Imagining Food Futures: Human Values and the Emergence of Cell-Grown Meat

The nascent cell-grown or ‘cultivated’ meat industry promotes itself as revolutionary—transformative for land and energy use, animal welfare, and the planet as a whole. More than a decade after a cell-grown hamburger was first eaten on live television, however, scaling up requisite infrastructure and production is still near-impossible for reasons including financing, product quality, technical capacity, and consumer perceptions. Based on interviews and observations with industry and science leaders, I explore the values underpinning different actors’ motivations in this field, to begin to unpack how strategic moral values and actors’ ethical and political visions can guide food future imaginaries and technological development.

The fragile, multi-sectoral world of cell-grown meat research and development is rallied by international coalitionary groups. While many early leaders and investors in this technology were driven by values and visions of global animal welfare, the field’s anticipatory rhetoric now emphasizes cell-grown meat as a leading global solution to climate change. Industry, science, and interest group actors construct shared discourses that depend on collective visions of ecological catastrophe, while promoting their speculative products—meat and seafood grown from cells—as a solution for global land, water, animals, and humans of the future.

This ‘theory of change’, however, depends on speculative and contested climate models, and on a belief that ‘sparing’ land will lead to more biodiversity and climate resilience. Some actors who might be essential to realizing these ecological visions, such as land stewards, are conspicuously missing from funded groups co-constructing this eco-technical imaginary. I explore the values guiding cellular agriculture in the United States, where much of my early field work is based, and begin to compare them with those in New Zealand, where land sovereignty and justice are emphasized through indigenous peoples’ direct input in basic cell-grown meat research.