Emerging profiles for cultured meat; ethics through and as design

Animals

Volumn 3, Issue 3, 2013, Pages 647-662

  van der Weele, Cor ^a   Driessen, Clemens ^a  

^a WAGENINGEN UNIVERSITY   (Netherlands)

Author keywords

Animal welfare; Design; Ethics; In vitro meat; Meat; Stem cells; Sustainable consumption; Tissue engineering

Indexed keywords

EID: 84880952710     PISSN: None     EISSN: 20762615     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.3390/ani3030647     Document Type: Article

References (35)

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2. Put Your Ethics Where Your Mouth Is. 2013. Available online: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/04/20/magazine/ethics-eating-meat.html (accessed on 21 March 2013).
3. Researchers tend to opt for "cultured meat" as it may promote associations with cultivation and culture rather than laboratories and technology. The name is a challenge in many ways. For example, one of our anonymous reviewers pointed out that the term 'meat' has been argued by Carol Adams in her book 'The sexual politics of meat' to function as a noun which renders abstract and absent the individual lives of concrete animals who are turned into 'meat'. This could be taken to imply that the notion of in vitro meat shares in, or even intensifies, the understanding of meat as something dissociated from living beings. The reviewer argued that it may be appropriate to change the term to 'synthetic flesh' or to acknowledge that the term 'meat' may be problematic. We opt for the latter. Interestingly, our native language (Dutch) makes no difference between flesh and meat-the word for both is "vlees".
4. Tuomisto, H.L.; Teixeira de Mattos, M.J. Environmental Impacts of Cultured Meat Production. Environ. Sci. Technol. 2011, 45, 6117-6123.
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10. The project "Cultured meat as a co-construction of science, ethics and social science" (2010-2014) takes place at the Universities of Utrecht and Wageningen in the Netherlands. The project is subsidized by the Dutch ministry of Economic Affairs and led by Professor Henk Haagsman of Utrecht University. Within this project, two Ph.D. students work on stem cells and consumer responses, respectively, while one of the present authors (CvdW) studies wider (philosophical, societal) aspects.
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20. Over the course of two years the first author has queried first responses to cultured meat during eight presentations for various audiences in the Netherlands. The three categories were distinguished after a number of initial open conversations on the topic. This approach does not claim to yield representative results for the general public in the Netherlands or elsewhere. For example, the meetings mostly involved highly educated audiences. However, in the context of developing moral profiles and possible material scenarios for cultured meat, categorizing first responses can be seen as a step in making sensitivities explicit. The range of percentages for each answer is indicative of the diversity of the audiences. A group of biology students, for example, accounts for the 80% "wow".
21. So far, GM technology is explicitly avoided in research on cultured meat.
22. Interestingly, questions about the use of stem cells were hardly ever raised.
23. van Mensvoort, K.; Grievink, H.-J. Next Nature: Nature Changes along with us; Actar: Barcelona, Spain, 2012.
24. The workshops acted as pilots for a further series of more elaborate workshops and we may go more deeply into these in a later paper. What emerged during the design part of the workshops was a mix of questions and considerations, in which material, technical, social, factual, and symbolic aspects of cultured meat were interwoven in attempts to imagine future practices. The discussion was fed with factual information when needed, but there was no clear separation of morality and technology, no attempt to separate rational judgments from emotions, or main points from mere side effects. Lots of ideas and questions were briefly discussed, though lack of time prevented the emergence of elaborated scenarios or firm conclusions.
25. Eating meat from an animal that remains alive near the site of consumption is also a homely variation on Oron Catts "Disembodied cuisine", the performance in which mini-steaks were served (allegedly) from a frog that was kept alive in a museum in Nantes.
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28. As one of the anonymous reviewers of this paper remarked, a tension emerges from combining the metaphors of 'moral pull' and 'ontological void'. Is it a void that pulls? The idea invites much further thought. Let us just remark here that for many people cultured meat seems so strange and unreal that the idea that it is too good to be true does not seem to be very far removed from a feeling of creepiness.
29. And sometimes an occasion for new societal rifts and refusals to enter in this type of thinking at all, e.g, [30].
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32. In this paper we discuss vegetarian and vegan choices as morally motivated. Many people also avoid meat mainly because of health concerns and it is a plausible idea that this makes a difference for (initial) responses to cultured meat. This is perhaps an interesting issue for further research.
33. Driessen, C.; Korthals, M. Pig Towers and In Vitro Meat: Disclosing Moral Worlds by Design. Soc. Stud. Sci. 2012, 42, 797-820.
34. Welin, S.; van der Weele, C. Cultured Meat: Will it Separate us from Nature?' In Climate Change and Sustainable Development; Potthast, T., Meisch, S., Eds.; Wageningen Academic Publishers: Wageningen, The Netherlands, 2012.
35. And so on: What tastes good, and how may new culinary practices enable a sense of meaningful connection with traditions as well as the wider ecologies in which our food is produced? What exactly is meat, merely a substance of a large number of muscle fibers or do particular cuts and types of meat contain a wide and specific variety of nutrients? Does the embrace of added flavouring and nutrients imply a further reduction of the possibility of 'knowing food'? Such questions also illustrate that new technological options effect changes in what we attend to in moral deliberation.