Meat Matters: Ethnographic Refractions of the Beta Israel

Ethnographer Hagar Salamon brings over thirty years of fieldwork into focus in her latest book, Meat Matters. The result is a layered ethnography of memory and meaning in the lives of the Beta Israel, a small Jewish community that migrated from Ethiopia to Israel in the mid-1980s and early 1990s. Rather than a clear narrative arc, the book is structured as a series of thematic meditations—snapshots of lives, stories, and sensory experiences—unified by a deceptively simple theme: meat, or more precisely, cattle.Since Nick Fiddes's Meat: A Natural Symbol (1991), scholars have been paying much more attention to meat and its meanings. Adding to this growing body of literature, Salamon's contribution begins by shedding light on the practices and beliefs of an understudied community, the Beta Israel. Beyond sustenance and symbolism, the domestic and cosmological economies built around cattle meant that in the transition from Ethiopia to Israel, both cattle and their flesh became material sites of memory, encapsulating the disorientation and vulnerability of transition, as well as the rupture of the once-integrated connection between human, animal, and meat. Importantly, this book is not about meat so much as it is about cattle: their flesh, blood, milk, and meanings, as well as their presence in memory and absence in new landscapes. By embodying stories of migration, loss, and disarray, Salamon successfully captures how cattle memories and meat stories serve as connective tissue between rural Ethiopia and urban Israel.The book's strength lies in its ethnographic sensitivity. Salamon listens deeply, articulates carefully, and stitches together a mosaic of oral histories and sensory details. Her emotive yet restrained style reflects a folklorist's attentiveness and a seasoned ethnographer's patience. Among the most powerful threads in the book (which could have been better reflected in the book's title, synopsis, or promotional material) is the entanglement of human and animal subjugation. Salamon recounts, for example, stories of domestic servants who sleep alongside livestock in cowsheds, and cows who act as emotional proxies for lost children, dead mothers, or barren women. Such tales of care-work and economic function reveal deep continuities between gender, servitude, and animality, gesturing toward larger questions of hierarchy, labor, and value.Meat Matters will be of particular interest to agricultural historians concerned with pastoral practices, livestock economies, and animal-human relations. Environmental historians will find in it a compelling study of how landscapes and lifeways are remembered through animals. It will also appeal to food historians attuned to the affective and ritual dimensions of meat consumption, and to African diaspora scholars interested in the lived transitions between homeland and resettlement.Early in the book, Salamon notes that stories about cattle, milk, flesh, and blood had been “hiding in plain sight” in her field notes for decades. Meat Matters brings these fragments to the surface. While readers familiar with the author's earlier work will recognize much of the material, now curated through meat and cattle as interpretive lenses, a broader reading of the book illustrates how scholarly turns—and in this case, the “animal turn”—reshape the kinds of questions we ask and the meanings we draw from evidence collected long ago. For historians seeking a structured narrative arc, this book may prove frustrating, but the gradual unveiling of textures and gestures through stitched-together fragments demonstrates how oral histories can be used not as archives of facts but as containers of emotion, contradiction, and meaning.The book's most notable editorial misstep is its title. For a work so thoughtfully composed, the title Meat Matters comes across as flat or generic. Like the many iterations of “you are what you eat” or “food for thought,” it risks sounding clichéd and fails to convey the book's depth and craftsmanship.Meat Matters does not offer a comprehensive history, nor does it claim to. Instead, it offers something equally valuable: a textured, emotionally resonant account of how memories of domesticated animals and their multifaceted roles sustain a community in transition. Salamon's work reminds us that food—particularly of animal origin—organize not only rituals but also worldviews. For scholars of agriculture, foodways, and animal life, this book is a rich contribution.