High meat consumption in Finland and other affluent countries poses many sustainability challenges that call for urgent reduction of the current consumption levels. However, the course of development has been the opposite in recent decades; meat consumption has increased strongly and is linked to, among other factors, the rise in the standard of living and the food system’s techno-cultural change. Meat has historically held a prestigious position in Western food culture, and modern economic and sociotechnical transitions have greatly enabled the growth of its production and consumption. In recent years, the food system has also seen new approaches that have strengthened the sociocultural status of plant-based foods, and the growth in meat consumption has simultaneously started to slow down. However, meat consumption has not shown signs of a clear downturn in the affluent countries thus far. This dissertation focuses on consumers’ perceptions on meat consumption and the possibilities of reducing it in Finland at the beginning of the 2010s, when new approaches and framings for plant-based foods started to emerge in the food system. This work can be considered pioneering; when the research frames were structured and dataset collected, not much had been published on the subject, making the work, in many ways, explorative by nature. In more detail, the work concerns what barriers, opportunities, and pathways consumers perceive for potential meat reduction as well as what social and cultural factors can help us understand such phenomena. This is done through sociological lenses regarding consumption, food and eating, environmental perspectives, and nonhuman animals. Detailed research interests include how consumers view meat as an environmental issue, what type of sociodemographic factors and values are connected to perceptions of meat and reducing meat consumption, and how these themes are conceptualized, politicized, and perceived in the context of everyday life. This dissertation takes quantitative and qualitative approaches to study the phenomena with three research articles, each of which offers different angles to increase understanding of the topic. The research articles’ main findings can be summarized as follows. The first research article suggests that although consumers’ general awareness of the environmental impact of meat consumption is moderate or low, neutral responses were the most common in the data, and based on a segmentation approach, several consumer positions seem to relate to the phenomenon. The second research article more generally concerns the barriers to reducing meat consumption, and the results show that such a barrier effect can be seen as a multifaceted concept that various sociodemographic factors and values also determine. The collective social media meat reduction campaign discussed in the third research article—specifically based on the participants’ personal experiences—seemed a generally successful promoter of experiments in meat reduction despite the many uncertainties that the participants had initially. Here, the campaign participants’ discussion and actions were placed in the context of everyday life instead of a more general-level policy discussion frame. In sum, this dissertation’s results highlight a wide variety of factors that concern the understanding of consumer behavior and determinants behind it as well as various themes of politicization. Therefore, for example, when the challenges underlying the assessment of the environmental effects of meat production and consumption are combined with the multifaceted choice factors of consumption, such bundles emerge in which there are possibly no easy ways to reorient consumer positions into a more sustainable path from the current situation. Such elements are also socially and culturally structured in many ways in which, for example, single policy measures aimed at changing the state of affairs may have limited effects. However, the multiplicity of consumer positions can be seen to pose not only challenges but also opportunities for various policy measures, which could be perceived as acceptable and effective. As a whole, this dissertation is focused on the beginning of the 2010s in Finland, but meat consumption has not decreased significantly to date, either in Finland or in other affluent countries worldwide. Therefore, this work’s findings and perspectives can be considered valuable additions to the understanding of how changes aimed at reducing meat consumption could take place in the future.