No pork, no life? Exploring practices and negotiations of meat reduction in South Korea

Meat production and consumption have been linked to human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, loss of biodiversity, human health concerns, and animal welfare issues. Accordingly, individuals have been called upon to eat less meat. Research and policy on the issue are highly dominated by the framing of consumers as independent decision-makers driven by motivation, knowledge, and values. Instead, this thesis uses social practice theory to explore the different social, material, and bodily factors that co-shape meat reduction. Most research using practice theoretical approaches to study meat reduction is done outside of Asia, even though several Asian countries, such as South Korea, have high meat consumption rates. Therefore, this thesis aims to contribute to understanding what it takes to shift dietary habits away from meat-heavy diets by looking at practices and negotiations of meat reduction in South Korea. Based on fourteen interviews with flexitarians in Seoul and Daejeon, this thesis seeks to understand what facilitates and complicates efforts of meat reduction in South Korea. The interviews with meat reducers were supplemented with four interviews with representatives of veg(etari)an restaurants, by doing observations of different food environments, and through partaking in different eating practices. The main findings indicate that meat reduction requires time, effort, and sacrifices from individuals. These efforts are limited by the social, material, and bodily elements in practice. Moreover, the findings show that flexitarians adapt their eating performances, often through intuitively conforming to different spaces of appropriate conduct. Thus, meat reduction was occasionally enabled without requiring conscious efforts from the flexitarians, but most often not. The research suggests that fundamental changes in dietary patterns seem unlikely to occur unless meat-reduced diets are increasingly normalized at the expense of meat-centric practices and food environments.