MEATigation: Meat in Norwegian Food Practices: Eating (completed)

• Efstathiou, Sophia; Rogers, Hannah Star; Efstathiou, Sophia; Rogers, Hannah Star & Halpern, Megan (2026). Yes STS, and . . . Improv! Improvisation as a Method in Art, Science, and Technology Studies. Configurations. ISSN 1063-1801. 34(3), p. 335–335. doi: 10.1353/con.2026.a1001403. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  ABSTRACT: Improvisation is a key method for science and technology practices that is yet undertheorized within science and technology studies (STS). The expanded field of art, science, and technology studies (ASTS) moves improvisation beyond its traditional association with the arts, to suggest that improvised performances are also crucial to scientific practice. Improvisation offers a method for embracing uncertainty and for challenging certainty. When protocols meet contingency, when instruments fail to behave as expected, or when infrastructural maintenance and repair exceed pre-scripted roles, science improv happens. Further, in a critical mode, improvisation operates to rethink existing concepts and methods toward epistemic and ethical amelioration. Following the improv theater method of “yes, and,” science improv is analyzed as correlatively cultivating three types of skills and response-abilities: for accepting uncertainty, attending to one’s ensemble, and contributing to action, while embracing failure. This is demonstrated in the essays collected in this issue. Through ethnographic, practice-based, and artistic research that considers exhibition design, intelligence testing, movement research, and techno-activism, readers will see how the production of knowledge relies on improvisation for its development, maintenance, and resistance to closure.

• Korsnes, Marius; Hansen, Arve; Sundet, Øyvind; Volden, Johannes & Loeng, Martin (2026). Bodies in tension: embodied persistence and change in meat-eating. Food, Culture, and Society: An International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research. ISSN 1552-8014. p. 22–22. doi: 10.1080/15528014.2026.2740964. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  This article examines how embodied knowledge contributes to both the reproduction and possible reorientation of meat consumption. Drawing on household interviews and a dietary experiment with consumers in Norway, we analyze three interconnected dimensions of embodied meat-eating: shared cultural understandings of meat as healthy and nutritious; habituated routines of shopping, cooking, and eating; and interpreted bodily experiences of taste, satiety, craving, and discomfort. Together, these dimensions show how meat becomes part of what feels normal, practical, satisfying, and at times necessary in everyday life. They also reveal tensions arising when habituated ways of eating, bodily experiences, and demands associated with health, social expectations, or dietary aspirations do not fully align. Inspired by practice theory, we conceptualize these frictions as “bodies in tension.” Such tensions may reinforce established conduct, be accommodated within familiar routines, or create openings for dietary reorientation. The article contributes to food studies by showing how bio-social bodies shape both the persistence and transformation of meat-eating. More broadly, it demonstrates that dietary transitions depend not only on changing attitudes or intentions but on creating alternative ways of shopping, cooking, tasting, and eating that can become familiar, satisfying, and socially supported.

• Efstathiou, Sophia & Murray-Leslie, Alexandra Nicki (2026). Curating for Controversy: Crearation, Overidentification, Objektinstruments and Pop Sloganeering as Art-Based Strategies for Critical Controversy Studies. In Rogers, Hannah Star (Eds.), What Curators Know Art and Science in the Museum. Bloomsbury Academic. ISSN 9798765162088. p. 343–377. doi: https:/www.bloomsbury.com/uk/what-curators-know-9798765162088/. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  This chapter theorizes “curating for controversy” as a set of art-based strategies: crearation, overidentification, Objektinstruments and pop sloganeering that use exhibition-making and performance to actively generate and interrogate critical controversies around meat and meat replacement. Working from the collaborative context of the MEATigation project and the exhibition MOREMEATLESSMEAT at Trondheim Kunstmuseum, Sophia Efstathiou and Alexandra Murray-Leslie develop crearation as a hybrid of curation and creation, showing how improvisational installation, critical costume, and live assemblage turn the exhibition space into a laboratory for controversy studies rather than a neutral site of display. Drawing on Science and Technology Studies, the chapter distinguishes three established types of controversy, historical, social, and epistemic and proposes a fourth, critical controversy, which is intentionally produced through artistic practice to problematize contested sociotechnical issues such as intensive livestock farming and alternative proteins. Through the pop-video-song MEATDrag and Chicks on Speed’s self-made Objektinstruments, the authors mobilize overidentification and pop sloganeering to inhabit exaggerated carnivorous positions—“hungry and fabulous” while simultaneously foregrounding the ecological and ethical “hoofprint” of meat. A trans-phrasing of Judith Butler’s theory of performativity is used to argue that “meat” itself is an ontological category constituted through repeated social and material performances, making meat replacement a site where carnivorous identity can be re-scripted. Methodologically, the chapter advances a Principle of Asymmetry for curatorial and artistic research, advocating a deliberate skewing of aesthetic and conceptual resources toward specific sides of a controversy as a way to create friction, discomfort, and reflection rather than consensus. Through crearatorial estrangement, participatory devices such as the MEATBODY augmented reality filter, and the sensorial excess of sound, costume, and drag, the chapter shows how art can extend STS concerns with matters of fact, concern, and care into embodied, playful and affectively charged encounters. In doing so, it positions curating for controversy as a transversal mode of critical controversy studies that harnesses pleasure, spectacle, and pop culture to complicate how publics think and feel about meat, climate, and more-than-human futures

• Efstathiou, Sophia; Koshy, Mrudhula Soe & Pandit, Avijit Vinayak (2025). Starting from hopelessness – grand challenges, sustainable development goals, and responsible research and innovation under urgency and uncertainty. Journal of Responsible Innovation. ISSN 2329-9460. 12(1). doi: 10.1080/23299460.2025.2497609. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  International governance has responded to global challenges like climate change, poverty or health through the UN Sustainable Development Goals, or Grand Challenges for research. This paper provocatively proposes that, besides goal-setting, responding to urgent societal challenges can start from hopelessness. Starting from hopelessness, attends to, and accepts a given situation, and harvests its potentials. Building on Jullien's work on Taoist approaches to effective action and Bovens's definition of hope, we define starting from hopelessness as (a) desiring an outcome, (b) believing it is possible, though uncertain, and, instead of imagining things otherwise, (c) accepting the grim situation one is in, harvesting what potential it offers without pre-set plans. The principles of acceptance, humility and togetherness help guide hopeless action. We illustrate divergent crisis responses, starting from goals or from hopelessness, through cases in Orissa and Wayanad, India. We further explore what ‘hopeless planning' and ‘hopeless research and innovation’ may involve.

• Efstathiou, Sophia (2025). Keep it ‘Natural’, ‘Wild’, ‘Organic’ and ‘Pure’: Thick Concepts Crossing Nazi Art, Science and Environmental Policy. Food Ethics. ISSN 2364-6853. 10(1). doi: 10.1007/s41055-025-00169-x. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  This essay proposes that some thick ethical concepts can cross practices of science, art and politics, reinforcing each other and coming to affect humans, animals and natural environments. This is illustrated through the case of Nazi biopolitics and necropolitics. The essay adds to Bauman’s analysis of National Socialism as a modern ‘purity-pursuit’ (1997) by considering how ideas of the ‘pure’, and the ‘natural’, ‘organic’ and ‘wild’ were promoted through Nazi art, science and politics. I propose that these thick ethical concepts became normatively ladened articulations of what is true, beautiful and just, identified with the ‘Germanic’ and ‘Aryan’. Thus, Nazism is analysed as a modern ‘purity-naturalness-organicness-and-wilderness-pursuit’. This argument is supported through a critical analysis of empirical material, selected to represent the artistic, scientific and political discourses of National Socialist ideology. The study further speaks to a current societal challenge. Nazi environmental policy promoted regenerative farming, nature preservation and restoration and Nazi officials encouraged vegetarianism. In today’s climate-changing world these actions appear eerily ‘advanced’, aligning with projects for meat reduction like the Planetary Health Diet, rewilding, or restoring and preserving biodiversity. The essay asks whether notions of the ‘pure’, ‘natural’ and ‘wild’, or ‘organic’ have the potential to drive climate action, reflecting on today's far-right ecologisms.

• Adolfsson, Johanna Sofia; Hansen, Arve & Wethal, Ulrikke Bryn (2025). Between Distributed Agency and Choice Architecture: Comparing Nudge and Practice Theoretical Approaches to Changing Consumption. In Jacobsen, Eivind; Strandbakken, Pål; Dulsrud, Arne & Skuland, Silje Elisabeth (Ed.), Consumers and Consumption in Comparison (Volume 37). Emerald Group Publishing Limited. ISSN 9781835493144. p. 189–213. doi: 10.1108/S0195-631020240000037009. Full text in Research Archive
• Efstathiou, Sofia & Roe, Emma (2024). The eat-er and the fed-er: Feeling, feeding and livestock in morethan-animal worlds. In Giersberg, Mona F.; Bovenkerk, Bernice & Meijboom, Frank L.B. (Ed.), Back to the future: Sustainable innovations for ethical food production and consumption. De Gruyter Brill. ISSN 9789004715509. doi: 10.1163/9789004715509_071. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  What is the relationship between eating and being fed in today’s food system? How does the food system use our need to eat to make us feed on what is in the interest of the market, as opposed to our health and the planet’s? This paper troubles understandings of consumers as sovereign, choosy, abled eat-ers, to instead highlight geographies, relationalities, and conditions that create situated, bounded, disabled fed-ers. Suffering from an ableist bias, the conception of the consumer as an eat-er ignores the systemic disablement of fed-ers, and the multispecies injustices that emerge from current food systems. Inspired by disability justice work, cultural economy and food systems thinking we propose that accepting limits and boundedness as part of an intrinsically disabled human condition generates new paradigms and associated leverage points for food systems change.

• Korsnes, Marius & Loeng, Martin (2024). The making and unmaking of demand for dairy and chicken in Norway: a systems of provision perspective. Sustainability: Science, Practice, & Policy. 20(1). doi: 10.1080/15487733.2024.2406067. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  This study examines the supply and demand for chicken meat and fresh cow’s milk in Norway and argues that understanding demand as being co-constituted and interrelated with supply is crucial for reducing consumption. This study takes a constructivist systems of provision perspective to examine the chain of activities that links production and consumption. Analyzing how the use of chicken meat and fresh cow’s milk has evolved through socially and historically contingent processes in Norway, the article describes how these products became commonplace through state involvement, nutritional advice, companies, and consumers. The demand for liquid milk decreased in the 1980s, providing a rare insight into a system of provision in decline, although both government and industry actors wanted the situation to be otherwise. This study highlights that the milk-provision system failed to address the factors that contributed to the decline in milk consumption, which worsened the situation for dairy farmers. This is contrasted with the case of chickens, which represents a story of expanded demand through industrial intensification and new food norms. Under the presumption that a theory that explains an increase in demand must also be able to explain a decrease in demand, the analysis highlights the factors that caused a reduction in fresh milk consumption and the factors that led to growth in the demand for chicken meat. The article concludes that a constructivist perspective allows for a more nuanced understanding of the making and unmaking of demand through processes of alignment/misalignment with established political, economic, and societal goals.

• Johannessen, Vilde; Giæver, Fay; Efstathiou, Sophia & Russell, Sally (2024). Emotion regulation of sustainability professionals facing adversity. Gruppe. Interaktion. Organisation. Zeitschrift fur Angewandte Organisationspsychologie (GIO). ISSN 2366-6145. 55, p. 167–174. doi: 10.1007/s11612-024-00734-8. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  In this Group. Interaction. Organizations. (GIO) article, we view Norwegian regenerative farmers as sustainability professionals and explore their emotions and emotion regulation strategies as they face adversity at work. Working with sustainability is intense work as it implies addressing economic, sustainability, and social needs. Regenerative farmers experience heightened stress and strains due to limited resources in farming. We did a qualitative study based on participant observation and interviews and found that regenerative farmers reported emotions such as guilt, pride, frustration, joy, sadness, and loneliness in their work. They regulated their emotions by a) redefining and accepting problems as challenges; b) creating meaning from their work; c) seeking community through exchange of knowledge and care; and d) protecting their philosophy and practice. This study identifies how sustainability professionals might regulate their emotions over transitions to more sustainable practices. We found that it is essential to facilitate social connections between sustainability professionals for their wellbeing, and mental health.

• Kanerva, Minna; Efstathiou, Sophia & Béné, Christophe (2024). Editorial: How to achieve a planetary health diet through system and paradigm change? Frontiers in Sustainability. doi: 10.3389/frsus.2024.1404141. Full text in Research Archive
• Loeng, Martin & Korsnes, Marius (2023). Unravelling the Norwegian meat reduction controversy: navigating contested sustainabilities and the role of meat. Consumption and Society. 2(2), p. 281–299. doi: 10.1332/CXSI8930. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Controversy surrounds research reports that promote reduced meat consumption in Norway. By studying these controversies in the media, we ask why meat reduction is polarised seemingly between environmental and agricultural, urban and rural voices. We show how a ‘conventional’ definition of meat reduction in a self-regulating market tends to disconnect consumption habits from agricultural policies. The result is a paradox: Norwegians are urged to eat less meat, but farmers must produce more to stay afloat. In this conventional frame, meat reduction is seen by rural and farmer voices as a further exaggeration of agricultural decline, depopulation and centralisation. To unravel this controversy, we contrast this with a critical ‘post-productivist’ view of conventional agriculture and volume-centred farm subsidies since the 1950s. We show how a different, more interactive understanding of consumption as interrelated with Norwegian food policies, production and distribution emerges, highlighting a path through the controversy. By reimagining a change from subsidies for production volume to production methods, climate, health, environmental and rural issues are brought into conversation with each other. While largely remaining a marginal voice in a heavily polarised debate, we show how alternative notions of meat reduction can help us move past meat reduction controversies. The article stresses that the two concepts of meat reduction are characterised by distinct notions of consumption, suggesting that the popular understanding of what consumption is can be a barrier to, or a part of, a meat-reduced future.

• Efstathiou, Sofia & Martín, Rebeca Ibáñez (2023). For the love of meat: A conversation. Consumption and Society. doi: 10.1332/YIVS3129. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  In this conversation Sophia Efstathiou and Rebeca Ibáñez Martín discuss how a love for the animal you are going to eat, or gustar, offers an alternative to industrial animal husbandry. They discuss how changing relationships between humans and animals in intensive farming mediated by technologies of effacement break these attachments, ironically allowing for the animal to be replaced. Looking to ethnographic work and situated analyses of working with animals opens up possibilities for different ways of being with animals. Meat is performatively constituted, and it can be constituted differently and less violently.

• Sundet, Øyvind; Hansen, Arve & Wethal, Ulrikke Bryn (2023). Performing meat reduction across scripted social sites: exploring the experiences and challenges of meat reducers in Norway. Consumption and Society. doi: 10.1332/ZGZV3476. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Current meat consumption trends are associated with extensive resource use, environmental degradation, and detrimental effects on animal and human health, making meat reduction a core sustainability target. The experiences of meat reducers, often conceptualised as flexitarians, have gradually attracted more academic attention. This literature has shown that in many cases meat reducers do not radically reduce their meat intake and have untangled a complex web of factors contributing to meat consumption, reduction and avoidance. This article contributes to a nuanced understanding of the experiences, approaches and challenges faced by meat reducers. The data was collected through in-depth interviews with 26 self-declared meat reducers in Norway. By framing consumption as embedded in social practices, this article highlights how broader cultural, social and material conditions structure eating and hence meat consumption. A central finding is that through processes of socialisation and habituation, performances of eating often conform to the prevailing conventions inscribed in the socio-material environment in which they are embedded. We thus question the popular depictions of individuals as efficient drivers of dietary changes and highlight the many factors involved in reproducing the ‘normalness’ of meat-intense diets, demonstrating how individual intentions, choices and habits are themselves rooted in, and circumscribed by, prevailing conventions, that is, practices.

• Volden, Johannes (2023). Doing (food) without meat? Accomplishing substitution and qualifying substitutes in household food practices. Consumption and Society. doi: 10.1332/APSQ9102. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Excessive meat consumption is associated with environmental, ethical and public health concerns. Substituting meat with plant-based alternatives has been located as a key strategy for consumers to reduce their meat intake. While a growing body of research seeks to measure consumers’ acceptance of substitute foods, less attention has been paid to how meat substitution is organised through everyday practices. Based on 50 interviews with consumers with varying levels of meat consumption in Norway, this paper explores how substitution is accomplished in everyday life, and how substitutes are leveraged in the project of meat reduction. A theoretical framework connecting theories of social practice and food qualification allowed investigating substitution as a contextually contingent process rather than the outcome of a simple product swap. The paper finds that many participants were open to the idea of meat substitution, and meatless meals could be acceptable and often desirable. However, substitution was complicated by a prevalent scepticism towards prefabricated substitute products and lacking competence to provide home-cooked alternatives fulfilling expectations in established food practices. The paper argues that ‘qualifying’ foods as substitutes depends on a range of factors beyond the material reconstruction of meatiness present in prefabricated products, problematising the idea of substitution as a straightforward strategy for meat reduction so long as consumers are motivated and/or have access to plant-based options. Shifting consumption from meat to plant-based alternatives require fundamental changes in the organisation of food environments and eating practices beyond measures targeting consumer attitudes or increasing the availability of convenient substitute products.

• Hansen, Arve & Wethal, Ulrikke Bryn (2023). ‘It's just pølse’: Convenient meat consumption and reduction in Norway. Appetite. ISSN 0195-6663. 188. doi: 10.1016/j.appet.2023.106611. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Meat consumption and convenience food are both located at the heart of contemporary, industrialized, unhealthy and unsustainable food systems. In this article, we study the intersections between convenience food and ‘meatification’ of diets, focusing on the ‘pølse’—an umbrella term including both hotdogs and a range of sausages—as the epitome of convenience food in Norway. We explore how the pølse is embedded in Norwegian food practices, and why it is considered convenient in different contexts. In doing so, we seek to explain how pølse eating is co-shaped by socio-material scripting processes that further entrench meat in food practices and complicate meat-reduction efforts. The analysis is based on 52 in-depth household interviews and autophotography in four geographical contexts in Norway, in addition to 22 park interviews and survey data centering on household food and meat practices. We use a theoretical apparatus combining social practice theory, foodscapes and socio-material scripts to analyse the conveniencization of pølse. The articles demonstrates how meat consumption and convenience food become entwined in specific social practices, and how conveniencization intersects with practices of care, notions of class, social expectations and normativity. Moreover, we show that despite the range of plant-based ‘pølse’ substitutes on offer, meat-eaters remain skeptical to its taste, and substitutes rather seem to offer a way into established social occasions for non-meat eaters than a way out of meat eating.

• Hansen, Arve; Wethal, Ulrikke Bryn; Efstathiou, Sofia & Volden, Johannes Rudjord (2023). Towards plantification: contesting, negotiating and re-placing meaty routines. Consumption and Society. doi: 10.1332/WPKF9257. Full text in Research Archive
• Efstathiou, Sofia (2022). Performing ‘meat’: meat replacement as drag. In Bruce, Donald & Bruce, Ann (Ed.), Transforming food systems: ethics, innovation and responsibility. Wageningen Academic Publishers. ISSN 9789086863877. p. 412–417. doi: 10.3920/978-90-8686-939-8_64. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  I propose that meat replacement is to meat, as drag is to gender. Meat replacement has the potential to shake concepts of meat, like drag does for gender. There is a rich literature on meat and gender. This paper also explores such connections but by analysing the concept of meat by analogy to that of gender: as an ‘identity’ that can be performed and performed otherwise. Meat replacements not only mimic meat but disclose how meat itself is performed in carnivorous culture – and show that it may be performed otherwise. My approach is inspired by the show RuPaul’s Drag Race. The argument builds on an imitation of Judith Butler’s work on gender performativity, performed by replacing ‘drag/gender/sex/heterosexism’ terms and relations in Butler’s text with ‘meat replacement/meat/species/carnism’ ones.

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• Efstathiou, Sophia (2025). Rethinking Sustainable Meat: Recognise, Replace and Refine. Routledge. ISBN 9781032734231. 242 p. Full text in Research Archive

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• Efstathiou, Sophia (2026). Technologies of effacement: Blocking ethics by blocking encounters. Full text in Research Archive
• Efstathiou, Sophia (2026). Technologies of Effacement: Blocking ethics in the intensive animal farm. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  This paper presents a Levinasian-inspired account of how technologies implicated in the intensification of meat production block encounters in the animal farm, thereby making the possibility of ethics moot, in these spaces. The paper argues that morality and ethics is blocked by social-material technologies which structure encounters between those laboring in the farm away from facing each other as unique morally significant Others, and towards one of the same. This makes ethics impossible in the farm. 

• Efstathiou, Sophia (2026). Recognise, Replace, Refine: 3Rs for sustainable meat-use as guides for Responsible Research and Innovation. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  A reduction in Western meat consumption is critical for global food security, respecting plane-tary boundaries and improving global health (Steinfeld et al. 2006, Willett et al. 2019, Swinburn at al. 2019, Cué Rio et al. 2022). However, even when positive to climate action, Europeans are reluctant to reduce their meat consumption (De Boer et al. 2013), especially in the Nordic re-gions (Sköld et al. 2018, Thøgersen 2017). This is because meat is not just calories: It is culture (Warde 2016). Meat is deeply embedded in social practices that weave together meanings, identities and values; competences, skills and professions; materials, animals and landscapes that all go into making meat (Shove et al. 2012, Hansen and Wethal 2023, Sundet et al. 2023). This paper has three parts. First, it articulates a frame of three practical/ethical principles for sustainable meat-use. Second, it explores how this frame can guide responsible research and innovation on animal-based food systems. Third, it offers some insights from discussing these principles’ implications with food actors in Norway. What I dub the ‘3Rs’ of sustainable meat use are: R1: Recognising the animals and people working to provide meat, R2: Replacing ani-mal-based proteins with plant-based, insect-based or in-vitro alternatives, and R3: Refining meat-use to match needs versus wants, reduce waste and malnutrition (e.g. obesity) (cf. Ef-stathiou et al. 2019). The principles are inspired by the 3Rs developed to guide the ethics of animal research (Russell and Burch 1992 [1959]), exported to consider humanimal labour in agri-culture (Efstathiou 2021). I argue that food research and innovation guided by this frame aligns with a need to address the ‘grand’ challenges of climate change and food security, but also of health and inclusion -though, as with all principle-based approaches, the devil is in the details of their application. I further argue that, following this frame, much of current research and inno-vation on how to reduce the emissions of industrial meat production is irresponsible, as it does little towards recognising the animals and people involved in this work, it continues with the logic of productivism, increasing meat production versus making room to replace animal-based with other proteins, and it does little to address waste and malnutrition. The paper concludes with insights collected on how to support sustainable meat transitions along these 3Rs follow-ing an engagement with actors (farmers, restaurants and retailers) within the Norwegian food system. This is based on research on the social, cultural and material embeddedness of meat-use in the Norwegian food system pursued within the NFR project MEATigation, and the JPI Healthy Diet Healthy Life project ComMEATted.

• Murray-Leslie, Alexandra Nicki (2026). Amnesty Journal - FEMINISTISCHES KUNSTKOLLEKTIV Aufregend uneindeutig Seit bald 30 Jahren bringt das Kollektiv Chicks on Speed Musik und Kunst, Wissenschaft und Aktivismus zusammen. Von Thomas Winkler. [Journal]. Amnesty Journal. doi: https:/www.amnesty.de/sites/default/files/2025-12/Amnesty-Journal-Januar-Maerz-2026.pdf. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  This Amnesty Journal piece portrays Chicks on Speed’s Alexandra Murray-Leslie as an artist using pop, performance, and participatory formats to confront shrinking cultural and political freedoms, while situating her work within a wider landscape of civil-society resistance to authoritarianism. Framed as both a feature article and an interview, it foregrounds Murray-Leslie’s reflections on three decades of Chicks on Speed’s practice—from early feminist and queer interventions in music and art to current projects that address surveillance, culture wars, and the policing of dissent. The article highlights how Chicks on Speed deliberately blur art, activism, and pedagogy, for example through collaborative performances, lectures, and song-based formats that invite audiences to “join in” rather than remain passive spectators. Murray-Leslie discusses strategies such as DIY media production, critical costumes and self-built instruments as tools to challenge dominant narratives and open up spaces for subversive, intersectional voices, especially in an era where public funding and institutional support increasingly favor patriotic or depoliticized culture.

• Murray-Leslie, Alexandra Nicki; Logan, Melissa E.; Efstathiou, Sophia; Busch, Annett; Bayesteh, Mohammad & Arigbabu, Ayodele [Show all 8 contributors for this article] (2025). HEARandNOWtopia by Chicks on Speed and Collaborators. doi: https:/music.apple.com/no/album/hearandnowtopia/1829998000. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  HEARandNOWtopia is Chicks on Speed’s (Alex Murray-Leslie & Melissa E. Logan) 7th album, a hyper‑aesthetic, culturally critiquing work that critically reactivates the group’s electroclash roots in the present tense. Produced with long‑term collaborators Christopher Just, Gerhard Potuznik, Ramon Bauer, Melissa E. Logan, Unnur Andrea Einarsdóttir and Armageddon Turk, it weaves hi‑NRG tracks like “MEAT&Drag” with more experimental pieces that address post‑growth economies, digital anxiety, climate crisis and queer/drag embodiment. Across its songs, the album stages HEAR‑and‑NOW as a performative space: voices, noise, beats and custom Objektinstruments are layered into dense, danceable structures that double as critical reflections on contemporary culture, media and activism. Alex Murray‑Leslie: co‑composer, vocalist, performer and conceptual architect and director of Chicks on Speed. Responsible for developing, producing compositions for studio recordings and performing with custom wearable “Objektinstruments” (including computational footwear, high heeled shoe guitar and E-Shoe), shaping the album’s visual/performative language, and co‑authoring/performing lyrics and vocal arrangements that articulate its queer/drag/feminist, post‑growth and digitally critical themes. The song “MEAT&Drag” extends a long‑term collaboration between artist and pop musician Alex Murray‑Leslie and artist & philosopher of science Sophia Efstathiou, drawing directly on Efstathiou’s seminal article theorising meat replacement as drag and her IDEOBICS practice. Over the past ten years, Alex and Sophia have worked together across academia, popular music and science communication, translating critical ideas about food, identity and performativity into both scholarly outputs, research songs and experimental electro‑pop performance.

• Efstathiou, Sophia (2025). Technologies of effacement: Shaping Ethics Through Technology in Human and More-Than-Human Encounters. doi: https:/iisg.amsterdam/en/events/launch-erc-project-vitalgreenhouse. Full text in Research Archive
• Efstathiou, Sophia (2025). Surrealing MEAT – Making Meat Realer (And Better?) Through Technoscience. doi: https:/virtual.oxfordabstracts.com/event/73530/submission/461. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Meat is being ontologically shaken. New products are taking on the names of ‘meat’ (and ‘burger’, ‘mince’, etc.) and approximating meat properties through activities ranging from imitating the molecular properties of (animal-based) meat or growing tissue in a lab, to vision-statements and marketing matching the “good stuffs” of meat (Sexton 2016). This has been analysed as an ontological, ideological and material process of attachment and detachment through which niche veg*n-focused products strategically transition to appeal to a dominant meat-consumer culture (Lonkila and Kaljonen 2022). Marketing strategies exploit veg*n to meat culture code-switching, working within but at the same time challenging such binary identities. One can now identify as a plant-based meat eater. The creation of a new space where food identities can be reimagined relies on performing meat reality in new ways (Efstathiou 2022). We argue that, indeed, these new meats become 'realer' than real meat. Through 'founding' everyday meat concepts (Efstathiou 2009) in plant-based biotech, technoscientific work becomes geared towards specifying and achieving the functionalities, mouthfeel, taste, odour, and so on, of meat materials, in a controlled and consistent manner. What we can call ‘meat realness’ is achieved through established techniques like extrusion cooking, and Couette cell technology, but also through molecular biology work and lab-grown proteins. Non-meat’s achievement of meat reality through science supports what we call ‘scientific surrealism’: food science builds on ideas, experiences, and symbolic aspects of animal-based meat, yet goes beyond it - to approximate a new, dreamed of, reality where meat becomes disconnected from animal bodies, achieving its ‘meaty’ attributes in animal-free forms. Surrealing meat can be analyzed as part of a critical, revisionary programme challenging both food identity binaries and the necessity of killing animals for meat.

• Efstathiou, Sophia (2025). 3Rs for sustainable meat use: Recognise, Replace, and Refine. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  The talk presents a frame of 3Rs for sustainable meat use, inspired by the 3Rs guiding the ethical use of animals in research. It discusses the challenges of developing principle-based frameworks for ethical, sustainable meat use, and the dangers of ethics protocols acting as technologies of effacement for those involved. We offer insights from our experiences working with stakeholders across the meat value chain in developing policy guidelines for meat use.

• Efstathiou, Sophia & Kendig, Catherine (2025). Surrealing Meat: What new meats have to say about reality. Full text in Research Archive
• Efstathiou, Sophia (2025). Keep it ‘natural’, ‘wild’, ‘organic’ and ‘pure’: Thick concepts crossing Nazi art, science and environmental policy. Full text in Research Archive
• Efstathiou, Sophia (2025). Interdisciplinarity, Grand Challenges and the Arts. Full text in Research Archive
• Hansen, Arve (2025). Variegated protein transitions: Meatification and demeatification in Northern Europe and Southeast Asia. Full text in Research Archive
• Hansen, Arve & Wethal, Ulrikke Bryn (2025). Sufficiency vs the system: Negotiating everyday limits in consumer society. Full text in Research Archive
• Efstathiou, Sophia (2024). Technologies of effacement: Blocking ethics by blocking encounters and the ironies of replacement. Full text in Research Archive
• Johannessen, Vilde (2024). Published paper and dissertation progress. Full text in Research Archive
• Korsnes, Marius & Loeng, Martin (2024). What can the cases of meat and milk in Norway tell us about agrifood systems transformation? Full text in Research Archive
• Efstathiou, Sophia (2024). Facing MEAT - or how to make your paper into a song. Full text in Research Archive
• Efstathiou, Sophia (2024). Starting from hopelessness – Sustainable development goals, grand challenges and improvising in the face of grimness. Full text in Research Archive
• Efstathiou, Sophia; Murray-Leslie, Alexandra Nicki & Driessen, Clemens (2024). Instrumentalise Me! - A logocrashing pop hit. Full text in Research Archive
• Efstathiou, Sophia (2024). Mechanism: Found science or Found philosophy? Full text in Research Archive
• Efstathiou, Sophia (2024). The eat-er and the fed-er: Feeling, feeding and livestock in more-than-animal worlds. Full text in Research Archive
• Efstathiou, Sophia & Kendig, Catherine (2024). Surrealing meat: Making meat realer and better through technoscience?, Full text in Research Archive
• Efstathiou, Sophia (2024). Starting from Hopelessnes. Full text in Research Archive
• Efstathiou, Sophia (2024). Surrealing MEAT: Making meat realer (and better?) through technoscience. Full text in Research Archive
• Hansen, Arve (2024). Det komplekse forbruket. Full text in Research Archive
• Hansen, Arve; House, Jonas & Rein, Angelique Kristine (2024). The global meat replacement complex and its geographies: Production, provision, consumption. Full text in Research Archive
• House, Jonas; Wertheim-Heck, Sigrid & Hansen, Arve (2024). What does it mean to replace meat? The ontological politics of meat substitution across cultural contexts. Full text in Research Archive
• Efstathiou, Sophia & Roe, Emma (2024). The eat-er and the fed-er: Feeling, feeding and livestock in more-than-animal worlds. Full text in Research Archive
• Efstathiou, Sophia & Bayesteh, Mohammad (2023). Again and Again. Full text in Research Archive
• Efstathiou, Sophia (2023). MEATaphysics: The found science of meat alternatives or how food biotech is creating new meat ontologies. Full text in Research Archive
• Efstathiou, Sophia & Kendig, Catherine (2023). Surrealing: Making real as founding and finding. Full text in Research Archive
• Efstathiou, Sophia (2023). Re-founding meat: From flesh to plant-based. Full text in Research Archive
• Efstathiou, Sophia & Murray-Leslie, Alexandra Nicki (2023). FACING MEAT. Full text in Research Archive
• Efstathiou, Sophia (2023). Facing MEAT. Full text in Research Archive
• Hansen, Arve (2023). The stubbornness of meaty routines: Meat consumption and reduction in Norway. Full text in Research Archive
• Johannessen, Vilde (2023). How do sustainable farmers regulate their emotional experience in everyday regenerative farming practices?- (preliminary analysis). Full text in Research Archive
• Johannessen, Vilde (2023). Emotion regulation and sustainability. Full text in Research Archive
• Johannessen, Vilde (2023). Emotion regulation- the case of regenerative farming facing adversity. Full text in Research Archive
• Efstathiou, Sophia (2023). MEATaphysics: Drag, found science and new meat ontologies between philosophy and art. Full text in Research Archive
• Murray-Leslie, Alexandra Nicki; Efstathiou, Sophia; Logan, Melissa. E.; glas, kathi; Cathrine, Kramer & Tromokratisch, Kangela [Show all 15 contributors for this article] (2023). More Meat, Less Meat. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  MORE MEAT LESS MEAT... is an exhibition about alternative food futures and encounters with several species, which explores themes related to meat and climate change in Norway. The exhibition shows multisensory artworks by: Chicks On Speed ​​​ & The Center for Genomic Gastronomy, and was developed in conversation with the research project Meatigation. The exhibition asks questions about what meat is and how should we eat it? In the exhibition you will be able to experience and interact with plants, animals, music and computers. You get to contribute ideas for a new national dish and participate in our exploration of possible futures for protein. A reduction in the West's meat consumption is crucial for the sake of the planet's capacity, ensuring global food security and improving human and animal health. But even when Europeans are positive about climate measures, we are still reluctant to reduce meat consumption, especially in the Nordics. Meat is not just calories: it is culture.

• Efstathiou, Sophia & Kendig, Catherine (2023). Reality-drag: Scientific realism as a set of practices that achieve realness. Full text in Research Archive
• Korsnes, Marius (2023). Melkedrikkingen går ned. Intervju med Marius Korsnes. [Radio]. Nea Radio. Full text in Research Archive
• Efstathiou, Sophia (2023). MEATigation: Collaborative projects joining the Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts. Full text in Research Archive
• Efstathiou, Sophia (2023). Starting from hopelessness - Grand challenges, Sustainable Development Goals under uncertainty and urgency. Full text in Research Archive
• Korsnes, Marius (2023). Melkedrikkingen går ned: Fett, frokostvaner og trend-dietter kan forklare hvorfor. [Internet]. nrk.no. Full text in Research Archive
• Volden, Johannes (2023). Can edible insects become the new meat? Exploring consumers’ experimentation with insect foods in everyday life. Full text in Research Archive
• Hansen, Arve & Haanæs, Øystein Rygg (2023). Ekspertintervju: Kjøttvaner er vonde å vende. [Journal]. Energi og klima. Full text in Research Archive
• Hansen, Arve & Ording, Oda (2023). Avdekket veggis-gåte: - Overraskende. [Journal]. Dagbladet. Full text in Research Archive
• Hansen, Arve (2023). Fastlåste mat(u)vanar: Kan vi endre kjøtforbruket? Full text in Research Archive
• Volden, Johannes (2023). Panelist. Full text in Research Archive
• Volden, Johannes (2023). Reconstructing meatiness: insights from ‘everyday experimentation’ with meat substitution in Norway. Full text in Research Archive
• Sundet, Øyvind (2023). Kjøttforbruk: hvorfor er det vanskelig å redusere – selv for de som ønsker det? Full text in Research Archive
• Efstathiou, Sophia; Murray-Leslie, Alexandra Nicki; Johnson, Leslie Jeanne; Logan, Melissa. E.; Tromokratisch, Kangela & Andrea, Unnur [Show all 7 contributors for this article] (2023). MEAT & Drag. Full text in Research Archive
• Hansen, Arve; Sundet, Øyvind; Volden, Johannes & Wethal, Ulrikke Bryn (2023). Friday tacos and outdoor barbeques: Re-configuring ‘institutionalized meals’ towards meat reduction in Norway. Full text in Research Archive
• Korsnes, Marius; Hansen, Arve; Sundet, Øyvind; Volden, Johannes & Wethal, Ulrikke Bryn (2023). The Circulation of Meat: How contemporary food practices reproduce the demand for meat in Norway. Full text in Research Archive
• Hansen, Arve (2023). Kvifor er det så vanskeleg å redusere kjøtforbruket? Full text in Research Archive
• Hansen, Arve (2023). Kva skal til for å endre kjøtforbruket? Full text in Research Archive
• Hansen, Arve & Wethal, Ulrikke Bryn (2023). Meat consumption and reduction in Norwegian households. Full text in Research Archive
• Hansen, Arve; Sundet, Øyvind; Volden, Johannes & Wethal, Ulrikke Bryn (2023). Hvorfor er det så vanskelig å spise mindre kjøtt? Full text in Research Archive
• Volden, Johannes (2023). Probing protein futures: Experimental geographies and everyday edible insect consumption. Full text in Research Archive
• Volden, Johannes (2023). Probing protein futures: Everyday experimentation and edible insect consumption. Full text in Research Archive
• Korsnes, Marius (2023). Food within the Planetary Boundaries. What will we eat in a sustainable future? Examples from Norway. Full text in Research Archive
• Johannessen, Vilde (2022). Feltarbeid og Woofing. Full text in Research Archive
• Hansen, Arve (2022). The geographies of everyday meat consumption in Norway: Stubborn food practices and meat-intensive foodscapes. Full text in Research Archive
• Hansen, Arve & Wethal, Ulrikke Bryn (2022). The power of the pølse: Foodscapes, convenience food and everyday geographies of meat consumption and reduction in Norway. Full text in Research Archive
• Johannessen, Vilde (2022). Presentasjon av forskningsgruppe og PhD prosjekt. Full text in Research Archive
• Hansen, Arve (2022). National development and contested (de)meatification in Vietnam and Norway. Full text in Research Archive
• Volden, Johannes (2022). Doing (food) without meat? The role of meat substitutes in the food practices of meat lovers, meat reducers, and meat avoiders. Full text in Research Archive
• Korsnes, Marius & Loeng, Martin (2022). The Constitution of Demand for Animals in Norwegian Foodways. Full text in Research Archive
• Efstathiou, Sophia (2022). Interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity in action. Full text in Research Archive
• Loeng, Martin & Korsnes, Marius (2022). Veganske mattradisjoner i Norge. Full text in Research Archive
• Efstathiou, Sophia (2022). Starting from hopelessness: Sustainable development goals, grand challenges and RRI. Full text in Research Archive
• Korsnes, Marius & Loeng, Martin (2022). How have animals become embedded in Norwegian foodways? Full text in Research Archive
• Efstathiou, Sophia (2022). The found science of meat alternatives-How food biotech is creating new meat concepts. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  This paper explores how emerging food biotech is transforming concepts of meat. One of my recent culinary fascinations comes in the form of Beyond Sausage– a sausage made of plants. With a capped super-cow as its logo, Beyond Meat claim: “We started with simple questions. Why do you need an animal to create meat? Why can’t you build meat directly from plants? That’s our company’s mission. We hope our plant-based meats allow you and your family to eat more, not less, of the traditional dishes you love. Together, we can truly bring exciting change to the plate -and beyond. GO BEYOND!” (Beyond Sausage packaging.) Philosophy of science has been increasingly engaging with applied science and technoscience fields, including agricultural and food research. This is because scientific work itself is changing, responding to calls for societal impact, addressing grand societal challenges, and achieving sustainable development goals. One key field of action -scientific and societal- is transforming the global food system. In the last fifty years, per capita meat consumption has, on average, across the world, doubled, while the earth’s population itself doubled (Weis 2013). This quadrupling of meat consumption has relied on the technological intensification of livestock production and of systems of provision: leaving a significant ecological ‘hoofprint’ on the planet’s air, lands and waters, and on other life, or biodiversity. Reducing the consumption of intensively farmed animals is thus key for reducing climate emissions. This paper explores how technoscientific work on ‘alternative proteins’ is changing ideas about meat as exclusively animal-based. I have previously argued that everyday ideas can get transfigured into new scientific concepts, by being founded in scientific knowledge-making practices. These new founded concepts often keep their everyday names but work as scientific ideas sustaining and generating more science. For example, when economists measure ‘wellbeing’, they are not using some everyday idea of wellbeing to do this, but found a common idea in an epistemic-metaphysical-social context of economics, and articulate it as a new, founded, economics concept that they can operationalise and measure (Efstathiou 2016). But can founded concepts jump back to everyday life and how? This talk explores how founded concepts travel back to everyday life by examining meat and meat concepts. I propose that this type of creative meaning-making is happening with ideas of ‘meat’ (and ‘burger’, ‘mince’, etc.) within food science and technology practices. Companies like Impossible Burger, Beyond Meat or, cultured meat company, GOOD Meat are founding everyday ideas of meat into novel plant- or cell-based food biotechnology contexts creating new founded, meat concepts. They do this through activities ranging from imitating the molecular properties of (animal-based) meat or growing tissue in a lab, to vision-statements and marketing matching the “good stuffs” of meat (Sexton 2016). Though the result here is not, or not only, found science but found meat. This paper shows how meat is founded in science but also re-entering the culinary practices of everyday life, bringing ‘meat’ back to the plate in new forms.

• Korsnes, Marius (2022). Kor mykje er nok? Forsking på forbruk av kjøt og mjølk. Full text in Research Archive
• Hansen, Arve; Wethal, Ulrikke Bryn; Volden, Johannes & Sundet, Øyvind (2022). Kjøttskam eller ribbeglede? Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Hvordan utvikler kjøttforbruket i verden seg? Hvilken rolle vil kjøttet ha i fremtidens matsystem? Hvorfor er det så vanskelig å spise mindre kjøtt? Kan kjøtt bli laget av planter? Vil vi spise melorm istedenfor kjøttdeig i fremtidens fredagstaco? Bli med på en samtale om kjøttproduksjon, kjøttspising, og kjøttkutt i Norge og verden Samtalen vil bli ledet av fire forskere i prosjektet Meatigation – Mitigating climate change through meat https://meatigation.no/

• Efstathiou, Sophia & Papalexandri-Alexandri, Marianthi (2022). Sounding Secrets. Full text in Research Archive
• Volden, Johannes (2022). Kjøttets framtid i forbruket: Muligheter og barrierer for å legge om matvaner fra konvensjonelt kjøtt til alternative proteiner og kjøttreduserende praksiser fra et forbrukerperspektiv. Full text in Research Archive
• Efstathiou, Sophia (2022). Meat without meat: The found science of meat and contemporary vegan biotech. Full text in Research Archive
• Efstathiou, Sofia; Thorseth, May Britt; Ursin, Lars Øystein; Gamlund, Espen; Lysaker, Odin & Børresen, Bergljot (2022). Freya: Moralske refleksjoner post mortem. [Internet]. Salongen. Full text in Research Archive
• Efstathiou, Sofia; Kaljonen, Minna & Lonkila, Annika (2022). MEAT meets! Minna Kaljonen and Annika Lonkila. [Internet]. YouTube. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Minna Kaljonen and Annika Lonkila – Pulses and plant-based proteins in food system transition November 30, 2022 Building a more sustainable and resilient food system requires a system perspective. The systems perspective is, however, hard to remember in practice and in research. In this talk we investigate the promises and realities associated to plant-based proteins in food system transition. We call for greater attention on both changing consumption and production patterns, when investigating the transition potential of novel plant-based products and value chains. A food systems perspective is essential also when evaluating the role of food innovations in just transition.

• Efstathiou, Sofia; Sadredini, Mani & Coutinho, Silvia Ribeiro (2022). MEAT meets! Mani Sadredini. [Internet]. YouTube. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  MEAT meets! Mani Sadredini – Meat Meets the Tummy October 26, 2022 Mani will give a brief introduction to the role of meat in health and disease. He will go through some of the science behind the association of meat consumption with various diseases. He will also present the nutritional value of different types of meat and compare it with the alternatives. Finally, Mani will clarify some of the myths related to dietary meat.

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