Abstract
Cultured meat is a novel technology that uses tissue engineering to expand cells taken from animals to grow muscle for consumption as food. Those supporting the technology anticipate it could radically disrupt livestock farming with, they propose, significant benefits for the environment, human health, and animal wellbeing. This paper examines the emergence of this sector through the prism of one of the leading companies–Memphis Meats–in particular focusing upon their online recruitment activity in online videos. Founded in 2015, by 2020 they had announced investment of over $160 m to build a pilot-plant and recruit staff to bring cultured meat closer to commercialization. This paper argues the company’s recruitment videos work to enact what I term “producibility”, a concept aligned to existing work on “edibility”, that emphasizes the process of becoming that foodstuff (included novel foodstuffs) undergo. I deploy existing theoretical work on multiple categories of futures – big/little, individual/institutional/field–to analyze Memphis Meats’ online recruitment activity. I argue that, by entangling science and food futures, the company’s videos work to assert the status and politics of cultured meat, render it producible and edible, and articulate a novel and transformative food-professional identity: the cultured meat producer.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 32-48 |
Number of pages | 17 |
Journal | Food, Culture and Society |
Volume | 25 |
Issue number | 1 |
Early online date | 31 Mar 2021 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 2022 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:This work was supported by the Wellcome Trust [under Grant WT208198/Z/17/Z].
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
Keywords
- cell-based meat
- clean meat
- cultivated meat
- Cultured meat
- edibility
- Memphis Meats
- producibility
- recruitment videos
- sociology of expectations
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Food Science
- Social Psychology
- Cultural Studies