Live, Die, Buy, Eat

With a focus on the Norwegian context, this book draws on a wide range of historical and archival sources, together with media analyses and interviews and observation at farms, slaughterhouses and production units, to examine the dramatic changes in animal husbandry and meat production and consumption, as well as their cultural consequences.

Kristian Bjørkdahl is a rhetoric scholar who holds a PhD in rhetoric from the University of Oslo, Norway, where he is Associate Professor at the Department of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies. He does work on moral and political rhetoric, the idea of the Nordics, pandemic preparedness and response, as well as on research communication. He is co-editor of several books, including Rhetorical Animals: Boundaries of the Human in the Study of Persuasion (Lexington 2018), Pandemics, Publics, and Politics: Staging Responses to Public Health Crises (Palgrave Macmillan 2019), and Do-Gooders at the End of Aid: Scandinavian Humanitarianism in the 21st Century (Cambridge 2021). He is also co-editor of the Norwegian language rhetoric magazine Kairos.
Karen V. Lykke is an agronomist and an ethnologist, and holds a PhD in cultural history from the University of Oslo, Norway, where she is Professor at the Centre for Development and the Environment. Her research interests pivot around landscape history and the cultural history of food. Her most recent books are the co-edited volumes Sustainable Consumption and the Good Life: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Routledge 2015), Denialism in Environmental and Animal Abuse: Averting Our Gaze (Lexington 2021), and Changing Meat Cultures: Food Practices, Global Capitalism, and the Consumption of Animals (Rowman & Littlefield 2021).