Contested Meatspace(s): Cultured Meat, Cellular Agriculture and the Futures of Foods

Session Submission Type: Traditional (Closed) Panel

Abstract

In 2013, a Dutch physiologist unveiled the first hamburger grown through cell culture techniques. This international media event created great interest in "cultured meat" and other "cellular agriculture" technologies (including “cultured milk” and “cultured egg whites”), presented as "foods of the future" against a backdrop of climate change and the pressing need for sustainable alternatives to industrial animal agriculture. The event also renewed interest in other protein alternatives, including plant-derived meats and insects. Promoted by entrepreneurs, scientists and other actors, these foodstuffs combine biotechnological innovations, including tissue engineering and synthetic biology, with powerful moral claims. We are told that cellular agriculture could save us from a wide range of crises, ranging from climate change, to animal welfare, to human malnutrition. In this panel we will use the tools of Science and Technology Studies to examine these novel foodstuffs that seek to use laboratory technique to replace animals and their farmers in livestock production; we will also examine the social, cultural and economic systems, out of which these foods emerge. Papers may focus on any of a variety of topics, ranging from the role of stem cells (drawing from the growing literature on stem cells from anthropological and STS studies of medicine), to the way "cultured meat” has enabled the re-imagining of human-animal relations, to the way foods of the future might change how we understand “edibility formation,” or the criteria by which humans define things as worthy "food.”

Sub Unit

• 4S Annual Meeting

Chair

• Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft, MIT

Discussant

• Neil Stephens, Brunel University London

Individual Presentations

• Bioprinted in vitro meat: The biomaterial reconfigurations of cellular agriculture - Elisabeth Abergel, Université du Québec à Montréal

• Pre-Histories of Post-Meat: Science, Psychology, and Plant Protein, 1945-1973 - Joel Richard Dickau, University of Toronto

• Mimesis and Invention in the Cultured Meat Debates - Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft, MIT