In vitro meat and the promises of future co-production processes

Industrialised meat production has since long remade animal bodies (Boyd, 2001; Watts, 2000), together with labour processes and spaces of production (Cronon, 1991; Pachirat, 2011). Current attempts to bypass animals by growing meat in petri dishes and on scaffoldings here offers no exception. In vitro meat promises to remake human bodies, the properties of meat, and food production landscapes together. People are to become healthier through consuming meat fine-tuned to human bodies’ requirements, and animal suffering is to be lessened as petri dishes supplant pig pens. With researchers today producing the first embryonic products such promises are yet to be fulfilled, but nonetheless disclose something rather important.
Above all, these promises reveal the future co-production processes envisioned in dominant depictions of in vitro meat; ranging from how lab-grown meat would react with human bodies to how in vitro meat is thought to remake livestock landscapes, lessen climate change, and obliterate animal suffering. But most representations today are too partial to account for the relations eaten if people were to actually adopt in vitro meat-based diets. Current representations of in vitro meat over-emphasise spaces such as high-tech laboratories, at the expense of other less spectacular spaces, such as those which would serve as laboratories’ hinterlands. I therefore argue that a fuller understanding of the actual entanglements promised necessitates critically scrutinising also now relatively forgotten spaces, bodies, and practices potentially coming together through in vitro meat production, and consumption - and this is what I aim to do in this presentation.