Paper long abstract:

This paper focuses on the role of meat in the political economy of school meals. It examines the processes of preparation & consumption of everyday school meals in terms of meat-eating and meat-avoidance practices. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in a 'multicultural' state-school cafeteria in east London, it describes the intertwining of political and economic concerns with the religious, affective, and health dimensions of such mundane practices. It explores the forms of belonging and not-belonging which emerge through these contextual engagements between humans and animals-as-food. In so doing, it illuminates the trans-national networks of trust and risk in which they are entangled.