Cheap Meat: Flap Food Nations in the Pacific Islands [Paperback]

Cheap Meatfollows the controversial trade in inexpensive fatty cuts of lamb or mutton, called flaps, from the farms of New Zealand and Australia to their primary markets in the Pacific islands of Papua New Guinea, Tonga, and Fiji. Deborah Gewertz and Frederick Errington address the evolution of the meat trade itself along with the changing practices of exchange in Papua New Guinea. They show that flapswhich are taken from the animals bellies and are often 50 percent fatare not mere market transactions but evidence of the social nature of nutrition policies, illustrating and reinforcing Pacific Islanders presumed second-class status relative to the white populations of Australia and New Zealand.

Deborah Gewertzis G. Henry Whitcomb 1874 Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at Amherst College.Frederick Erringtonis Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut. Among their many books areEmerging Class in Papua New Guinea: The Telling of DifferenceandYali's Question: Sugar, Culture, and History.

Gewertz and Errington unpack the aspirations and anxieties, calculations and controversies that inhabit an inexpensive cut of fatty meat. Following the trail of sheep bellies from slaughterhouses in Australia and New Zealand to the plates of Pacific Islanders, they evenhandedly map the divergent perspectives of commercial traders, government officials, and ordinary consumers acting within a contested material and moral economy.Cheap Meatprovides a startling view of how global food markets fashion the bodies and identities of people everywhere.Robert J. Foster, author ofCoca-Globalization: Following Soft Drinks from New York to New Guinea

Cheap Meatis a compelling example of how ethnography concerned with Oceania can elucidate broader questions in anthropology and the social sciences in general. GewlÃB