Contemporary European consumers find themselves at an interesting point in history with regards to their relationships with animals. On the one hand there has been a growth in the acknowledgement of animal sentience, yet on the other hand, largely unabated, we continue to farm, kill, and eat animals for food. In this paper we contend that these ambiguities are played out within everyday embodied practices of preparing, eating, and shopping for food. We begin our account by outlining a novel performative approach to food consumption practices, which we have termed`foodsensing', and we contend that every act of sensing food is always already an act of making sense of food. This approach allows us to examine the complex interplay between material and symbolic dimensions of food consumption practices. Throughout the paper we draw on this notion of foodsensing, in conjunction with empirical material taken from forty-eight focus group discussions conducted across seven European countries, to shed new light on the ways in which farm animals are made to matter (and not matter) within food consumption practices.

Providing information to consumers in the form of food labels about modern systems of animal farming is believed to be crucial for increasing their awareness of animal suffering and for promoting technological change towards more welfare-friendly forms of husbandry (CIWF, 2007). In this paper we want to explore whether and how food labels carrying information about the lives of animals are used by consumers while shopping for meat and other animal foods. In order to achieve this, we draw upon a series of focus group discussions that were held in Italy as part of a large EU funded project (Welfare Quality Õ ). In the focus group discussions we addressed how, when or if, claims made about the lives of animals on food labels intervened in what the participants bought and ate. We contend that such labels bring the lives of animals to the forefront and act as new 'subjectifiers' (Latour, 2005: 212) that offer a new tool for becoming an 'ethically competent consumer', who cares about the lives of animals while shopping for food. However, this offer is not always easily accommodated within existing competences and previous commitments, as it requires a reassessment of existing, and often intimate, practices of shopping, cooking and eating. We argue that new labels carrying welfare claims, with their intention of increasing market transparency, produce two contrasting outcomes: they open new spaces of action, which offer an opportunity for investing in new competences and for engaging with animal welfare issues, in short, they allow an 'ethically competent consumer' to emerge, but they also produce another outcome, or a collateral casualty (Bauman, 2007), namely the ethically non-competent consumer.

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