The modern slaughterhouse has figured as an important ethical and political issue in many developed countries. In late imperial and early Soviet Russia, the ethics and politics of industrialized slaughterhouses are illustrated in sharply contrasting ways in the fates of two prominent writers. Lev Tolstoy wrote an essay in 1892 describing the gruesome slaughter of terrified oxen at a local abattoir that was lauded as a “bible of vegetarianism” for the way it presented what many readers viewed as a highly cogent ethical argument against the use of meat in the human diet. A few decades later, Boris Pilnyak was commissioned by the Soviet Food Commissar to write a Socialist Realist novel that would glorify the achievements of his country's newly modernized meat industry. Meat: A Novel (1936), however, failed to please Party officials and led to the writer's execution during Stalin's Great Terror of 1937–38.

Beyond Meat, a food technology company based in California, is currently developing a range of plant-based proteins that aim to provide more sustainable, ethical, and healthful alternatives to conventional meat. Its products are also aiming to be viscerally equivalent in terms of their meatlike taste, texture, and overall sensory experience. These alternative proteins (APs) are not, however, intended merely as a substitute for conventional meat. Instead they are viewed and marketed by their developers as meat, made simply from a different raw material and via different methods. Yet as animal meat has become increasingly linked with environmental, health, and ethical concerns, Beyond Meat is having to negotiate a careful balance between positioning its products as meatlike in some respects and not meatlike in others in order to gain consumer adoption. To become “meat” in consumer thinking not only depends on the things these APs are made of—both material and ideological—but also the things that are actively excluded; as such, their materiality is made of purposefully chosen “stuff” and “non-stuff.” The article explores this decision-making via my fieldwork encounters with Beyond Meat's products. Using a visceral-autoethnographic approach, I discuss how certain (non)stuff was “made to matter and not matter” (Evans and Miele 2012) to me during these encounters, and how this careful balancing of stuff can create new and problematic imaginaries, moral politics, and misguided understandings of what constitutes “better” foods and “better” eaters. The observations made contribute to existing discussions on visceral methodologies, perceptions of (novel) foods, embodied consumption practices, and the ways in which bodies are made as eaters and things as food.

This article examines Boris Pilnyak's attempt to answer Commissar Mikoyan's “social mandate” for a work of Socialist Realist fiction that would glorify the achievements of the newly modernized Soviet meat industry in general and of the recently constructed Mikoyan meat-packing plant in particular. Pilnyak's Meat: A Novel (1936), which reads like a Soviet(ized) version of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1907), shows how under a socialist system the negative features of the tsarist-era meat business can be eliminated in Stalinist Russia without having to sacrifice industrial efficiency or worker productivity. The novel failed to please the Party leadership, however, because the author did not respond earnestly enough to Mikoyan's “social mandate.” Pilnyak provided a parodic, tongue-in-cheek pastiche of a Socialist Realist novel rather than a genuine one. This article shows how Commissar Mikoyan's aspiration to have a literary monument erected to the Soviet meat industry, which he had worked so diligently to modernize and expand, culminated in the publication of The Book about Tasty and Healthy Food (1939), the famous cookbook and household guide, which projects numerous Socialist Realist images of material abundance, good taste, and scientific nutrition that were associated during the Stalin years with an ideal (and idealized) cuisine that never really existed in the USSR. The food commissar's abiding desire to produce a domestic version of the American hamburger was likewise realized through his creation of the “Mikoyan cutlet,” which generated a veritable revolution in the system of public food service in his country.

The short fiction of modernist author Katherine Mansfield, in particular her work written during World War I, provides a distinctive glimpse into the civilian culture of war. Mansfield uses food imagery in her writing to accentuate a shifting sensibility and profoundly emotional response to her own experience of the war. Embedded throughout her letters, notebooks, and short fiction written during and soon after the Great War, are references to food, especially to meat. Mansfield's food imagery and her artistic manipulation of the act of consuming food politicizes her work and compels a reconsideration of several pieces of short fiction which engage the event of war.

The eating-house was a pillar of late nineteenth-century American cities, feeding famished industrial workers and harried professionals. Urban wage laborers came to depend on cheap lunch joints for a quick midday meal, in the process altering Americans’ relationship with food. Eating-houses familiarized many Americans with the habit of purchasing cooked meals, eating rapidly with strangers, and the increasing distance between diner and farmer. The beef-centric meals served at such establishments helped strengthen the nationwide network of industrial ranching. This prose piece explores the experience of dining in an eating-house from the perspective of a hungry laborer.