Making the Modern ‘Meat Complex’: The Co-production of Humans and Livestock in Finnish Agricultural Modernization, c. 1880s–1960s

Livestock industry is a key contributor to climate change and other environmental, ethical and health problems. However, its growth is often presented as a spontaneous process out of malnutrition, which obscures meat lobbying and political measures to promote it. Historical research has so far focused mostly on the pioneers of livestock industry (USA, UK, France, Germany), which easily leads to a straightforward and teleological story of agromodernization. While animal history has favoured pets, horses and wild animals, ‘humble critters’ such as pigs have rarely been looked at in and for themselves, despite their global prevalence and high cognitive skills.

Our project examines the expansion of livestock production, the ‘meatification’ of society and the changing animal-human relationships as Finnish animal husbandry shifted from domestic self-sufficiency to commercial agribusiness, c. 1880s–1960s. Particular attention is paid to pigs, the first farmed animals produced for the meat trade in Finland. Our research is guided by the concept of the ‘meat complex’, i.e., the changing and complex set of networks and relationships between animal agriculture, the political economy of meat and knowledge production. Data includes textual sources, supplemented by statistics, photos, drawings, floor plans of piggeries and slaughterhouses, oral histories and films. Our methodology is mainly qualitative, based on contextual and interpretative content analysis of the sources. Drawing on interdisciplinary Human-Animal Studies and history-from-below, we read sources anew to extract an animal perspective from them. The focus is thus on relationality and the social co-production of humans and pigs.

Our project is basic research on the subject in Finland. It renews international research by showing how the values of industrial capitalism, such as efficiency, productivity and profitability, could make a breakthrough in a short period of time under conditions of proliferating small family farms. In the history of experiences, our project has the potential for a major scholarly breakthrough. By combining cutting-edge research on the history of human and animal experiences with the latest scientific understanding of pigs’ senses, abilities and social life, the project promotes renewal of historical research by including pigs into history as agents of modernization, while also providing insights into animal welfare and behaviour research by historicising pigs’ experiences.