Professor of medieval history and specialist in the history of food, Bruno Laurioux has co-edited the books Pour une histoire de la viande. Fabrique et représentations de l'Antiquité à nos jours (A history of meat. Production and representation from antiquity to today) (Presses universitaires de Rennes and Presses universitaires François-Rabelais, 2017) and Le Modèle culinaire français (The French culinary model) (Presses universitaires François-Rabelais, 2021).

Throughout history, there have been many periods of high meat consumption. Prehistory in its final period, the Paleolithic, was one of them. Then, at the end of the Middle Ages, the 14^th and 15^th centuries were carnivorous centuries. Following a period of widespread cereal cultivation, livestock farming developed in pastures that increased in surface area, at a time of climatic cooling and demographic decline. Then, from the 16^th to the 18^th centuries, a new demographic boom led to a return to cereal-growing.

In the 19^th century, meat consumption rose again, uninterruptedly, until it reached 80 kilos of meat consumed today per person per year in France. At the beginning of the 19^th century, people ate 20 kilos of meat per person per year. Today, the trend is towards a gradual, slow decline. The latest report from FranceAgriMer [the French national agency for agricultural and sea products] has shown a slight upturn, but the overall trend is downwards.

We're still a long way off, but more and more people are declaring that they are eating less meat than before. We're also seeing a reclassification of meats. Beef made great strides from the 19^th to the 20^th century, but since the 1980s its consumption has been declining, while pork consumption has risen since the Second World War, followed by poultry, both driven by the development of factory farming. This downward trend is set to continue. Of course, there still is some resistance, but nobody says that you have to eat a lot of meat anymore.

There are far more than just nutritional reasons for eating meat: Whole peoples go without meat, and others eat only meat. Questions of status and representation come into play. The category of meat itself is a construction. In Old French, viande is a term that designates any food, meaning "that can be used to sustain life." The term used in the Middle Ages is flesh: Human flesh, animal flesh. It's more concrete.

You have 50.99% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.