What Does Lab-Grown Meat Say About Society?
A conversation with Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft, author of “Meat Planet: Artificial Flesh and the Future of Food”
I don’t care at all about lab meat, cultured meat — whatever anyone is calling the flesh born of animal cells in laboratories that some believe could eventually feed the world, if only it could scale. There are things other than meat that people could eat, as we know. The human race could survive without any food that comes close to resembling animal flesh, but it remains an obsession. For reasons from the patriarchal, as outlined in Carol Adams’s seminal text The Sexual Politics of Meat, cultural, and other, though, meat remains a daily part of life for much of the planet’s population, and thus there is money to be found in replicating it in a kinder, gentler, more environmentally friendly way that doesn’t depend upon factory farming.
Despite my complete disinterest in meat — whether from the flesh of an animal or created in a lab — I wanted to read the new book Meat Planet: Artificial Flesh and the Future of Food by academic Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft to understand a bit better this world that’s adjacent to my work without rejecting it wholesale. He begins with the 2013 debut of a cultured meat burger by Dutch scientist Mark Post, using a live-stream of the event to…
