Meating Global China at Home

The production of meat has become a matter of global climate urgency with increasingly vocal calls for the reduction of meat diets to mitigate climate change. China has committed to an ambitious target of carbon neutrality by 2060 but achieving this will require the greening of the agricultural sector, in particular attending to the carbon cost of meat and dairy production. While technological innovation in production offers solutions, when it comes to meat consumption China’s policymakers may have a blind spot. Rising incomes have led to increasing meat consumption such that China is now the greatest global producer and importer of meat. This chapter makes use of the concept of “meatification” to explore the economic, political and cultural processes at work in China’s shift to greater meat consumption. It examines how China’s growing meat consumption is tied up with notions of China’s modernity that fuels a global demand but creates tensions in thinking about the environmental aspects of food choices at home. How China deals with its expanding meat demand has ramifications for its carbon neutrality ambitions and indeed the rest of the world.