of dynamic approaches for reconnecting to the
“where” of food has rarely addressed animal origins of
meat.
Furthermore, there is little overall literature on the role of
animals in AFNs, especially dealing with how or when affec-
tive dimensions of care for animals becomes a part of the
alterity of meat commercialized within AFNs. Research on
production, circulation, and consumption of fruit and veg-
etables is prolific, but few works analyze animal products.
When eggs, milk, cheese or meat are considered in stud-
ies of AFNs, these emerge as deserving scholarly attention
because they are seen as produced in “better ways” than
conventional animal commodities or as potential sources of
local economic development (Baritaux et al. 2016; Hollo-
way 2002; Paxson 2010). The element of “reconnection”
(between humans and animals) falls out of the scholarly
discussion in classifying AFNs as “alternative” to “conven-
tional” agriculture. What does it mean to connect to “where”
food comes from in the case of meat? What specificities or
aspects of human–animal relations come to matter? And of
special interest for this paper, what does the “reconnection”
between humans and animals imply for how they are framed
as divorced from one another to begin with?
It must be noted that the literature on farm animals
in both industrial and alternative agriculture has tended
to neglect affective human–animal relationships (nota-
ble exceptions include Buller and Roe 2018; Holloway
2001; Porcher 2017; Wilkie 2005) and replicated the
nature–culture binary when addressing animal farming.
The nature–culture binary in literature on industrialized
animal agriculture highlights animals as bio-capitalist
resources to be exploited (Shukin 2009; Twine 2010).
In this bio-capitalist perspective, capital mediates the
nature–culture relationship, leaving animals as passive,
inert, and exploited victims. A few insightful studies have
chipped away at the idea of total animal commodification
by offering glimpses of emotional links between workers
and animals in the industrial pork industry (Baker 2013;
Porcher 2011; Wilkie 2010), but such studies are rare,
especially if they show “care” within industrialized agri-
culture (but see Gorman 2017).
Within literature on AFNs of meat, there is also a neglect
of affective human–animal relationships, even as critical
bodies of work addressing animal welfare and “happy”
meat are slowly growing. Particularly across Europe, in
light of the expanding market for animal welfare, scholars
have taken interest in the commodification of “happy” meat
(Buller and Morris 2003; Buller and Roe 2014; Cole 2011;
Evans and Miele 2012; Miele 2011). There have been two
broad areas of research that deal with “happy” meat and
animal welfare legislation. One focuses on animal commodi-
fication as a neoliberal project, while the other addresses
the socio-technics of standards and knowledge practices.
Research that approaches “happy” meat critically frames
the minimally-improved standards and anthropomorphized
images of talking animals as the next frontier of neoliberal
greenwashing (Cole 2011; Stanescu 2010). It is argued that
the “happy” meat phenomenon assumes the free market will
solve ethical issues concerning the suffering of farm animals
(Stanescu 2014). While we do not fully dispute this critique,
we want to point out that AFNs are diverse, and that those
who participate in AFNs articulate more nuanced portrayals
than a simplistic narrative of commodification across the
food sector. Furthermore, by skeptically referring to such
meat as “happy” (or not), such literature evades a deeper
discussion as to the mechanisms through which shared hap-
piness between farm animals and humans is intertwined and
becomes palatable (see Miele 2011 for an excellent excep-
tion to the “happy” meat simplification). In summary, the
academic debate around “happy” meat mobilizes animal
imaging and marketing to point to the commodification of
animal bodies, again through a nature–culture construct in
which humans’ relationship to farm animals is defined by
animals as a capitalist resource.
The second body of literature to address “happy” meat
deals with the socio-techno processes of how standards
for farm animal welfare are established (Buller and Morris
2003; Buller and Roe 2014), offering a helpful lens into the
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 Author's personal copy
knowledge-making practices of animal welfare. While this
literature acknowledges the material and affective presences
of naturecultures (Latimer and Miele 2013), it focuses on
science and knowledge from a macro-level, thus losing sight
of more mundane ways in which the public may engage with
“happy” animals of AFNs. Whilst research on farm animals
in AFNs is generally lacking, as previously mentioned, this
paper points to how what is particularly missing is a focus
on the everyday practices and insights of how human partici-
pants in AFNs relate to the origins of the food they produce
and consume. This paper fills that gap by interrogating the
relationships that consumers and producers have to animals
within these supposed alternative networks of care, asking to
what degree AFN participants query nature–culture bounda-
ries. It is often assumed that the nature–culture boundaries
are so ingrained in the public (like through “happy” meat)
that it’s the job of social scientists to analyze the processes
through which this occurs (for example, through com-
modification or knowledge-making practices). However,
by prompting, following, and intervening in the everyday,
this paper shows how people are already performing more
nuanced versions of the nature–culture boundaries than the
literature currently presents.1
We take inspiration from human–animal studies in its
acknowledgement of the agency of animals, while we
pursue our human–animal research from an admittedly
human perspective. As the relationship between meat and
animals is at once a study of food and of human–animal
relations (Buller and Roe 2018; Yates-Doerr and Mol
2012), our methods and analysis highlight the role of
animals as more-than-symbolic in the makings of “tasty”
meat. Helpful to situating the more-than-human agency
of “happy” farm animals is Lorimer’s characterization
of “nonhuman charisma” (Lorimer 2007). Lorimer uses
charisma to outline how affective relationships to non-
humans motivate people to become involved in biodiver-
sity conservation, signaling that humans’ relationships
to animals rely on qualities of the animals themselves.
He focuses on how animals (because of their “cuteness”,
lifecycle, media representations, etc.) draw people to care
for them. Key to our research is Lorimer’s recognition
that the human ability to care and be affected by the ani-
mal lies outside the purely humanist realm and has much
to do with the nonhuman charisma of animal agents.
Lorimer uses generalized characteristics of entire species
1
  A caveat: the authors do not claim an inherent goodness in AFNs
and caution against such efforts, following scholars which point to
the many blind spots and limits of AFNs in their racial and economic
exclusivity (see Guthman 2008; Slocum 2007). What we do wish to
argue is that in our review of AFN literature, inquiry into affective
human–animal relationships is missing, which is striking considering
the agenda of “reconnection” in the food movement.
13
H. K. Bruckner et al.
to frame his notion of nonhuman charisma. In a compli-
mentary piece on the affective value of animal life, Barua
builds on nonhuman charisma to develop a notion of the
“encounter value” of animals (2016). While compelling,
we find both Lorimer and Barua’s characterizations of
affect simplify interactions with species, generalizing
affective properties to an entire species. Here, we com-
plicate their arguments by showing that different tem-
poral moments in the life of even the same farm animal
category matter more (or less) in engendering bounda-
ries of partial connection/disconnection between humans
and animals. We thus theorize the affective relatings of
charisma through the metaphor of “human–animal mag-
netism”, a spectrum of attraction and repulsion which is
sensitive to difference within species and moments of
encounter.
In the discussion that follows, we elucidate how com-
bining the concepts “natureculture” and “being alongside”
shifts the debate from one of “happy” animals to the shared
and partially entangled ways humans and animals live.
Naturecultures
The term natureculture was coined by Donna Haraway in her
book, The Companion Species Manifesto (2003). Following
Latour (1993) and feminist theorists, she takes issue with
the dichotomies of nature/culture or human/animal, argu-
ing instead that the social and biological are fundamentally
entangled. Nature is not outside of culture, nor is culture
outside of nature, but what humans call “natural” or “cul-
tural” results from specific historical, material, and affective
associations. Natureculture thus provokes an ontological ori-
entation towards becoming, a matrix of beings in relation:
Beings do not preexist their relatings…the world is a
knot in motion. Biological and cultural determinism
are both instances of misplaced concreteness—i.e., the
mistake of, first, taking provisional and local category
abstractions like “nature” and “culture” for the world
and, second, mistaking potent consequences to be
preexisting foundations. There are no pre-constituted
subjects and objects, and no single sources, unitary
actors, or final ends (Haraway 2003, p. 6).
To explore relations between the human and animal,
natureculture directs attention to the co-constitution of
“companion species”, how human and animal lives are never
without one another. From this perspective, humans and ani-
mals form part of one another, affectively and materially,
conjoined through an interspecies relationality in the mak-
ing: “all that is, is the fruit of becoming with: those are the
matters of Becoming with” (Haraway 2008, p. 17). Through
 Author's personal copy
Naturecultures and the affective (dis)entanglements of happy meat
“becoming with”, a human–animal hybrid is formed.2 This
ontology stands at odds with AFNs’ “re-connection” agenda
as it does not assume two discrete points or entities which
are disconnected. Flows, hybrids, and entanglements are
central to natureculture, while disparate entities or subjects
to be “reconnected” are not.
Interestingly, the application of Haraway’s natureculture
in terms of food or animals has been in the context of indus-
trial agriculture, while the naturecultures of AFNs escapes
in-depth scholarly attention. Haraway dedicates a chapter in
When Species Meet to Chicken Little, a story of how techno-
science, politics, and business produce the current state of
genetically manipulated, hormone-laden chickens (2008).
Only briefly at the chapter’s end does she mention that
some forms of agriculture, like heritage breeding projects,
could incubate what industrial agriculture fails to imagine:
“ongoing chicken-human lives that are attentive to complex
histories of animal-human entanglements” (Haraway 2008,
p. 273). However, these “attentive” projects receive little
scholarly attention. Instead, for example, Watts invokes
nature–culture to describe how the industrial food system
makes animal bodies into ever-expanding capitalist machines
(Watts 2000). In these studies of industrialized agriculture,
natureculture is often framed as an enhancement, a hybrid-
ized relation which creates socialities as “more-than” nature
or culture on their own. That the concept of natureculture
tends to perform a “world enhancing” role has been critiqued
by Latimer in her engagement with Haraway (Latimer 2013,
p. 92). In natureculture, Latimer argues:
what gets performed, at least for a moment, is about
becoming better than one…this particular hybrid,
complicated as it is because it is made up of differ-
ent kinds, continues to perform and enact a cultural
preoccupation of modernity with enhancement (2013,
p. 92).
Latimer asserts that in trying to erase or subsume divi-
sions between humans and animals, the hybrid natureculture
fails in its goal of articulating “being with” one another, as
the hybrid relationship is presented as creating something
entirely new. In response, Latimer proposes the concept
“being alongside” (2013). She offers “being alongside” as
a tool to understand “partial connection alongside partial
2
 Haraway discusses meat-eating as compatible with her notion of
“companion species”, while vegan and vegetarian scholars articulate
a different understanding. Critical animal scholars reject meat-eating
as incompatible with feminist principles and fundamentally contrary
to an egalitarian society (see Adams 1990; Adams and Gruen 2014;
Donovan 1990; Potts 2016). However, for Haraway and ecofeminists
like Val Plumwood, eating meat acknowledges a species intercon-
nection and foregrounds embodiment and human–animal continuity
(Haraway 2008; Plumwood 2000).
division…the notion of relational extension that captures the
importance of the ‘tension between’ and the ‘irreducibility’
of parts that can never merely settle into a whole” (Latimer
2013, p. 93). For Latimer, “being alongside” preserves divi-
sion and difference between human and animal, while giving
attention to the partial relatings that align with an ontology
of connectivity. In stressing intermittency and partiality,
Latimer helps us to understand more precisely human–ani-
mal (dis)connection within the framework of asymmetrical
power relations in animal agriculture.
Haraway’s natureculture conceptualization provides a
basis to think through shared human–animal sociality and
the ties that bind species. What Latimer contributes by
“being alongside” is a way to theorize the overlaps and also
divisions between nature–culture that are expressed through
human–animal relatings. In using these concepts together
in our study of AFNs in Austria, we show how consumers
and producers enact naturecultures as they feel connected
and disconnected to the animals they rear and eat. Our anal-
ysis points out how knots of connection and relating are
tied in affective ways through shared happiness, metabolic
continuity between animal life and taste, and the weight of
death as a moment of reckoning and responsibility. None-
theless, research participants create boundaries and species
divisions, evoking Latimer’s notion of distancing, when
addressing aspects like the inevitability of animal slaughter
and their discomfort with elements of animal life imagined
as “unnatural” (like artificial insemination).
We indicate how at certain moments, commodification
and utilitarian logics of animal life mediate consumers’ and
producers’ disconnections from animals. The social, politi-
cal or ethical implications of researching the coproduction
of naturecultures lies not in delineating what is “natural”
or not, nor does it lie in a broad endorsement of AFNs as
networks of “care” (or industrial agriculture as exploitation).
Instead, the relevance of our scholarship on the potential
alterity of AFNs of meat arises through understanding how
ethical judgements are made in terms of food systems seen
as deserving support. In this study, there is an opportunity
to identify how and in what ways the quality of animal life
is considered worth regarding as an element entangled with
human wellbeing.
Situating the “alternative” in Austrian food
networks
Before discussing the findings, we situate our research and
methods for readers unfamiliar with the Austrian context.
Austria makes an interesting case study for AFNs in part
because the lines between “conventional” and “alterna-
tive” forms are often blurred in public opinion and practice
(Schermer 2015). Attributes like “organic”, “traditional”,
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 Author's personal copy
“regional” and “small-scale” are interchangeable for Aus-
trian consumers describing national farm products (Matscher
and Schermer 2010). This is in part due to the high standards
of food quality resulting from national agricultural policies,
and in part related to consumer loyalty to nationally-pro-
duced products—so-called “consumer patriotism” (Sas-
satelli and Scott 2001). Surpassing standards set within the
European Union, Austrians pride themselves on promoting
environmentally sustainable agriculture. The country has the
highest proportion of organic farming within the EU, and
its small-structured farm base produces a strong degree of
trust with consumers (BMLFUW 2014). Since joining the
EU, Austrian policy has promoted the added value of low-
intensity agriculture as a strategy to emphasize the quality
and distinctiveness of its food products. Images of traditional
production methods, animal welfare, and “food from here”
have been common approaches adopted by food retailers to
market agricultural products (Schermer 2015).
Within the livestock industry, Austrian policies discur-
sively and materially support a low-intensity agricultural
system. However, unlike the expansive reach of certification
in organic produce, the market for certified organic meat or
animal-welfare labelling within Austria remains quite small
(BMLFUW 2014). The national image of meat production
is idealized as traditional, and the emphasis of meat indus-
tries relies heavily on promoting the emotional, affective,
and symbolic aspects of animal agriculture rather than on
formal certification of an animal welfare standard. Nonethe-
less, while a general public seems to trust any nationally-
produced meat, critical consumers still seek out smaller,
regional niche markets that intentionally promote animal
welfare (albeit not in certified forms), and the market for
animal welfare has potential for growth (BMLFUW 2014).
Thus, in our research, the differentiation between “con-
ventional” and “alternative” forms of agriculture is made
by consumers who seek to connect to the animal in their
meat and do so without relying on a specific certification
or label, and by producers who consider their businesses
as “alternative” to conventional, large-scale farms. For this
reason, Austria provides a unique context to research how
the affective and metabolic registers of consumers become
linked to animal life, and how producers within the “alterna-
tive” networks of Austria express their alterity to industrial
agriculture.
To explore how people engage with the animals they
encounter through rearing or eating, we first focused on
three regional meat networks that emphasize an interest
in animal welfare and “knowing” where your food comes
from. All three networks offer farm visits, practice animal
agriculture which exceeds federal standards on animal
welfare, and market their farming as “in harmony” with
the regional landscape. They are based in southeastern
Austria in the federal state of Styria, in an agricultural area
13
H. K. Bruckner et al.
bordering Slovenia and Hungary. While the farms vary
in size and management, the farmers themselves consider
their businesses small-scale “alternatives” to industrial
agriculture.
We recruited consumers in Graz via informational fliers
posted at local farmer’s markets, butcher shops, and grocery
stores. On the flier, we specified we were looking for par-
ticipants who self-identified as carnivores “conscientious”
of animal welfare. In return for participation in the focus
groups, consumers received a stipend of 20 €. The 27 con-
sumers who participated in the study were all white, uni-
versity-educated, middle to high income, aged 18–65 years
old. The data generated via the mixed methodology (detailed
below) are meant to be illustrative, rather than representa-
tive, of how consumers engage viscerally with the animal
origins of the meat they eat. Inquiring into why consum-
ers may prefer to buy meat from locally raised animals and
how they (dis)connect to/from the animals in meat requires
reflexive methodologies that do not purely rely on words.
The ways in which we relate to food is complicated, often
irrational and emotional, and difficult to fully articulate ver-
bally. Put simply, food is a visceral matter, and we follow
other scholars who utilize methods to elicit data on food’s
visceral nature (Sexton et al. 2017). Although semi-struc-
tured interviews offer a context in which both interviewees
and interviewer discuss the topic at hand, interviews rely
primarily on the verbalization of thoughts, feelings, and
experiences. Therefore, we developed a mix of methods that
combine focus groups with body mapping (Bruckner 2018),
enabling participants to first visualize their feelings, and then
engage in reflexive discussions. Essentially, consumers were
asked to draw a silhouette of their body on a large sheet of
paper and visually represent how they consider animal lives
rationally, emotionally, and physically in their meat-eating
practices. Then, they presented their body maps to the group
in a type of reflective performance, a visual to help partici-
pants and the facilitator explore representational, more-than-
representational, and affective human–animal relations of
interest (Bruckner 2018). The talk-based discussion data that
arose from body mapping forms the bulk of consumer data
utilized in this paper. For producers, seven farmers in the
three alternative networks of meat were interviewed in semi-
structured interviews and were accompanied by one of the
authors on go-along interviews (Kusenbach 2003) through
daily farming tasks. The combination of semi-structured
interviews with go-alongs attempted to address both farm-
ing practices and the emotional/affective sense-making of
how farmers engage with their animals. All focus groups
and interviews were conducted in German between 2015
and 2016. Data was audio-recorded, transcribed, and trans-
lated into English. Post transcription, the authors followed
an open coding approach (Strauss 1987) to closely scruti-
nize the data for concepts common among producers and
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Naturecultures and the affective (dis)entanglements of happy meat
consumers. Salient themes emerged related to how people
characterize “good” animal life, and how (dis)connection to
animal life was performed.
In the following section, we turn to our findings of how
both producers and consumers express natureculture entan-
glements as they describe the ways they relate to animals in
AFNs. Although farmers and consumers have very diverse
encounters with animals, as we explain in more detail below,
our study points to how both groups enacted similar affec-
tive and material notions of interspecies relationality when
elaborating on their encounters with farm animals.
Naturecultures through well‑being,
metabolic intimacies, and responsibility
Three themes emerged in our study that illustrate how
human–animal naturecultures (i.e. how human and animal
lives are intertwined) are evoked by producers and consum-
ers in AFNs in Austria. First, human–animal naturecultures
are enacted through a lively connection of shared wellbeing
and joy; second, via eating practices whereby dead meat is
reimagined as a living animal whose life is metabolically
linked to the human body; and, finally, through accepting
responsibility for the weight of animal death.
“Happy” meat in its commercial form may be accurately
described as greenwashing (Stanescu 2010), when framed
as an animal exhibiting anthropomorphized trait. Such
“happiness” reproduces a species boundary as animals are
merely imbued with human characteristics. However, our
research brings to light that there is a different imagination
that producers and consumers convey when encountering
animals in AFNs, a shared sense of well-being produced
through encounters with animals. It is more complex than a
romanticized notion of “nature” or “animal” because it links
animal life worth regarding as fundamental to human well-
being. This notion of well-being spreads between spaces of
production and consumption and speaks to the natureculture
of these AFNs in which affective intimacies connect, rather
than divide, species. As one farmer describes, this does
not mean a “nature” left on its own, but instead a steward-
ship which is perceived as mutually, though differentially,
beneficial:
Everything that’s said about animals being “happy”
or not, well it depends on how the farm operates in
practice. You have to show a commitment to living and
working as part of a natural cycle. Here I have to stop
myself and say that as farmers, we don’t do everything
completely naturally for our animals, like you might
think of “natural.” We decide when they breed, what
they eat, where they roam, etc. But that’s as “natural”
as farming has ever been—it’s always a mix of what
we need, as humans, and what provides a good life for
the animals (Interview, cattle farmer).
The quote elucidates that for this farmer, the “natural”
and “cultural” aspects of farming are always intertwined.
Working as part of a “natural” cycle means a human-nat-
ural, or natural–cultural cycle, according to the conditions
that work best for the farmer and animals. The farmer also
expresses that this view of farming might complicate a dom-
inant view of what others “might think of as natural.” In
terms of the “mix” of conditions that provides humans with
what they need, and a good life for animals, this farmer chal-
lenges scholarly engagement of “happy” meat as neoliberal.
Instead, he relays that his life is materially and affectively
intertwined with animals, and that wanting to provide for his
animals does not stem (solely) from economic calculation.
Another farmer describes how a shared joy/well-being
with animals motivated his pursuit of pasture-raised pigs:
Without knowing what would develop, the pasture-
raised pigs appealed to us so much: the open-air births,
the social lives, the piglets running through the snow
or autumn sunlight or whatever, we were so excited to
be a part of it all. To become a part of their lives. Not
only that, where we felt at home and what we wanted
to make as our home, was a farm that opened our
hearts. It brings us such joy. Which is I think so impor-
tant, that farmers don’t see animals as inert objects, or
as things. Where’s the joy in that? We are happy when
we see that the pigs are happy (Interview, pig farmer).
What is expressed here is a feeling of reciprocity, differ-
ent from the notion of animals as commodified resources.
This entanglement echoes what Haraway calls “multispe-
cies multicultural flourishing” (Haraway 2008, p. 273). That
animal agriculture can be animal husbandry, not merely a
calculative practice targeted to extract value from the bod-
ies of the animals, but also (and perhaps primarily) about
joy is discussed by animal scholar Porcher: “[the nature of
farming] manifests itself organically in the body (both their
own and those of their animals), through joy and suffer-
ing, through feelings, through life and death” (2017, p. 15).
The relationship between farmer and farm animals suggests
connectivity and mutuality through affective entanglement,
without implying that animals experience joy in the same
way as humans.
Of course consumers and producers have different rela-
tionships to animals, as daily lives of consumers often
do not include farm animals. Producers, on the one hand,
share a close working relationship in which shared well-
being also means more pleasurable work. They possess an
intimate knowledge of the animals’ lifecycle, needs, and
often recognize individual personalities or characteristics
13
 Author's personal copy
of their animals (Palladino 2017; Porcher 2017). On the
other hand, most consumers are far removed from daily
interaction with farm animals and have little practical
experience with animal agriculture. For these and other
obvious differences, it is rare to find research which incor-
porates consumer and producer relationships to animals in
the same analysis. However, practices of care for animal
welfare “go beyond dichotomous approaches to the study
of food production and consumption” (Buller and Roe
2018, p. 178). Moreover, both consumers and producers
share critical similarities which lead us to analyze their
responses together: (1) they are participants in AFNs and
supporters of AFN goals, and (2) they relate to animals
through eating (Yates-Doerr and Mol 2012, p. 51). Finally,
in our study, we found that while the types of encoun-
ters producers and consumers have with animals varies
(also within consumer groups or producer groups), how
the human–animal natureculture were described by both
groups had many similarities.
Consumers articulated a feeling of sharing moments of
their lives with farm animals, understood as living organ-
isms, rather than resources to be commodified. In the case
of pasture-raised cattle, several consumers brought up hik-
ing and passing cattle on their walks:
There’s nothing nicer than when you’re hiking,
encountering a herd of cows. Of course, there’s some
fear there because you know, if they close in on you,
they could kill you, but overall, I must say that when
I walk by them and smell cow dung, some people
might not like that smell, but for me, I just get this
feeling that me and the animals, we’re part of the
same ecological system (Focus group participant).
Even though the consumers do not interact daily with
cattle, the evocation of such encounters communicates a
feeling of respect, valuing animals as part of the same mul-
tispecies world. As such a quote emerged in a focus group
about meat, it points to the emotional continuities that
consumers feel with animals even when rarely physically
occupying spaces together. The symbolic animal matters,
even when physical encounters are rare: “animals are kept
in mind even when they are not present” (Latimer 2013,
p. 79).
Furthermore, consumers and producers of meat both
expressed a metabolic intimacy with animal life through
meat. This demonstrates that the natureculture formulation
of human–animal relations extends to animals in their carnal
form. Even if consumers are often thought as the only ones
who eat meat, farmers also express the same types of senti-
ment of “food as a vector of intercorporeality” (Stassart and
Whatmore 2003). Similar to Stassart and Whatmore’s dis-
cussion of BSE and the desire to avoid unwanted metabolic
13
H. K. Bruckner et al.
intimacies with contaminated beef, this producer rejects
meat from “conventional” sources:
I would never eat meat from a pig that’s stuffed inside
a dark building. There are big differences in terms of
quality, taste. You have to imagine, your whole life
living in a stall that stinks of ammonia, the fear, the
claustrophobia, it seeps into the skin and the meat
(Interview, pig farmer).
Here the producer draws the parallel not only with the
tangible, material conditions that would change the quality
of the meat (like stench of ammonia), but also indicates that
fear and claustrophobia during an animal’s life seep into
the meat. A consumer similarly chooses meat from AFNs
to avoid the negative aspects of industrialized agriculture.
However, going beyond avoidance of “unnatural” meat (as
presented by Stassart and Whatmore 2003), this consumer
also points to the metabolic continuity of eating meat from
an animal that had a “good life”:
I think about animals when I’m eating meat, how they
lived, how they were treated, if they got medications
or anything. Because we’re eating their medicines
and their suffering, if they suffered, or if they had a
good life, we eat that, too. This is something you can’t
see through labels, you can’t see the big picture. The
whole interconnection between the animal and you,
it becomes a part of you when you eat (Focus group
participant).
The relationship between animal, eater, and meat is
expressed as a natureculture which is illegible through
purely rational forms, like a food label. The lifecycle of
the animal, their feed, medicines, and relationship with the
farmer is something which becomes part of the consumer
through the act of eating, an interconnection of which this
eater claims to be aware. Unlike scholarly works that that
foregrounds disconnection to animal life through the con-
sumption of meat (Gillespie 2011; Shukin 2009), this con-
sumer explicitly acknowledges that animal life (and death)
becomes materially and affectively part of his bodily experi-
ence (see also Yates-Doerr and Mol 2012).
The death of the animal as a moment of (partial) connec-
tion that requires responsibility is the third theme expressed
by consumers and producers of the AFNs in our research.
For consumers who handle meat (and not often the living
animal), this responsibility comes through by taking care
in preparing raw meat and educating themselves about the
process through which an animal becomes edible meat. The
tactile element is how this consumer exhibits his responsibil-
ity to developing such knowledge:
My hands, the haptic element, are important for me.
I was a vegetarian for a long time and then I found
 Author's personal copy
Naturecultures and the affective (dis)entanglements of happy meat
it difficult to handle meat, to cook it. But now that’s
something I need, to touch it, to look at it, to process it
myself. I think it’s important for meat eaters to know
what they’re eating, where it comes from on the ani-
mal…it’s not just some ready-to-eat piece on your
plate, but you have a responsibility to cultivate this
relationship by working with the meat. For me, that’s
how I bring awareness to my role in the food system
(Focus group participant).
The consumer-food connection as a way to honor the ani-
mal through hands-on butchery or slaughter is critiqued by
Gillespie as a form of “disconnected connection” (Gillespie
2011, p. 118). Gillespie asserts that bloody contact with the
animal body can bring consumer awareness to the violence
and weight of animal death (a form of connection) while
disconnecting them from an actual emotional connection
with the animal as subject (p. 118). We interpret Gillespie’s
“disconnected connection” as a form of partial connection.
Consumers consider working personally with meat as “being
alongside” farm animals understanding animals generally as
an element of the food system—while disconnecting from
specific animals as subjects. However, for most consumers
who never have an opportunity to develop multi-species
relationships with individualized farm animal subjects, it is
always within the context of abstracting meat into a category
of animal bodies that feelings of intimacy, relation, or con-
nectivity may occur.
For the producers who rear and slaughter their own meat,
they have the opportunity to see animals as individuals.
When these farmers discuss slaughter, death emerges as a
site of responsibility, a moment in which farmers must con-
front the weight of killing:
During slaughter, you really have to look at each ani-
mal because they are, like humans, individuals…you
have to treat each animal. After all the time and care
of raising the pigs and learning from each other, I
don’t want the pigs to experience fear, or to have my
farmer–animal relationship, which we develop over
years, to be threatened in the last moments (Interview,
pig farmer).
Another farmer contends that:
For me, it was important to do the slaughter myself.
Killing is never fun nor should be taken lightly. It
requires skill and care, an understanding for the ani-
mal, which is why I prefer to have the responsibility
myself (Interview, pig farmer).
The theme of killing and eating responsibly resonates
with Haraway’s “parting bites” discussion in which she
takes on meat-eating and discomfort during natureculture
(dis)connections (Haraway 2008). Acknowledging death as
part of eating, she says, is critical to eating and living well
together: “there is no way to eat and not to kill, no way to
eat and not to become with other mortal beings to whom
we are accountable, no way to pretend innocence and tran-
scendence or a final peace” (2008, p. 295). For Haraway, the
problem is when the weight of life and death is not regarded
or respected, or when human exceptionalism discourse blan-
ketly assumes animal rights positions are “dogmatically cor-
rect or incorrect” (Haraway 2008, p. 299). There is violence
in killing and eating, according to Haraway, and grappling
with the discomfort is a way to become more open, more
engaged with the difficult questions which place humans and
animal in relation to one another.
This section has discussed some of the ways in which
consumers and producers participating in Austrian AFNs
bridge the nature–culture divide in their encounters with
farm animals through specific aspects of farming, eating,
and killing. Understanding the human–animal in relation to
one another, as partially connected, is at once a notion of
shared “wellbeing” alongside darker elements of death as
responsibility. Not easily romanticized as simply “happy”,
probing the imaginary of reconnection between human and
animals in AFNs highlights that animal life is seen as worth
regarding through its entanglement with human affective,
metabolic, and moral realms.
In the following section, we turn to address the ruptures
in naturecultures that are elucidated through Latimer’s
“being alongside” contribution. Our research participants
articulated setting boundaries of care for the animal by par-
tially disconnecting themselves from animals or distancing
the categories of nature and culture. We show how they
eschew discomfort by dividing “nature” from “culture” in
human–animal relationships during moments of animal birth
and death.
The ruptures and partial disconnections
of “being alongside” animals
Both producers and consumers also set boundaries to the
natureculture framing of their relationships to animals. As
part of “being alongside,” there are cuts made in the con-
tinuity felt between human and animal lives. As Latimer
explains, “it is this attaching and detaching to different oth-
ers, partially connecting and partially disconnecting…that
I am calling being alongside” (2013, p. 81). She stresses
dwelling alongside animals as “preserving division and
alterity as much as connectivity and unity” (2013, p. 98).
These divisions, or disconnections, which we discuss in this
section, occur at different points of animal life. For some
producers and consumers, they occur at animal death, for
others at inception. While death in the previous section was
discussed as a moment of responsibility, here we point to
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some producer and consumer narratives which distance
themselves from confronting killing as part of animal
death. This disconnection from the gravity of slaughter take
place when the animal is envisioned as a mere resource for
humans, or as a commodity.
This consumer divides himself emotionally from caring
for animals in how he re-inscribes a binary of nature ver-
sus culture by focusing on the “natural” aspect of killing.
Interestingly, for this consumer, even killing should have
a feel-good aura, as animals know they are destined to die
(and want to). Here a consumer rationalizes the death of
“happy” meat:
It’s a question of, well, they are farm animals, they are
livestock and we raise them either to give us milk or
to be slaughtered. It’s not like they die a natural death
because they are breed specifically for that purpose,
to die. The question is, if it isn’t somewhere in them,
that they know that’s why they are here (Focus group
participant).
He avoids thinking of death as something that the ani-
mal might not want, preferring instead a narrative of the
animal wishing its own death. The theme of so-called “sui-
cide food”, highlighted in Ben Grossblatt’s blog (2017), cri-
tiques meat consumption through exposing visual imagery
that depicts animals as if they wished to be killed and con-
sumed, and avoids a Harawayan responsibility of “eating
well”. Instead, the narrative behind “suicide food” implies
that animals would willingly take their own lives (see Wadi-
well 2016). Common in food marketing, but a strategy of
dismissal, this notion ignores Haraway’s warning not to
“pretend innocence” (2008, p. 293). Furthermore, here and
in the citation below, the disconnection to animals is per-
formed via a functionalist discourse, presenting the animal
as just a cog in the circuit of commodification.
A producer puts it bluntly, remarking that animals are, at
the end of the day, a product and a source of profit:
You can’t pet a pig to death. There comes a time when
as farmers, we need to produce a product. And that
means killing. Of course, we give the animals as much
as we can while they are alive, but we still need to live
off the profit from their meat.
Here this farmer sees killing no longer as an act of
responsibility but as the instance when an animal becomes a
distanced product, as the means through which farmers make
a livelihood. While in life, the farmer can “pet” the animals
and provide for them, ultimately it is through the moment
of slaughter when some farmers can disassociate from the
animal. To justify killing and eating animals, our research
participants enroll animals into logics of commodification
and utilitarian purposes of human consumption. In such
moments of partial disassociation, animals are no longer
13
H. K. Bruckner et al.
living beings with whom AFN participants share a place in
the world, but instead resources destined to die. In recog-
nizing the asymmetrical power relations which place farm
animals as destined for food, Latimer writes that considering
division alongside connection in “being alongside” means
humans and nonhumans, in their relations, may not “share
the same purpose” or goals (2013, p.  93). This tension
between what farmers and consumers envision as the “pur-
pose” of animals (meat), and what animals may presumably
want (i.e. to live), points to the species division and unequal
power relations pertinent to Latimer’s case for “division-
preserving” creatures, rather than hybrid naturecultures.
While death might seem like an obvious moment of
natureculture rupture, or an uncomfortable subject for AFN
participants, other moments of animal life can also be unset-
tling for consumers, like breeding.
In a focus group discussion about what makes a good ani-
mal life, consumers came to the realization that even within
AFNs, artificial insemination of animals was common prac-
tice. This provoked reactions that it was “unnatural” not to
let pigs mate “naturally.” Here consumers, recognizing that
not all aspects of AFNs are “natural,” perform an emotional
separation from their discomfort by joking that insemination
could be the next frontier for labelling their value-added
meat:
Participant 1: I have to say, it {artificial insemination}
shocks me, I had never thought about it, but I don’t
think it’s okay at all.
Participant 2: They could just let the animals run
around and do it naturally.
Participant 3: Yeah, well especially with pigs. Because
don’t pigs have great sex and long orgasms?
Participant 2: I’ve heard that, too.
Participant 3: An extremely long orgasm. So we can
talk all about happy meat but if pigs can’t have sex…
Participant 1: That’s going to be the next big thing,
post organic.
Participant 2: They’ll be a label, normal sex©
Participant 1: It will probably taste better.
Participant 3: Probably more relaxed—no stress in the
meat!
The focus group classifies artificial insemination as “not
okay” whereas “normal” sex is “natural,” but furthermore
proposes that the way for the public to become involved in
pigs’ lives is through a “normalsex” label. Of course, what
is left out of this discussion is that farm animals never have
“normal” sex—whether artificially inseminated or not, they
are strategically grouped together, bred for certain traits
and timing ease by the farmer. Such reproductive manipula-
tion is a part of farming. Nonetheless, the consumers fail to
acknowledge the human influence in breeding animals by
asserting that the way around the “unnatural” insemination
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Naturecultures and the affective (dis)entanglements of happy meat
is to commodify a certain version of “normalsex.” This par-
tial tension in natureculture relating occurs as focus group
participants try to identify and select one component of ani-
mal life, breeding, as a category separate and “pure” from
human influence. Then, they reinstate the category with mar-
ket characteristics for its commodification, furthering the
nature-as-resource conceptualization of the human–animal
even as they frame it as producing a “happy” animal. They
thus escape responsibility; avoid “nourishing indigestion”
(Haraway 2008, p. 300) by turning reproduction of the ani-
mal into a commodity. The animal is no longer an Other
with whom their lives are connected, but instead an Other
separated from the affective human realm as it is turned into
dead meat.
The logics of commodification influence naturecul-
tures (Haraway 2008) and it is in these instances of so-
called natureculture rupture that they are evoked to frame
human–animal separation. The consumer discomfort with
considering specific moments of animal life and death
“unnatural” suggests that aspects which do not fall into a
romanticized version of AFN become invisible. This reso-
nates with Alkon’s research on socio-natures and her find-
ings that the imaginary of “natural” elements of AFNs
ignores other less-romanticized elements, like farm labor
(Alkon 2013). Like Alkon, we see such blindspots as
moments when affective natureculture relatings dissolve.
They demonstrate the limits of “happy” meat as a nature-
culture and indicate that consumer comfort with AFNs is
often contingent on maintaining certain species divisions.
There are several factors in motion as to how and when
naturecultures as positive, human–animal relatings are
enacted, and when AFN participants distance themselves
from the animal as a commodified other. While the notion
of nonhuman charisma can be helpful in thinking through
affective relationships, we find its reliance on the whole-bod-
ied organism limits its usefulness for our study of “happy”
meat. Instead, there are moments of a cow’s life, for instance
through grazing on a pasture, or of a pig’s life, like the farm-
er’s joy at participating in piglet birth, which carry stronger
resonance for AFN participants and lead them to feel a con-
tinuity with animal lives. At the same time, other temporal
moments, like artificial insemination, or considering animals
as a source of livelihood, lead some people to partially reject
the idea of a shared human–animal natural cultural exist-
ence. To conceptualize the drawing towards, and pulling
away from, certain affective relatings, we propose elaborat-
ing a notion of “human–animal magnetism”. More holistic
and encompassing than nonhuman charisma, human–animal
magnetism means that the draw for humans to care for other
animal lives exists within a spectrum of attraction and repul-
sion and occurs through “events of encounter”, or specific
human–animal interactions (Buller and Roe 2018, p. 177).
These encounters can be through media representations or
physical interactions, like petting a goat on a farm or daily
animal husbandry. Through these encounters, a human–ani-
mal magnetism can arise. This human–animal magnetism is
embedded in a broader field, influenced by socio-economic
and cultural notions of the animal. It helps us understand
how people align themselves closely with animal lives and
perceive their lives as coterminous under certain circum-
stances. However, the same human participants might reject
or disassociate from the same animals during other encoun-
ters, invoking othering logics of commodification.
Understanding the magnetism of “happy” animals—the
ability to attract or charm people—recognizes that animals
have nonhuman charisma—but also calls for more attention
to when and how it is engendered. Magnetism, as inclusive
of attraction and repulsion, can more appropriately capture
both these tendencies, even within the same animal species.
Conclusions
As reconnection, or perhaps more accurately, different kinds
of connections, take center stage in the discussion of alter-
ity of AFNs, rethinking human and animal relations within
food networks of meat demands particular attention. This
paper begins to address the complexity of how producers
and consumers both connect—and disconnect—with the
animals they rear and eat, pointing to how for these human
actors, ideas of “animal” constitute part of themselves. By
expressing shared happiness or animal stewardship, material
flows between animal and human body, and responsibility
towards animal life, these meat consumers and producers
enact nature–culture relatings that chart a course resonant of
“being alongside” animals. This indicates natureculture con-
nection at the same time as division, difference, and partial
disconnection.
Beginning from the observation of connectivity and
entanglement, our findings elucidate the ways a binary
nature–culture thinking is not expressed by many partici-
pants in AFNs. Our examples differ from predominant bod-
ies of scholarship which present animal welfare as either
anthropomorphized, singing and dancing “happy” meat, or
as a neoliberal marketing strategy. For the producers and
consumers in our study of AFNs, the relationship to farm
animals is performed as an interwoven material and affective
part of their meat consumption, which is sometimes seam-
less, other times difficult or uncomfortable. By considering
the disconnections as well as the natureculture continuities,
we challenge the celebratory tone taken with AFNs and its
“feel-good” foods (Goodman 2016). At the same time, we
advocate “reading for difference” in AFNs (Gibson-Graham
2006; Harris 2009) to showcase how animals are not blan-
ketly excluded from consideration, but instead regarded as
interlinked components of human wellbeing.
13
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Researching the “happy” meat phenomenon in Austria
further underscores the importance of geographic specific-
ity of AFNs. In Austria, formal certifications and a label-
ling overload has not inundated the market for animal wel-
fare, leaving consumers and producers perhaps more open
to natureculture entanglements outside of a prescribed
ethical consumption market. Future research on AFNs of
meat, especially in non-American or European contexts,
could elucidate how the material and affective elements of
human–animal relations of meat become experienced on
terms beyond that of neoliberal, “happy” meat marketing.
It is in re-thinking animal and human relations through
connectivity that we move towards “reconstituting humans
as being as much a part of nature as any other creatures,
however domesticated, tamed, exploited, acculturated and
socialized” (Latimer 2013, p. 99). Towards the ambitious
goal of more caring human–animal relations within animal
agriculture, attention to how and when affective and meta-
bolic entanglement of “happy” meat occurs directs us to pos-
sibilities of fostering new human–animal relatings. Instead
of assuming human–animal hybrids, we argue that “being
alongside” allows us to explore specificities of relations
which include difference and distancing. Human–animal
magnetism, as a spectrum of attraction versus dissociation,
is a useful metaphor to think through these relatings. What
becomes urgent in the process of attunement to connectivi-
ties is not to neglect the blind spots which maintain spe-
cies divisions, hierarchies, and exploitation within animal
agriculture. Ultimately, only through further attention to the
intermittency and partialness of human–animal connections
in “happy” meat, can AFNs hope to forge truly “alternative”
paths forward.
Acknowledgements  Research for this paper was made possible due
to funding from the Regional Government of Styria, Austria, under
the project title “(Un)Knowing Food.” We would also like to warmly
thank the many local farmers and consumers who shared their time
and stories with us.
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Heide K. Bruckner  holds a Ph.D. in human geography from the Uni-
versity of Graz, Austria. Her work on alternative food networks draws
from political ecology and feminist geographies to explore the more-
than-human relationships within food systems.
Annalisa Colombino  is an Assistant Professor in the Department of
Geography and Regional Science at the University of Graz, Austria.
Her current research interests lie at the intersection of geographies of
food, human–animal studies, and biopolitics.
Ulrich Ermann  is a full Professor in the Department of Geography and
Regional Science at the University of Graz, Austria. His research inter-
ests include geographies of markets, commodities and consumption,
agro-food studies, more-than human geographies and new regional
geographies of Southeastern Europe.
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