Domestication On a Molecular Level: How cultivated meat could affect our relationship to food

The current agricultural paradigm is not our natural disposition but a way of life that has emerged out of a long cultural evolution for thousands of years. This suggests that we evaluate the emergence of cultivated meat within a broader historical perspective as simply another transition into a new modality of food production.

LISA NEIDHARDT: Initially proposed as food for astronauts in space, cultivated meat has turned from a science fiction fantasy to a source of hope for a more sustainable and animal welfare-conscious meat production method for the world’s growing population. Cultivated meat aims to replicate conventionally produced meat by harnessing stem cells that multiply and form skeletal muscle and fat tissue. Therefore, it has the potential to marry the consumer’s desire for meat with a more secure and sustainable global food production.

The following excerpts from an interview with Dr Inanna Hamati-Ataya, Principal Research Associate at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) and founder of gloknos (Centre for Global Knowledge Studies) at the University of Cambridge, evaluate social and ethical implications of this novel technology…

As Dr Hamati-Ataya puts it: “Cultivated meat approaches the same problems with a completely different framework: it is far removed from land-based food production and agricultural labour. If you consider how old Homo sapiens are, agriculture itself is quite recent”… “I think that cultivated meat is a new threshold,” Hamati-Ataya says, “but it has the revolutionary characteristics of the earliest transition to an agrarian lifeway.”

“Whereas the first ‘Agricultural Revolution’ developed over thousands of years and on a community level, this one is happening very quickly and is controlled by a relatively small number of people working within specific socio-economic sectors.” The First Agricultural or Neolithic Revolution describes the prehistoric transition from hunter-gatherers to larger agricultural settlements starting around 10,000 B.C.

“For us as a species, it is not the first time we transition to a new way of producing our food,” Hamati-Ataya points out. “I think we tend to forget that the current agricultural paradigm is not our natural disposition but a way of life that has emerged out of a long cultural evolution for thousands of years.” Hamati-Ataya thus suggests that we evaluate the emergence of cultivated meat within a broader historical perspective as simply another transition into a new modality of food production…

Studies have shown that a major barrier towards consumer acceptance of cultivated meat is its unnaturalness. Hamati-Ataya brings up an intriguing paradox: “cultivated meat is high-tech in terms of its production process, but at the same time, it is not ‘unnatural’ concerning its composition. It is not processed in the way most food products or ready-made meals are.

The cultivated meat industry is transitioning from ground to whole cut meat products, like a chicken breast or beef steak: when this is achieved, I think that our definition of what is artificial and what is natural will be profoundly shaken. One area in which such conversations are likely to emerge early on is secular and religious legal doctrines, where these definitions are important and have wide-ranging implications on people’s behaviour and what counts as permissible or taboo”…

The prominent vegetarian and socialist Henry Salt predicted in the 1880s that “future and wiser generations will look back on the habit of flesh-eating as a strange relict of ignorance and barbarism.” Being the addressee of his prediction, how would we respond? Hamati-Ataya summarises that since the start of industrialisation of agricultural production around 200 years ago, humanity has fostered an extremely aggressive way of exploiting other species, even in ways that seem excessive and not always justified to satisfy our basic needs. Cultivated meat is part of a moral awakening that can pave the way for us­ to be more pacified with our environment and other species. SOURCE…

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