Buy it from Amazon – by BENJAMIN ALDES WURGAFT
254pp. University of California Press. £23 (US $27.95).
PICTURE THE SCENE: shiny metal bioreactors lined up in rows, each at work building burgers from starter cells taken by biopsy from the muscles of cows. When cooked, the burgers will mimic traditionally produced hamburgers, while avoiding animal slaughter and agricultural damage to the environment: a food revolution for omnivores – and for cows. Food futurists and venture capitalists alike have invested in this striking high-tech vision.
In Meat Planet: Artificial flesh and the future of food Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft brilliantly sets hype against reality in the world of cultured meat, and considers what it means in the first place to believe that a food system can be revitalized by technology. Between 2013 and 2018, Wurgaft visited some of the science laboratories, think tanks and not-for-profit start-ups working to make artificially grown meat viable. According to its champions, the promise of cultured meat is considerable. It could, Wurgaft summarizes, “utterly transform the way we think of animals, the way we relate to farmland, the way we use water, the way we think about population and our fragile ecosystem’s carrying capacity of both human and nonhuman animal bodies”.
But when will such meat become the norm? How soon will it be affordable? Ever since a much-hyped event in London in 2013, when the Dutch physician and physiologist Mark Post unveiled a single labgrown burger, cooked by a chef and served in all its pinkish glory to a panel of three tasters, these questions have been paramount among journalists and investors. (Post’s project was funded by the Google co-founder and billionaire Sergey Brin at a cost of around $300,000.) Wurgaft elects instead to observe developments through prisms such as “pro-mise”, “hope” and “doubt”, dedicating a chapter to each. He draws a parallel between the expectations of would-be consumers of culturedmeat and those of medical patients awaiting new therapies – which, just like this meat production, sometimes make use of stem cells. “The patients feel keenly the gap between the actual and the possible”, he notes. During the five years of Wurgaft’s research, the meat “was a glittering object in the media, but a holographic one, without solidity”. Change is on the horizon; according to industry predictions, production costs may dwindle to as little as $3-4 per pound by the end of this year. Meanwhile, the doppelgänger of Post’s original burger sits behind glass at the Boerhaave Museum of the History of Science and Medicine in Leiden in the Netherlands – a hope for the future, now preserved as the past.
Doubt nudges against hope, because obstacles remain to scaling up production. Currently, the typical growth medium for lab meat is foetal bovine serum, the use of which animal activists and vegans object to perhaps even more strenuously than to the use of starter cells. Using cells from animals’ umbilical cords is an alternative method under exploration which may circumvent the ethical objection, though the viability of that idea – or of others, such as 3D-printed meat, unmentioned by Wurgraft but touted by technology companies – is hard to know. Other problems persist. The layered muscle of certain meats (such as steak) is more complicated to replicate in three dimensions; the bioreactors required would need “vasculature of some kind”, “artificial blood vessels and veins”.
Doubt seeps through in less straightforward ways, too. Wurgaft deconstructs a six-minute video that accompanied Post’s glitzy event, focusing particularly on the atavistic rhetoric of the anthropologist Richard Wrangham’s narration. Images of spearcarrying Africans, generic through lack of context, are accompanied by Wrangham’s lofty theorizing about the centrality of meat-eating in human evolution. “This”, says Wurgaft, “is a pitch about the future that believes it also needs the past.” (Wurgaft “chokes a little” on hearing Wrangham refer to modern humans’ “Paleolithic minds”, and deploys the word “offensive” precisely where it is needed.) The book is stronger for Wurgaft’s choice, as a carnivore, to write about his own behaviour, actions and thoughts. He experiences alternating hope and doubt, cycling “like the moon” as his research goes on. The goal of the study, like that of all good field ethnography, is to “leave more questions than answers on the page rather than impose a narrative line upon disparate images”. (By contrast, culturedmeat enthusiasts tend to push a “breathless” celebratory story.) Wurgaft has a seemingly uneasy relationship with food: “I view my own carnivory as a sign of my moral imperfection”. He dismisses any moral philosophical argument for meat-eating as “a fig leaf meant to preserve my gastronomic convenience”.
Here, animal activists might let out a heavy sigh. For many people, there are, increasingly, ready alternatives to meat – the fig leaf needn’t factor at all. Wurgaft cites Peter Singer’s utilitarian perspective, which asserts that it is “unclear which animals, if any, know that they have personal futures”. If an animal has no concept of the future, so the theory goes, our killing of him or her is fair. By contrast, humans not only envisage a future – we want to be strong and ready for it. And yet I would note that animal-behaviour science contests this claim of human exceptionalism. Research reveals that individuals of other species from apes to birds remember the past (consider those that grieve for dead companions or experience trauma in the present because of past bad experiences), as well as anticipating the future. To give one example, in 1997 a chimpanzee in a Swedish zoo made headlines when it was discovered that he was stockpiling rocks in the morning to hurl later in the day at gawking visitors.
Wurgaft concludes that utilitarianism “appeals to those who dislike moral ambiguity and to those who focus on outcomes”. He does not, then, appear to buy into Singer’s argument. Still, at the book’s end, Wurgaft describes his “favorite” idea unearthed during research: In a city, a neighborhood contains a yard, and in that yard there is a pig, and that pig is relatively happy. It [sic] receives visitors every day, including local children who bring it [sic] odds and ends to eat from their family kitchens Each week a small and harmless biopsy of cells is taken from the pig and turned into cultured pork, perhaps hundreds of pounds of it. This becomes the community’s meat. The pig lives out a natural porcine span, and I assume it [sic] enjoys the company of other pigs from time to time.
The fantasy is rooted in a project called “Varkenshuis” (Pig House), trialled in Dutch neighbourhoods. It raises some concerns. Were that backyard pig to be gifted with verbal language, what might she say about Wurgaft’s insistence that our food systems are political as much as technological constructs? Would she ask to be seen as part of that political system, so that a future world of cultured meat might not only refuse to slaughter her, but might also allow her some autonomy? Sprinkled through Meat Planet are mentions of science-fiction narratives. Wurgraft notes for instance that sci-fi films can shape a generation’s expectations for technology. It’s possible that cultured meat will remain in that realm, he says. If it does: “Let it perform the classic function of the best science fiction by serving as a mirror on the present”. One thing already reflected back is how severely limited is our imagination regarding animals’ lives.
Precisely as Wurgaft intended, Meat Planet invites broader thinking. He could not have anticipated that readers might encounter the book in a time of global pandemic, when we may feel extra urgency to rethink our handling and consumption of animals, some of whom, in the extreme, might even harbour viruses ready to infect us. It’s a time, too, when inequalities in access to essential goods and services loom ever larger. “What if the solution lies not in producing more,” Wurgaft asks, “but in needing less, and in the more just distribution of what we already produce?”
Barbara J. King is an anthropologist emerita at William & Mary, in Virginia. Her most recent book is Personalities on the Plate: The lives and minds of animals we eat, 2017
