Romantic narratives on nature and environment in meat-focused food documentaries

Vezovnik, Andreja (author)

The article looks at the discourses of five selected Western food documentaries released in the last decade that deal with meat production and animal agriculture and their impact on the environment, animal welfare, and nature. The article finds that the documentaries employ discourses about nature that involve highly romanticized notions of nature, the environment, and animals that nostalgically harken back to the premodern, pastoral, artisanal, and peasant ethos. In the studied documentaries, nature is portrayed as a victim of modern technologies, but also as an avenging and self-restoring entity. Although the Romantic visions of pristine nature and natural meat and food production are grounded in the late eighteenth century, they remain an important source of skepticism and critique of capitalist, industrial, scientific, and technological forms of food- and meat production. By applying the method of multimodal critical discourse analysis, this study reflects on the nature of Romantic representations and the potential meanings of visual, auditory, and linguistic features in the selected documentaries, as well as the potential of Romantic thought to trigger paradigmatic shifts in the way nature is affected by the meat system.

• Language: English
• Keywords: nature, environment, meat, Romanticism, documentary movies
• Work type: Article
• Typology: 1.01 - Original Scientific Article
• Organization: FDV - Faculty of Social Sciences
• Publication status: Published
• Publication version: Version of Record
• Year: 2024
• Number of pages: Str. 889–906
• Numbering: Vol. 27, no. 3
• PID: 20.500.12556/RUL-151059
• UDC: 791.229.2:338.439.4:637.5
• ISSN on article: 1552-8014
• DOI: 10.1080/15528014.2023.2260974
• COBISS.SI-ID: 166159875
• Publication date in RUL: 28.09.2023

Record is a part of a journal

• Title: Food, culture, & society
• Publisher: Taylor & Francis, Association for the Study of Food and Society
• ISSN: 1552-8014
• COBISS.SI-ID: 30691165

Licences

• License: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
• Link: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
• Description: The most restrictive Creative Commons license. This only allows people to download and share the work for no commercial gain and for no other purposes.

Secondary language

• Language: Slovenian
• Keywords: mesna industrija, živinoreja, narava, okolje, dokumentarni filmi, analiza diskurza

Projects

• Funder: Other - Other funder or multiple funders
• Funding programme: Fulbright Program