The New Biopolitics of Eating: Meat Biofabrication and the Post-Animal Bioeconomy

• In Event: Bioeconomies - Life, Technologies, and Capital in the 21st Century I: Frictions, Values and Prospective Markets Across Global Bioeoconomies

Abstract

The production of in vitro meat (IVM) involves the biofabrication of edible muscle tissues from stem cells. While the objectives of the post-animal bioeconomy are to disrupt the meat industry by producing clean, ethical and environmentally sustainable animal-free meat, it creates tensions and contradictions regarding the future of food and rural livelihoods. Cellular Agriculture, the production and design of existing foods from cell cultures, represents a new mode of technoscientific knowledge production, organization and practice. From an STS point of view, we will analyze how the possibilities of tissue engineering, material sciences, bioengineering and synthetic biology drive the animal tissue economy. Cellular Agriculture companies have no real-world connections to the traditional agri-food system or farming. Yet, their aim is to feed the planet and build a better agricultural ecosystem starting from a stem cells. Edible animal tissues contribute to increased scientific interaction with new forms of life while creating biovalue. In that sense, IVM follows the paradigm of intensive animal farming through its application of biotechnologies. This paper will present an analysis of the discursive strategies and the language used to promote ecological and responsible eating as well as how vegetarian/vegan/flexitarian/vatitarian communities, biohackers and tech billionaires get enlisted as consumers, drivers and investors in Cellular Agriculture. We will show that IVM not only essentializes the human need for consuming animal flesh, it creates a new biopolitics of eating as well as the domination over animal bodies by other means.

Author

• Elisabeth Abergel, Université du Québec à Montréal