In 2013, a Dutch scientist unveiled the world's first laboratory-created
hamburger. Since then, the idea of producing meat, not from live animals
but from carefully cultured tissues, has spread like wildfire through
the media. Meanwhile, cultured meat researchers race against population
growth and climate change in an effort to make sustainable protein.
Meat Planet explores the quest to generate meat in the lab--a
substance sometimes called "cultured meat"--and asks what it means to
imagine that this is the future of food.
Neither an advocate nor a critic of cultured meat, Benjamin Aldes
Wurgaft spent five years researching the phenomenon. In Meat Planet,
he reveals how debates about lab-grown meat reach beyond debates about
food, examining the links between appetite, growth, and capitalism.
Could satiating the growing appetite for meat actually lead to our
undoing? Are we simply using one technology to undo the damage caused by
another? Like all problems in our food system, the meat problem is not
merely a problem of production. It is intrinsically social and
political, and it demands that we examine questions of justice and
desirable modes of living in a shared and finite world.
Benjamin Wurgaft tells a story that could utterly transform the way we
think of animals, the way we relate to farmland, the way we use water,
and the way we think about population and our fragile ecosystem's
capacity to sustain life. He argues that even if cultured meat does not
"succeed," it functions--much like science fiction--as a crucial mirror
that we can hold up to our contemporary fleshy dysfunctions.
