The Meat of the Matter: Towards a Conceptual Understanding of the “Meat Question” in the Fin-de-Siècle Romanov Empire

The late Romanov Empire experienced a series of global transformations. New scientific fields such as nutrition, veterinary studies, and zootechnics were emerging, slaughtering processes were industrialized, livestock commodified, and agriculture commercialized – all of which served to intensify public and scientific debates over optimal diets. This article proposes meatification as an analytical framework for examining the global developments within the context of the late Romanov Empire. By analyzing the entanglement of livestock commodification, agricultural modernization, and dietary reform on the one hand, and evolving knowledge regimes alongside Russia’s imperial pathologies on the other, meatification works as a conceptual lens to unravel the logic and rationale behind the growing anxieties over meat in human diets, as expressed across diverse contexts in the Empire. Expanding the historical geographies of meatification to include the Romanov Empire opens new avenues for scholarly discussion of the “connected histories of empire,” and the role of non-Western empires in the imperial food regime.