(M)eating Out? Understanding tensions between the established practice of eating out and changing discourses on meat and plant-based consumption

Due to the environmental impacts of meat, one of the major challenges of current times is a societal transition towards more plant-based consumption (i.e., a protein transition). Chefs are seen as promising change agents in such a transition because they can create innovative and delicious plant-based meals. However, chefs’ agency is limited due to the nature of the established practice of eating out and its diverse carriers, such as restaurant diners. This paper aims to understand the tensions between the established practice of eating out and changing discourses on meat and plant-based consumption. Using Elizabeth Shove’s concept of ‘infusing’, the paper examines how such discourses infuse this meat-heavy practice and more specifically, how the intertwinement between discursive and routinized elements in the practice of eating out either supports or hinders meat reduction. Drawing from 23 semi-structured interviews with executive head chefs of French/Western restaurants in the Netherlands, preliminary findings reveal how discourse on plant-based consumption infuses the practice of eating out in several ways, such as through an increasing number of clients requesting vegetarian and vegan dishes, internationally renowned chefs in the culinary field going plant-based, and coordination between head chefs and more plant-based oriented apprentices in an increasingly horizontal kitchen hierarchy. Next to such seeds of change, we also identified forms of resistance. Serving and eating animal products in restaurants is normatively acceptable and expectable, as exemplified by the high percentage of meat dishes sold, the fear of bankruptcy after cutting meat off the menu, and the persistent intertwined symbolic statutes of animal products and eating out. Taken together, the embedment of ideas about meat and plant-based consumption into the practice of eating out both facilitates and complicates meat reduction in restaurants. This paper contributes to the literature on social practices in transition and specifically builds on scholarship on the scarcely studied link between discursive and routinized elements in practice. Moreover, it delves deeper into the underexplored territory of the practice of eating out in the context of the protein transition from the perspective of chefs.