The Meaning of 'Meat': Boundary Objects in the Promotional Cultures of Plant-Based Meat

This dissertation interrogates the use of boundary objects in the rhetorical framing strategies of plant-based meat companies. I address the framing, categorization, and boundary work of foods such as "vegan", "meat", and "burger" from a Bourdieuian, class-focused perspective. I use rhetorical framing analysis to critically engage with the Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods burger campaigns--including CEO interviews (with Patrick Brown and Ethan Brown), trade journal articles (Fortune and Business Insider), company websites (Beyond Meat, Impossible Foods, A&W, and Burger King), Twitter posts (@AWCanada and @BurgerKing), and consumer engagements on Twitter--between 2014-2018. This project contributes to the theoretical refinement of boundary objects by demonstrating how they can be used to rhetorically situate non-dominant social actors within the categorical boundaries of dominant groups. In this case, plant-based meat companies redefine "meat" along chemical and nutritional lines in order to situate themselves and their products within the privileged socio-cultural category of meat. I also enhance the usefulness of rhetorical framing analysis as a method of studying communication by adding agenda-dismissal to the methodological repertoire of agenda-setting theory. I find that, while vegetarianism and veganism have historically constituted anti-consumerist subjectivities, Beyond Meat, Impossible Foods, and the rhetoric of plant-based meat serve to reinforce a dominant ideological frame of individuals-as-consumers by encouraging people to consume more "good" food. From a class-based perspective, this rhetorical strategy places the consumerist logic of plant-based meats at odds with the conspicuous and distinguished consumption ideals of bourgeois veganism. Beyond Meat, Impossible Foods, and plant-based meat rhetorics thus perpetuate neoliberal hegemony by emphasizing a nutricentric framing of food products, which dismisses other relevant social, cultural, and economic elements of food. Finally, I use this project as an interjection into the larger field of cultural studies in order to identify and name an emerging sub-discipline of critical analysis: "meat studies". Ultimately, I argue that the rhetoric of plant-based meat companies reinforce rather than challenge both meat's privileged cultural status and the foundations upon which consumer capitalism exists.