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Meat In Vitro

On the (dis)embodiment of the animal in human meat consumption

Master Thesis for Cultural Analysis

June 2015

Prof. dr. Mireille Rosello Dr. Jules Sturm

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Table of contents

Introduction 5

One: Eating Meat: On the Encounter With the Animal Through Eating 9

Two: Knitting Meat: a Possible Future for Meat Imagined 17

Three: Culturing Meat: Flesh Made Into Data and Data Made into Flesh 26

Conclusion 37

Bibliography 40

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“A love of nature keeps no factories busy.” Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

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Introduction

‘‘Choose a menu and make you reservation for 2028 now!’’ it says on the website of Bistro In Vitro, ‘‘the restaurant for trailblazers, world changers and nature lovers’’. This new project launched by Next Nature created a fictitious restaurant that serves a selection of in vitro meat dishes that may end on your plate one day. What about a ‘‘meat cocktail’’ to start with, continuing with a ‘‘friendly foie gras’’ and a ‘‘meat ice cream’’ as dessert?

In vitro meat is meat produced out of cultured cells in the lab, presented as a sustainable and animal friendly alternative to traditional meat. The Bistro In Vitro Project aims to give us a glimpse of what the future of meat could possibly look like and wants to be ‘‘a radar for anything that is possible’’ (Bistro In Vitro). The project is pushing the boundaries of our current food culture, one that proves to be insufficient and unsustainable to a world population heading for 9 billion in 2050.

Food reflects the human condition within its living environment and moves between personal desires and social behaviour, intimacy and publicity, shortage and excess, enjoyment and disgust and nature and technology.

Compared to only 50 years ago the production and consumption of food has changed significantly. Under the rise of capitalist industrialization, food became as cheap, diverse and accessible as never before. Wealthy, Western societies have long reaped the fruits of these changes, but are now faced with its disadvantages too. Modern urban societies are dominated by processed foods - high in sugar and fat - that promote quantity, efficiency and cost over health. In this environment people get more and more alienated from the food they eat, causing a lot of valuable knowledge and culture to go to waste. This, among other things, has led to a world in which obesity is twice as prevalent as hunger. These numbers are shocking, especially compared to 100 years ago, when the situation was reversed (Fresco).

There is room for nostalgia, fetishism and snobbery towards food when there is enough of it and even more than that. Food hypes such as the commercially exploited ‘‘superfoods’’ are an adverse result of the above. Quinoa for instance, is sold at the astronomical cost of ten euros per kilo, a seed that in its countries of origin – Bolivia and Peru – was predominantly used as chicken feed. Meanwhile, hunger still exists, most often in the countries that provide the products that make our daily diets so diverse and luxurious. Something is terribly wrong here.

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We are privileged, and privilege is accompanied by confusion. What should we eat? And how? What is healthy, fair and affordable food that is moreover kind to the environment?

These questions have intrigued me for a while now but founding a catering company together with my cousin in 2010 - Cousine Catering – made these questions all the more pregnant. Since I was no longer only cooking for myself, but expanding my dishes to a larger public, I had think about what kind of food I want to work with and what ideas about it I wanted to bring about and share with other people. Meat in particular proved to be a difficult issue. A lot of clients ask for meat, but do we want to meet this demand in the first place, and if we do, what kind of meat do we want to use to prepare our dishes and what are the moral concerns at hand?

Through my activities in the catering business, I got the chance to participate in the six-month program of the Youth Food Movement Academy in 2013. Together with 26 young professionals coming from all different nooks of the food chain - welfare activists, chefs, fishermen, chicken farmers and policy makers – we investigated what is supposed to be a good, clean and fair food system. This research included several trips into the ‘‘Dutch food landscape’’ and so it happened I got the chance to visit several factory- and biodynamic meat farms in the Netherlands. The issue of meat has always intrigued me but I was astonished by the scale and power of this industry in this country - let alone in other countries in the world – and the shocking things I saw there only piqued my interest and curiosity about this industry and our on-going carnivorous lifestyles. This is when I knew I wanted to deepen my exploration of the issue of meat and to think about its possible form of existence in the future.

Let us go back to the beginning of this introduction, to Bistro In Vitro. What I have seen in the Dutch factory farms is detrimental to animals, the environment and - in the end - to ourselves. If in vitro meat poses a future solution for the above, it might not be such a bad idea. One of the many things I learned by joining the academy is that ‘‘organic’’ is not always the solution. But then is biotechnology?

The combination of food and technology has a bad connotation and recalls images of ‘‘Frankenfoods’’, the neologism that often figures in discussions of genetically modified foodstuffs (Miller 45). Here, we tend to forget that food and technology have always been closely related and intertwined with our culture. Even if we believe our products are ‘‘organic’’ and ‘‘natural’’ it is technology that allows us to consume them on such a large scale.

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My interest goes out to what happens when this technology does not only concern mechanical technology, but when it is living matter - cells - we are dealing with. In this thesis, I will discuss in vitro meat as a possible substitute for meat coming from freshly killed animals, taking up cultured meat as an angle to rethink the concept of meat and the binary systems of difference (Chen 3) between man and animal, man and meat, ‘‘nature’’ and technology and life and death. I will question how disembodiment of the animal in human meat consumption alters our relationship with the animal.

To introduce and discuss the issues I have raised above, I will use three artistic objects: the living installation the Tostifabriek, world’s first In Vitro Meat Cookbook and the ‘‘cultured frog-steak dinner feast’’ Disembodied Cuisine. The objects touch upon questions about the animal as meat, about the role of art and design in imagining the novel and, lastly, the meaning of the move from in vivo to in vitro, to our relation to animals, our own bodies and our understanding of life.

All three objects relate to the issue of meat differently but share their critique against the way meat is currently produced, proposing new perspectives on dealing with meat, now and in the future. They evoke questions about our relation to animals, their meat, our own bodies, imagination and power. They ask for theory to dive into these questions more deeply. This theory I found mainly with theorists Donna Haraway, Mel Y. Chen and Hanna Landecker, and the writing of the Australian bio artist duo Ionat Zurr and Oron Catts who raised similar questions before. I have intertwined their thoughts on the topic in the three chapters of my thesis.

In the first chapter, I will explore the relation between the human and the animal through eating. I will use the installation of the Tostifabriek to determine what meat means to us today and the role it can play in either our approach or alienation from the dominant western understanding of humans and animals.

Chapter two takes a step away from the animal body, introducing in vitro meat as an alternative to traditional meat since it would be a solution to animal suffering, environmental damage and possible food shortages and diseases. I will do so, through the fantastically and aesthetically designed recipes from the In Vitro Meat Cookbook, which pretend to give us a glimpse of what a potential future for meat could look like. In this chapter I will moreover pay attention to the function of the cookbook and to art and design as tools for making in vitro meat approachable and discussable. One particular recipe coming from the cookbook named ‘‘Pig in the Backyard’’ allows me to delve deeper into the possible ‘‘new’’

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relationship we can develop with the animal when its killing is no longer a condition for its meat.

Finally, in chapter three, I will focus on the meaning of creating meat in the lab, and specifically on creating new matter outside of animal bodies, for which Hanna Landecker’s book Culturing Cells will serve as a point of departure. I am questioning what it means to think about animals in such a fragmented way and how this might not only change our conceptions the human and animal, but also how these conceptions are challenged and maybe chanced by biotechnology. With the help of the bio art installation Disembodied Cuisine I will furthermore point the attention towards the question into what kind of matter we are creating and what the possible ethical limits and contradictions are that are carried along with it.

Through these three chapters, I would like to make the move from the concept intimacy towards the opposite concept of disembodiment. I begin my argument writing about meat on a very personal level, about the direct, intimate contact between humans and animals in the act of eating. I will end up discussing the impact of in vitro meat seen in a larger perspective, that moves beyond the animal to our understanding of life. The second chapter, deliberating the power of art and imagination, literally functions as a link between these two areas in which meat is at play. Just like the In Vitro Meat Cookbook - the main object of this thesis – aims to do when attempting to overcome the gap between the private space of the kitchen and the laboratory. In both spaces we ‘‘prepare’’ meat, and it is the tension between the different ways of doing so that forms the incentive thought behind this research.

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Eating Meat: On the Encounter With the Animal Through Eating.

‘‘That is what I mean by ‘‘companion species’’ – those variously enduring, quasi stabilized, co-constituted entities whose very being is forged in the contact zones of the fleshy practices of eating together (…).’’ – Donna Haraway

FIG 1: design of the ‘‘Tostifabriek’’, pictured next to the van Gendthallen in East Amsterdam (MediaMatic).

Anyone who paid a visited to the van Gendthallen in the eastern part of Amsterdam between June 2013 and September 2014, must have noticed the slightly messy-looking wooden construction situated next to the water, opposite to the entrance of the former Mediamatic building, the Amsterdam centre for art and new technology.

The construction consisted of a stable (providing shelter to two cows and two small pigs), a second enclosed space and 25 square meters of crop field. Fluffy tufts of corn gently swaying in the wind, contrasted with the white facades of the social housing, remnants from the sixties, on the other side of the water. It formed a striking combination of a concrete, urban and industrial environment contrasted by the appearance and smell of a small (obviously home-made) wooden ‘‘farm’’.

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This project, or ‘‘living installation’’, as the initiators call it, is named ‘‘De Tostifabriek’’. It came into being as a cooperation with Mediamatic as part of a ‘‘city within a city’’ that experiments with new ways of building, growing, creating, and generating energy. A team of urban artists recreated the entire production process of a ‘‘tosti’’ - a simple Dutch grilled sandwich consisting of two slices of bread with ham and cheese in between - which means that they produced all required ingredients, all the ingredients that were needed from the very beginning until the end. As a result the project took over eight months to complete. 818 days were needed for the ham, 89 days for the cheese and 177 for the bread. The Tostifabriek was an obvious counterstatement against an accelerated world full of fast food in which we do not know, or seem to care, about where and how the food we consume is being produced challenging our modern society’s habit and inattentiveness regarding food.

The project became a success receiving a lot of attention in national and international media and attracted ‘‘at least forty visitors a day’’ (Mediamatic) coming from Amsterdam and beyond to see the city’s smallest ‘‘farm’’ and its proceedings. Neighbouring citizens were especially concerned with the project and both the cow Els and pigs Wim and Max were particularly popular with the public, animals that suddenly appeared in a human and urban landscape.

It was the 15th of August and the day when the first tosti would be presented to the public, accompanied by a big ‘‘tosti harvest party’’, was drawing near. It was also the day Wim and Max were brought to the butcher’s to be slaughtered (the only part of the process the tosti-team was not licensed to do themselves) so their shoulder-parts could be used for the ham. Obviously the cuts of Wim And Max that could not be used for the tosti did not go to waste but were prepared at a big communal roast a few days after the slaughter.

During the days after the butchery, neighbours and regular visitors were upset about what they found when they passed by the factory because instead of their two grunting friends a video screen had been installed right in the middle of the former pig stables, screening the entire scene of the slaughter from beginning until end. The goal after all was to make visible the entire production process of a tosti and especially that part we would rather turn our heads away from.

After the slaughter the collective received many complaints from indignant adults, some of them parents who could not understand how the pigs they considered part of the neighbourhood could have been killed so abruptly. Parents who asked why their children had to be confronted with the bloody images of the slaughter of those pigs whose moist, dripping noses they had been stroking less than a week before.

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These reactions highlighted the main issue that the collective tried to broach with the project and demonstrated to what degree animals are over-determined within human imaginaries (Chen 90), in this instance turning them into neighbourhood friends. The horror incited in the Amsterdam citizens after a confrontation with such images proved to what extent we are detached from the animal as meat, which nowadays is considered as something we buy in the supermarket around the corner that comes boneless, cut, clean and wrapped in quality plastic. Sometimes the package shows the image of a healthy cow grazing green meadows or even indicates a geographical region -‘‘from the Irish Greenfields’’- but they never insist on the lives, times and killing of the animal that we, consumers, are about to eat (Mol & Yates Doerr 51). And here I am not even talking about the heavily processed meats in which any reference to the animal body has completely disappeared such as the Turkey Twizzlers - the fried, spiral shaped strips of processed meat - Jamie Oliver protested fiercely against in the U.K. (Evans, 2), McDonald’s chicken nuggets or brightly pink slices of sandwich meat in the shape of a smiling Bob the Builder, specially designed for children.

The Animal As Meat

What does meat means to us today? This question has a direct relevance to our relation to animals and other living organisms we share this world with. We become human in an on-going interaction with them, as Donna Haraway points out in her famous book When Species Meet. She explores the complex relations between humans and animals in our technoscientific, global civilization, writing ‘‘to be one is always to become with many’’ (4). It is animality that has been treated as a primary mediator for the definition of ‘‘human’’ and, at the same moment, of ‘‘animal’’ (Chen 90). From all the different encounters we have with animals in our daily lives, in the house, zoo, park, farm, street, airport and sea, one of the most intimate encounters is through eating, because it brings us back to a very basic interaction humans have with other living beings. It is the encounter between human and animal through eating meat that I would like to highlight and explore in this chapter, focusing on the concepts of incorporation and intimacy.

When we eat we relate to the world and connect not only to other people and animals, but also to technologies, industries and economies (Kelly 12). Our relationship with food is a very material and visceral one and the sensory contact and experiences we have with it through taste, vision, smell and touch shape us as humans. Or, as the Australian bio art duo Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr formulate clearly: ‘‘food is one of these contentious niches in which our relations with life are constantly negotiated and become a reflection on the human

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condition within its living environment (Catts and Zurr 101)’’. Moreover, food passes beyond our external senses because we incorporate it into our bodies, and therefore enter into an embodied relationship with it (Evans 4). This embodiment does not only mean nourishment and pleasure, but moreover, as Haraway argues, creates differential relationalities that make us who and what we are and materialize what we must do if response and regard are to have any meaning personally and politically (295).

In the English language the words ‘‘flesh’’ and ‘‘meat’’ distinguish the human from the animal whereby the word meat already encloses the possibility of being consumed by humans. But does meat still mean ‘‘animal’’ to us when it lies on our plate, stripped from that what seems to enclose our notion of what is animal? Where is the animal when its (furry) skin that separates its inside and outside has disappeared? And what if it no longer has a face with two eyes looking at us, turning it into a thinking entity with feelings and the possibility to register pain (Hansen 3)? Once all this is removed a piece of meat is left behind, transformed from something living into an object through the violence of death, which changed it from something indigestible to something edible (Broglio 58). The animal has disappeared a long time ago together with that what makes an animal recognizable as such, in which the animal is carried forward.

The animal that has been skillfully downplayed and made absent in the way consumers nowadays deal with meat, Carol Adams calls the ‘‘absent referent’’, which she describes as that which separates the meat eater from the animal and the animal from the end product (13). Adams points out that an animal cannot be an animal and meat at the same time. The lives of the animals come before meat, and in order to become this, it has to die first. Once animals turn into meat they are no longer considered animals, but food. Beyond every meaty meal1 there is an absence: the death of the animal whose place is taken by the meat (13). Animals are not only not made to matter in the physicality of the food by keeping their preceding lives away from our eyes, but also through language in denominating the animal and its meat differently. In the English language at least, a cow becomes ‘‘beef’’, its baby ‘‘veal’’, a pig is ‘‘pork’’ and sheep is ‘‘mutton’’. It is the function of the absent referent that keeps the notion of ‘‘meat’’ separated from any idea it was once an animal (13).

At the same time we can see another tendency at play in western urban culture, obviously charged with elitism, that exactly does not want the animal to be absent in the meat they consume and precisely leans towards a closer relationship to its origins and a re-  re-  re-  re-  re-  re-  re-  re-  re-  re-  re-  re-  re-  re-  re-  re-  re-  re-  re-  re-  re-  re-  re-  re-  re-  re-  re-  re-  re-  re-  re-  re-  re-  re-  re-  re-  re-  re-  re-  re-  re-  re-  re-  re-  re-  re-  re-  re-  re-  re-  re-  re-  re-  re-  re-  re-  

1 I would like to add a nuance to Carol’s statement, since her statement does not hold water for people who, for

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evaluation of the animal’s former life. This movement wants to shed light on the shady domain in between the animal and the piece of meat that ends up on our plate. The Tostifabriek is one example of an initiative that opens up this process entirely and by doing so literally gives the meat between those two slices of bread a face and a name. Some of the neighbouring people that frequently came to visit Wim and Max might experience the communal pig roast differently than others for whom that chop was just another piece of pork meat, because they will relate the meat back to a living presence, to a face that demanded recognition, caring and shared pain (Haraway 71).

In a city like Amsterdam more and more local organizations and entrepreneurs respond to this movement promoting a supply chain that is as short and traceable as possible, in which the animal has a better life, and for which the farmer receives a more honest price. On a commercial level artisanal butchers spring up like mushrooms, producing sausages only from local, free range pigs that have been on a diet of purely organic food. Also restaurants live up to this philosophy (Straatsma 11). Another example of this ‘‘postmodern carnivoracity’’ (Miller 54) is the recently opened restaurant Guts & Glory in Amsterdam, where they serve only one sort of animal at the time, changing every three months. They opened this season with the chicken and every recipe from the small selection of dishes is based on another part of the animal, indicated with numbers on a chicken image that comes with the menu. All the chickens are so called local Dutch ‘‘polderhoenen’’ and if desired, any information about their lives can be traced down. According to Miller this new fetishisation of meat - charged by him with a negative connotation - comprises in part a backlash against vegetarianism and veganism that has given rise to the ‘‘ethical omnivore’’ as a new category of the environmentally aware (53).

Meat as Mediator

But what does this knowledge about the animal’s life mean to us? Is it a matter of taste? Meaning that a chicken whose life we know in detail tastes better than any random, anonymous factory farm chicken whose short, miserable life we (also) know, but rather not speak of? The animal is still exploited and killed. Does it solely serve to make us feel better? In this attitude towards meat as described above, the animal did not disappear completely but is actually brought to the fore and opened to signifiers we humans can attribute to it, deeply bound up with our own affective, imagistic meanings (Chen 98). We are conflating our human ideas about an animal with the actual animal itself (Chen 92), which becomes clear when we justify our meat consumption by eating animals that had a life we humans consider

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pleasurable enough for a pig to eat it guiltlessly. This is articulated by Haraway when she reminds us how actual animals often bear little resemblance to the signifiers and discourses used to reference them, if any at all (Haraway qtd. in Chen 101).

I argue that meat does play an important role in our relation to animals, asserting that it should not only be considered as an abstraction of the living animal, but could also be seen as a mediation in the relationship between humans and animals (Mol 53), as something that bridges the gap between ourselves and the animal body we hardly come face to face with anymore. The difference between humans and animals that automatically arises by considering them consumable, distinguishing between meat and flesh, is one that in the act of eating partly disappears. We do not only separate ourselves from the animal by overcoming its meat, but there is also continuity at play, because the meat we incorporate continues inside our bodies.

Therefore, eating an animal both constructs and at the same time consumes the idea of humanity’s power over the animal. In meat our dominance over other living beings becomes apparent, but at the same time stresses our relation to it. When eating meat, there is not only power at stake, it is also a very close way of ‘‘becoming with’’ the animal. Eating is, together with sex, one of the most intimate physical contacts with the other, intermixing bodies and lives in which we mark the border between the world and the self, between inside and outside (Fischler 278).2 But at the same time, this absolute division between inside and outside disappears in the act of eating itself, dissolving the structure it appears to produce (Kilgour 4). Besides a powerful act, eating the animal makes us vulnerable at the same time because it is not only energy we are taking in, we are also incorporating possible dangers and diseases. Taking it a step further we could say that meat, and especially raw meat, confronts us with our own mortality because stripped from all external appearances, what remains of both humans and animals is the same: flesh and blood.

Jacques Derrida critiqued the superiority of the human order over the animal order in his lecture And Say The Animal Responded? in 1997 (Derrida, The Animal That Therfore I Am 119). Derrida saw these rigid borders between the self and the animal other fade away in eating, which is never an individual act, as he pointed out saying ‘‘one never eats entirely on its own’’ (Derrida 282). For Derrida, all taking in, all assimilation, is eating. But eating does not stop where the ‘‘food’’ has passed the border of the mouth, because eating is not only sensing, but also making sense. When we eat, in this case meat, the external other is                                                                                                                

2 This argument could be potentially problematic since it could also apply to cannibalism, a field of study I will

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transformed into something internal, incorporated in the great digesting system (Derrida 283). According to Derrida man does not only devour the object, but rather incorporates it abstractly, and thereby creates the inner space that is the subject (Birnbaum & Olsen). Thus, when we are eating the animal meat, we relate with it not only in its materiality but also in the thoughts and feelings it creates inside us. In the experience of eating there is a respect for the other, one must identify with the other who is to be assimilated and understood ideally (Derrida 283). This is where the animal is sensed and therefore makes sense.

So eating meat can be a way to disassociate us from the animal body by ignoring the life that preceded the meat on our plates and is confirming our human control over the animal. At the same time eating is one of the most intimate encounters with it that does not separate us from the animal but creates continuity instead where we meet it in an almost equal vulnerability. Nevertheless, this contact with the animal through meat is still always interrupted by death, by an act of killing. Not only when we eat animals, but when we eat any living organism, because, according to Haraway, ‘‘there is no way to eat and not to kill, no way to eat and not to become with other mortal beings to whom we are accountable, no way to pretend innocence and transcendence or a final peace’’ (295).

What if we could at least eliminate the killing of the animal in the process of making meat? In Vitro Meat, meat grown from animal stem cells in a biocreator, suggests a completely new perspective on meat, namely, a production that eliminates all troublesome externalities through technological efficiency (Agapakis 117). The biocreator is a machine in which the cells, the culture medium and the scaffold come together. An environment is created ‘‘which can be likened to a fitness centre’’ in which the muscle cells get ‘‘trained’’ through movement and differences in temperature (Futurefood). This will make them grow into small and large fibres that, together with connective tissue producing collagen and fat cells, create a familiar and palatable texture. Instead of an interest in the animal that preceded the steak on our plate, it is exactly the animal body that meat coming from a machine moves away from entirely; its material and bodily limits are no longer restrictive. Is it possible to be a vegan carnivore? Will disembodiment from the animal be the only possible way then to an ethical relationship with the animal or will it simply distance us further from the animal?

I have started this chapter with the description of a farm and ended it with the description of a biocreator, possibly the ‘‘farm of the future’’. The farm in this chapter is an art installation that imitates a real farm on a very small scale, symbolizing the traditional way of producing meat in which the animal is born, fed, and killed. The artistic value here hides in the public

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staging of this process: making visible that what normally happens out of sight, on farms situated out of the city and behind the walls of the slaughterhouses. On the other side of the spectrum the biocreator is situated, producing fake meat but at least as hidden in our society as the slaughterhouses. Also the issue of fake meat coming from the biocreator is picked up by artists, as the recently published In Vitro Meat Cookbook (2014) demonstrates. In the next chapter I will try to overcome the distance between these two divergent ways of producing meat, on the farm and in the lab, discussing the cookbook and its appealing, ‘‘science fictional’’ recipes.

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Knitting Meat: a Possible Future for Meat Imagined

‘‘Before we can decide whether we will ever be able to consume in vitro meat, we must explore the new food cultures it brings us.’’ - Koert van Mensvoort

In the first chapter I wrote about how humans relate to animals through meat, but I only superficially mentioned meat’s detrimental relation to the environment. In the Netherlands alone we eat an average of eighty kilos of meat per year for which 40.000 animals are killed every day. Just as in most places in the Western world, in this instance animals are understood as ‘‘resources’’ that can be raised, traded, killed and eaten freely. Because of the large ecological footprint of meat production, the current level of worldwide meat consumption is one of the primary obstacles to a sustainable future (University of Sheffield). Now that the planet’s population is speeding up towards an expected 9 billion in 2050, it is impossible to keep on consuming meat as we do today. In particular upcoming economies such as China (meat) and India (dairy) pose a problem because animal products are an expected accompaniment to a good and wealthy life.

Even though the consumption of meat is still rising, in Western societies its moral reputation is shrinking (Driessens and van der Weele 79). Once you deeply inquire into the case of meat, it is hard not to link meat to the image of massive chickens blown up by hormones, colossal factory farms, diseases and scandals such as horses being sold as cows, the bird flu and the use of antibiotics. Books such as Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals (2009) and documentaries like Our Daily Bread (2005) emphasize how much we are forcing animals into conditions that optimize speed, size, consistency and efficiency over environmental safety, human health and animal welfare. Through eating we make ethical decisions. We could ask ourselves if there is any good argument left to eat meat in a part of the world characterized by an excessive offer of products that could easily substitute its nutritional value. In 2012 The New York Times asked the same question announcing a nationwide writing contest directed to the omnivorous readers of their newspaper, asking them to make an ethical case for eating meat, in a time when ‘‘ethically speaking, vegetables get all the glory’’ (Kaminer).

Thousands of readers took on the challenge and in the end the essay of Ingrid Newkirk, president and founder of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), was picked as the winner by a row of almost all outspoken vegetarians such as Peter Singer, Michael Pollan

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and Jonathan Safran Foer. She knew to convince them in her essay that is a plea for in vitro meat (IVM from now), which she sets out as follows:

In vitro meat is real meat, grown from real cow, chicken, pig and fish cells, all grown in culture without the mess and misery, without pigs frozen to the sides of metal transport trucks in winter and without intensive water use, massive manure lagoons that leach into streams or antibiotics that are sprayed onto and ingested by live animals and which can no longer fight ever-stronger, drug-resistant bacteria. (…) It comes without the need for excuses. It is ethical meat (New York Times).

According to Newkirk meat can only be ethical if it does no longer involve the sacrifice of an animal’s life and it is IVM that opens up the road to an entirely vegetarian world. In an article in the Dutch newspaper Trouw, with a title that roughly translates into ‘‘Animals have the right not to be a possession’’ Willem Vermaat supports this statement. In the end, he writes, animals do not benefit from any welfare measures that will only maintain problems instead of solving them. ‘‘Animals will only be saved by complete liberation. As long as animals are used as a means instead of being considered to be a goal, they will not be free’’ (11).

Introducing In Vitro Meat

Is in vitro meat the solution to giving animals (back) their freedom? Although the previous chapter focuses on having a closer relationship to the meat we consume by being aware of the life preceding it, this chapter focuses on the question of IVM as substitute for meat thereby stepping away from the animal body as a condition for meat.

IVM is presented as a promising solution to the meat-crisis, since it aims to eliminate all animal suffering, reduce the environmental damage significantly and produce healthier food (Driessens and van der Weele 650). Meat that is grown by proliferating cells in a nutrient-rich medium without the necessity of an animal’s killing (Miller 41) is presented as a sustainable and humane alternative to raising a whole animal from birth to slaughter (Next Nature). The topic has gained much public attention over the past few years and increased enormously in August 2013 when scientist Mark Post, after years of intensive research, presented the public with the first ‘‘lab grown burger’’ made from cultured cow cells. Costs: a considerable price, 250.000 euros funded by a wealthy and anonymous American (Driessens and van der Weele 650). The question is not what scientists can do, but rather what consumers will accept. IVM has a high ‘‘yuck factor’’, as the food technology

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scientists across the world like to put it (Renton), finding the idea of meat coming from the lab uncanny, alienating and belonging to a postmodern future in which the natural has disappeared under layers of simulation (Miller 45).

FIG 2: Mark Post presenting the first lab-grown burger in 2013 (new Harvest).

The question now arises: why don’t we promote vegetarian alternatives to meat, such as legumes and nuts? The appearance of Post’s cultured burger identical to its conventional variant, but also that of already existing meat substitutes, affirms the cultural centrality of meat in our lives. ‘‘If we decide we can not have meat as it is currently produced’’, Miller states, ‘‘we must have something that reproduces the experience of it (44).’’ Meat lovers want their meat to be tender, red and juicy and ‘‘alive’’ enough to be recognizably animal based, an experience a chickpea burger would not be able to bring about.

The technological character of IVM makes us rethink the ways in which meat is being produced and processed now. What Tracey Warkentin calls the ‘‘pastoral image’’ is already immensely forsaken in current practices of factory farming (96) and what supposedly remains natural about this practice is extremely questionable (Miller 46). Perhaps the intensive meat production practices are as abject as the thought about meat coming from a biocreator. Nonetheless, we know what nuggets and ‘‘kroketten’’ - in which the animal is at least as difficult to trace - taste like while the idea of IVM remains ungraspable and difficult to relate to. The makers of the In Vitro Meat Cookbook try to help us imagine what meat in the future could possibly look like, showing that IVM does not only belong to the domain of scientists but is also a space for art and design.

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FIG 3: The In Vitro Meat Cookbook (Next Nature)

The In Vitro Meat Cookbook

The book is produced by the Dutch art collective Next Nature, an organization that aims to speculate, research and understand the interaction of new science and technology within society (Next Nature). It offers a fantastical approach to the topic, through forty-five fictional recipes that cannot (yet) be cooked, rendered to us in a contemporary cookbook. A written format most are familiar with.

The book is very thoughtfully designed; the cover shows a pattern in pink and red of fat and blood vessels, meat tissue and cells. The pages are painted red on the side, both this and the cover position the book in the realm of bloodshot meat. Each recipe is beautifully illustrated with fine pencil drawings in red, stimulating our imagination to visualize that which still seems so hard to think of. They are complemented with beautiful pictures

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representing other recipes from the book, such as ‘‘the meat cocktail’’, ‘‘meat oysters’’ and ‘‘see-through sashimi’’. The recipes are designed by students from the industrial design department in Eindhoven, a faculty responsible for the many different visual and essential representations of IVM in the book. Another striking recipe is ‘‘Paint With Meat’’: cultured meat of different colours in tubes, serving to make ‘‘meat paintings’’ that can be baked in the oven.

These fantastical examples, though far from realistic, emphasize that this is an artistic work, not meant to create nostalgia for conventional meat as an absolute integral component of our daily diet, but to propose something completely different. Also, they add an ingredient to the cookbook: humor. Their recipes are not only aesthetically pleasing but absurd and funny at the same time, turning well-known meat dishes into fascinating in vitro variants, leading to recipes such as ‘‘Friendly Foie Gras’’.

The book literally makes the idea of cultured meat ‘‘digestible’’ by presenting it in the shape of tasteful recipes that require simple common ingredients in addition to the versions of cultured meat that are not yet available. The aforementioned refers to the quote I started this chapter with: ‘‘before we can decide if we want to eat meat from the laboratory, we will have to explore the food culture it will bring us’’ (Van Mensvoort and Grievink 161). Belasco terms this the ‘‘recombinant food culture’’ that mixes the comfortably familiar and the unsettling novel as a tactic to make food of the future less threatening (Belasco qtd. in Carruth 97).

FIG 4: From left to right the recipes ‘‘Lab Pearls’’, ‘‘Meat Oyster’’ and ‘‘See Through Sashimi’’ (Next Nature)

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Recipes are scores, scripting the performance of food (Kelly 37). A cookbook, a collection of recipes, reflects the food trends, the diet fads, the technological innovations and products of a certain time and place. A cookbook does not only reflect a society’s diet but influences it at the same time. Take for example the Allerhande, the free, monthly magazine of Holland’s biggest supermarket Albert Heijn, best known for its simple family recipes beside its house-hold tips and plentiful advertisements. It is significant that Allerhande is the most widely read magazine in the Netherlands after the Kampioen (the magazine for ANWB members) (Foodlog) as it is very likely to determine the food on the Dutch household tables.

Another example of the far-reaching influence of a cookbook is that of the British-Israeli chef Ottolenghi, whose book penetrated into thousands of Dutch households in fewer than five years. His recipes, starring vegetables and Middle Eastern spices, have become very popular in the Netherlands. Over 185.000 copies of his books have been sold so far (NRC). An appendix of the Dutch newspaper NRC mentioned how his books skyrocketed the sales volumes of Turkisch supermarkets. Because where else can you get za’atar, sumac, date syrup and tahini (Kamsma 11)? The accessible, everyday character of a cookbook can reach consumers on different levels of society, consumers whose agency and influence can be a major instrument for change. As the example above demonstrates, everyday shopping decisions have economic, social and political impact as consumers can use their power of choice to modify market relations (Soper and Trentmann 67).

A recipe is also an archive, a way to recall that specific dish or taste, what remains after the meal has disappeared in people’s stomachs and so the culinary success can be repeated. Conceptual and performance artists used this archival notion in the same way, offering recipes as a documentation of projects so that the same work could be re-enacted later, anywhere, any time and on any scale (Kelly 10). The designers of The In Vitro Meat Cookbook wanted to achieve this approachability to IVM as well, consciously designing a traditional cooking bible as a counterpart to its futuristic content that can be read and imagined over and over again. The medium makes the abstract concrete, innovating and speculating with the idea of IVM, engaging familiar food with genetically manipulated meat in fantastical recipes and introducing the ‘‘uncanny’’ into the familiar space of a kitchen. The book attempts to overcome the gap between the laboratory and the kitchen, two separated worlds often associated with masculinity and femininity, mixing up these worlds and undermining the question of who works where.

Using our imagination we can explore the boundary between science, art and design. The French philosopher Peter Bieri describes imagination, or fantasy, as the skill to try inner

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possibilities without really making them happen (Van Turnhout). This kind of imagination allows us to think possibilities through so we can carefully position ourselves towards a possible future. Van Mensvoort and Grievink make tangible these abstract thoughts about IVM in their book in a very playful, humoristic way.

So then, imagine someone sitting at the kitchen table nibbling on a pork chop, accompanied by a good glass of red wine. Through the large kitchen window he has a perfect view of the animal who is ‘‘responsible’’ for the meat on his plate. ‘‘Pookie’’ grubs her wet nose into the ground, happily making grunting sounds. If he would step outside right now, he could even cuddle her while still chewing on the pig’s meat.

FIG 5: Drawing that comes with the recipe ‘‘Pig in the Backyard’’ (Next Nature)

Pigs in Backyards

The particular recipe derived from The In Vitro Cookbook is called ‘‘Pig in The Backyard’’. It imagines how pigs in urban backyards serve as the living donors for muscle stem cells. While the pig can be turned into a beloved ambassador of the community, can be caressed and cuddled by the surrounding neighbours and fed with the food waste from their

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households, we will still be able to enjoy their meat (van Mensvoort and Grievink 55). The situation described here almost sounds saccharine, celebrating the slogan ‘‘food connects’’- almost flogged to death by now – but does become even more so when we take a look at the recipe, written on the right side of the page. It contains instructions to prepare a ‘‘backyard pig roast’’ from approximately 100 kilos of ‘‘Pig in the Backyard meat’’ and emphasizes the importance of the community and encourages neighbours to share food with each other. The illustration on the left page shows a pack of pork sausages with a wrapper depicting a combination of an image of in vitro meat tissue and an image of a wholesome looking pig, half hidden in the grass looking at the viewer from the corner of his eye. All details about ‘‘Pookie’’, concerning her age, her diet and origin, can be found on the wrapper as well. After the word ‘‘harvested’’ the date is written down on which the stem cells were taken and transferred to a communal biocreator, where they were used to grow pork meat.

In the situation described above we get a glimpse of a ‘‘possible world in which we can have it all’’: meat, the end of animal suffering, the company of animals and simple technology close to our homes’’, according to van der Weele & Driessens (656). In her research into the ideas around IVM, Cor van der Weele presented four recipes derived from the cookbook to the respondents. The recipe that generated by far the most enthusiasm was ‘‘Pig in the Backyard’’. Worries about cultured meat being unnatural, too technical, or alimenting were absent here, the idea of local production and close contact with the animals seem to dispel these concerns (Van der Weele and Tramper 294). What is left completely undiscussed is the – in my eyes – obvious ironic overtone that hides in the recipe, describing this happy, healthy community situation. Texts such as the one by Cor van der Weele and Clemens Driessens discuss this scenario as if it were a realistic, potential result of the placement of a stem cell donor-pig in urban backyards, while it seems to be obvious that it is not.

However, these ‘‘bonding qualities’’ within a community have been assigned to pigs in real life too. The recipe ‘‘Pig in the Backyard’’ calls to mind a similar art project initiated in Rotterdam named ‘‘Varkenshuis’’ (‘‘The Pig House’’), where two pigs (Arie and Japie) were taken to an urban community, raised and cared for by its inhabitants over the time span of a year. Also here the importance of the local community was emphasized, presenting the pig house as ‘‘a place for pigs and people’’ where neighbours with different backgrounds could come together to eat, drink and have discussions. After a year both pigs were slaughtered and eaten by their caretakers and anybody else who wanted to join. In order to document the

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event, the experience of living together with pigs was put down into words and images to be shared with the public (PeerGroup).

Remarkably both the recipe as well as ‘‘The Pig House’’ project become sites with their own discursive terms in which the pigs bear the simultaneity of being individualized, named and considered to be a part of the community while remaining special and distinct precisely for being nonhuman (Chen 100). In the ‘‘Varkenshuis’’ project in particular, the pigs become signifiers for ‘‘nature’’ in which the neighbours can escape from the daily buzz of the city. Furthermore, the pigs are recruited as an instrument to bring people together in the care and responsibility for them, and they are used to create intimacy and a communal feeling. Just like the example of the Tostifabriek in the first chapter illustrated, the category of ‘‘animal’’ – here pigs - is determined by our humanist view and, quoting Haraway, ‘‘often bear little resemblance to the signifiers and discourses used to reference them, if any at all (Haraway qtd. in Chen 101)’’.

Even though the people participating in ‘‘The Pig House’’ project could be called ‘‘compassionate carnivores’’, the project still involves killing the animals for meat, something the scenario of ‘‘Pig in the Backyard’’ as described in the cookbook, promises to leave out completely. According to Newkirk - who mentions in her winning essay cited at the beginning of this chapter - IVM ‘‘is ethical meat’’ and is thus the only way to come to an ethical, meaningful relation with nonhuman animals.

The question is: ‘‘what is a meaningful relation’’? Obviously, this is a relation we consider to be meaningful. In both the recipe and the art project, pigs become a humanist abstraction of a pig, treated in the way we think a pig would like to live, and most of all how we would like to live with a pig and especially its meat. I argue that Newkirk’s statement overlooks that IVM still entrenches the conceptualization of animals as resource and its body as a factory (Miller 50). This argument I would like to develop further in the next chapter, going deeper into the moral implications of cell-technology.

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Culturing Meat: Flesh Made into Data and Data Made into Flesh

‘‘Meat is an emblem both of our existence within nature and our transcendence of it’’– - John Miller

The In Vitro Meat Cookbook and in particular the recipe “Pig in the Backyard” have demonstrated that cultured meat is a potential solution to our problematic treatment of animals. This notion has been given gravity by critics and animal activists alike. Driessens and van de Weele go as far as to call it the ‘‘most uplifting promise of in vitro meat’’ (In Vitro Meat: Animal Liberation? 79) and even PETA subsidizes and promotes IVM research. If we no longer have to sacrifice animals to enjoy their meat, this would create possibilities of a different (ethical) relationship with them. In this chapter I will elaborate on this question and moreover ask what growing life outside of animal bodies means to our understanding of and relation to life and that of other sentient beings.

Animal Liberation?

First and foremost I argue that IVM does not fully disintegrate animals, because so far it has relied heavily on animals and animal products. Not only the stem cells are animal based but most notably the liquid to make the cells grow require a serum taken from unborn calves (McHugh 187). It is expected however that one day it will be possible to grow stem cells by use of algae, but until now efforts remain unsuccessful. And even if it would be possible to dispense animal bodies completely, IVM will still be very intimately related to conventional meat, since they operate in the same power structure.

The conviction that humans can continue eating meat without the animal is an expression of human mastery over the world, formulating the idea of life independently, without the need of any other species. The value of animals to humans - their meat – is literally isolated from their bodies by taking out the stem cells. What is left is the animal body to which we can now assign anything else we want or think it to be, such as a communal pet to hug and feed with our food scraps, as we have seen in chapter two. Ironically enough the image of the animal is still used - mentally and physically - to make IVM appealing for consumption. The association with animal meat is maintained by constantly referring back to it, not only in IVM’s materiality but also with images of animals showed on the packages (See FIG 6).

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In the development towards IVM the ultimate capitalization of animal bodies seems to have been reached. Although designed as a solution to animal exploitation, IVM still departs from a very instrumentalist approach to other species. This is exactly the thought most vegans and vegetarians condemn and the reason why they consciously take a step outside the dominant discourse. By promoting the idea of real, fake meat IVM desperately tries to involve its critics (Miller 60).

FIG 6: A sausage made from ‘‘Pig in the Backyard’’ as presented in the In Vitro Meat Cookbook (Next Nature).

Whereas the promise for animals is generally felt as one of IVM’s biggest advantages, the most common counterargument is that it would upend the idea of living naturally in the world (Driessens and van de Weele, In Vitro Meat: Animal Liberation? 83). IVM’s ‘‘yuck factor’’ can be related back to our suspiciousness to something that concerns food and is alien to us; to anything that departs from the ‘‘ordinary palate’’. But it is mainly the lack of control over how this product is manufactured that contributes to our suspicion. IVM does not come from a cow, a pig or a chicken and is therefore not ‘‘checked’’ and balanced with nature. The latter, while the idea that ‘‘natural is good’’ is prevalent among ‘‘the conscious consumer’’, a

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thought food companies faultlessly respond to in their campaigns, flooding us with rural images of nature, happy, ruddy farmers and an abundant use of the colour green.

Koen van Mensvoort, co-author of the In Vitro Meat Cookbook, is amazed at how, ‘‘in a time and place dominated by technology in which children know more brands and logos than birds and tree species’’ we still like to design our environment according to an idea of untouched nature (van Mensvoort, Ted Talk). The version of nature he points at here is a very one dimensional, romantic one that we have long surpassed, if it even existed at all beyond the human imagination. IVM - coming from the lab - does not bode well with this idea at all. But van Mensvoort still refuses to describe IVM as unnatural, at least not less natural than the way meat is produced now. ‘‘Nature’’ and ‘‘natural’’ are problematic terms, especially when it concerns meat, since some animals we eat do not occur ‘‘naturally’’ but are bred specifically.

The idea of nature as a static energy is no longer tenable. Rather, it is a dynamic process that has changed along with us and still does. According to van Mensvoort, human beings are technological beings. Even when they lived with nature more closely, they manipulated it with technology. Technological developments from the past that may seem natural to us now once were revolutionary too. The invention of agriculture and cooking changed human diets significantly and thereby their physical development. Thousands of years ago eating boiled vegetables signified a radical change. Anno 2028 this is developed to eating a meal made from proliferating muscle cells grown in a laboratory.

From In Vivo to In Vitro

However, there is a difference when we talk about biotechnology whivh is not about human intervention in an already existing natural system, but about creating new matter. Haraway also insists on this when saying that, although life may seem to be overwhelmingly ‘‘denatured’’ by human practices, it is not a denaturing so much as a particular production of nature (Haraway qtd. in Warkentin 87). The domain of ‘‘birth’’ and ‘‘origin’’ and the ‘‘made’’ have started to blur since large volumes of the biological research rests on cells and culturing them outside the original body, a method that has become increasingly important for new biological objects to be made (Landecker 4-5). Therefore, cells became important, patentable and productive economic entities (3).

Biology had long been the paradigm of a natural science, one in which applications were restricted in number and scope; when serious biologists began to see themselves as designers

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and inventors of new things, the conceptual and practical significance of “nature’’ became to evaporate (Pauly qtd. in Landecker 94).

According to Landecker, the history of biotechnology may be described as the increasing realization and exploration of the plasticity of living matter (232), as we can see in the development towards IVM as well. In her book Culturing Cells - subtitled: How Cells Became Technologies - she asks the question how it is that life, once seated firmly in the interior of the bodies of animals and plants, is now located in the laboratory.

I would like to direct my focus to this aspect of cultured meat; that is taking cells, thus life, from the animal body. What are the consequences to our own bodies and the way we relate to animals now when cell technology created the possibility of removing life from the body without ever returning to it again? (Landecker 176).

In 1911 dr. Alexis Carrel form the Rockefeller Institute for Medical research and his assistant Montrose Burrows formally defined tissue culture for the first time as ‘‘a plasmatic medium inoculated with small fragments of living tissue’’ (Landecker 53) to describe the research they were conducting on regeneration and organ transplants. Cells were taken from the animal body and grown in a ‘‘medium’’, which replaces the body supplied by the lab to let the cell grow.

The act of taking a stem cell from an animal is a violent one that does not show respect for the animal as a whole individual, but rather abstracts it into fragments that can be mediated through technological apparatuses (Zurr and Catts, Disembodied Livestock 107). This may not involve the necessity to kill the animal, but it will nevertheless objectify the animal body into a biological machine that can be made transparent, knowable and predictable. IVM changes assumptions to the interiority and hiddenness of certain bodily processes that remain invisible in current meat production and animal bodies as we know them now (Lancecker 32). The move from in vivo to in vitro - where the substance of the animal body will be always ‘‘visible’’ through the glass - does not liberate the animal but again reduced it to its former state, from a sentient point of view, more vegetable than animal (Holland qtd. in Warkentin 99).

Carrel and Burrows adapted the existing technique of cell culture, but then changed its method fundamentally. The most profound change is the introduction of the idea of ‘‘continuous culture’’, which means they could make new cultures from old ones, without returning to the animal body (Landecker 53). This changed the relation to the animal body

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even more because the cultures get further and further removed from their original ones. But wouldn’t this mean it liberates the animal then? I postulate this is not the kind of disembodiment we want to pursue. As I have discussed in the first chapter, the human-animal interaction through direct embodied experiences is of great importance to our relationship with animals, and thus to our own perception of being human in the world. Therefore the treatment of animals as mere artefacts is not only a threat to animal welfare but also to the vital sensibilities of human beings (Bowring 3). The ways we are about to grow and construct meat will affect not only our culture but also our bodies, just like eating animals does. The food we eat shapes us, not only physically but also mentally, since it is not only the materiality of the food we eat that we relate to, but also the thoughts and feelings it creates inside us (Derrida 283).

IVM means a degradation of the quality of our feelings towards animals and will result in a loss of our capacity to relate to other animals empathically. This is inevitable when we choose to disassociate us from other animals, failing to see them as companion species, arresting our efforts to see the characteristics we share, labeling their bodies in mechanical terms instead We will equate the body with information instead of connecting with it as a warm, living individual being in this world.

This mechanical way of thinking stands in dark contrast with the feelings of ‘‘pathos’’ and ‘‘compassion’’ that Derrida assigns to human beings. In his famous essay The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow) he states that when these feelings are awakened in people this could result in an awareness, it could raise voices - although still weak and marginal - and trigger our responsibilities and obligations in respect towards the living animal (395). Elizabeth Costello, one of the characters in J. M. Coutzee’s bundle The Life of Animals, describes the same feeling, which she calls ‘‘sympathy’’. The centerpiece of a collection of essays with the same name, organized around the question of animal rights, as transcribed after a lecture he gave at Princeton University. Costello urges us to recognize the accessibility of our sympathy for other living beings, when she says: ‘‘(…) there is no limit to the extent to which we can think ourselves into the being of another. There are no bounds to the sympathetic imagination” (35). But is Costello right when she says this? We may be able to feel sympathy which allows us to ‘‘share at times the being of another’’ (34) but we seem to be even more skilful in resigning this feeling when we refuse to think ourselves into the place of animals. Although both texts – of Derrida and Costello – are written without referring to IVM, what I want to demonstrate here is that a mechanical approach is not an expression of respect to animals but rather upholds the idea of human superiority and

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undermines both Costello’s and Derrida’s arguments about sympathy just as much as traditional meat production does.

A Peak Into a Disembodied Cuisine

Two artists who are questioning the issues around IVM and write and speak about it extensively are the Australian based Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, mostly through their self termed ‘‘wet biology art’’ (Carruth 92). They are the lead investigators and artists of the Tissue Culture and Art Project (TC&A) at the host organization SymbioticA in Western Australia, which, according to themselves ‘‘questions conventional notions of human relations with other living systems, and the human position within the continuum of life, by using living tissues from complex organisms as a medium to create semi-living entities and/or objects of partial life’’ (Catts and Zurr, Disembodied Livestock 104).

Different from the work of van Mensvoort and Grievink, who offer a very optimistic, fantastical and amusing view on the future of meat in their cookbook, Catts and Zurr’s work is more critical towards a future of cultured meat. Moreover, their art includes the developing of in vitro and in vivo organisms by themselves, continuously experimenting in scavenging, growing, cooking, feeding and palate altering (Catts and Zurr qtd. in Carruth 94).

Both collectives Next Nature and the TC&A Project interrogate the ethics of culturing meat by exploring the relationship between the lab and the kitchen, one of the most common zones between humans and other living organisms, with both the same intention: to enlist our participation as eaters in making cultured food less threatening (Carruth 97).

An important aspect of the work of Catts and Zurr is the public staging of their experiments and installations, with which they wish to challenge ‘‘scientific authority’’ and encourage the formation of a community of hobbyists to ‘‘share an open source ethos of biological research’’(Carruth 94). They aim to do this by organising workshops, teaching methods of molecular and cellular biology to participants - with no advanced science backgrounds – letting them create their own edible tissue cultures.

Their most famous artwork titled Disembodied Cuisine offers an example of how they took this form of food out of the lab and into a public environment. The installation is part of The TC&A Semi-Living Steak Project, the outcome of a residency at the Tissue Engineering & Organ Fabrication Laboratory at Harvard Medical School in 2000 (Carruth 94). The project addresses the possibility of IVM grown from animals - frogs in this case - while the animals are still alive. The installation took shape in 2003 at a bioart exhibition in Nantes, France, where they set up a dining table nicely - including plates, cutlery and wine - in a

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narrow space comparable to a glasshouse. Right next to it they created a big, igloo shaped space completely covered in thick black plastic, except for six little round windows. This was meant to be the biocreator where the frog meat, or ‘‘steaks for non killers’’, was grown. The installation was organised around this idea, and made biotechnological nature of IVM tactile in the installation. This dark, round dome, the ‘‘lab’’, stood in contrast with the light, rectangular and spare dinging room. Cloistering the work on the tissue culture in such a dark space intensifies the drama of exposing bodily interiors to the light and to the public (Kelly 245). Additionally, the combination of the dinner table next to the biocretor created a hybrid space bringing together the lab and the kitchen. Visitors of the installation could participate in ‘‘feeding’’ the cells that were ready to be consumed at the end of the installation. The culmination of the project consisted of the tasting of the tiny frog steaks ‘‘marinated in calvados, fried in honey and garlic’’ and served as ‘‘victimless meat’’ (Carruth 94). The artists created these steaks during the installation of this project and were only ready for consumption at the end of the show. On both sides of the glasshouse two aquariums were installed. The frogs whose stem cells had been taken were still alive inside, reminiscent of those display aquariums of many seafood restaurants where lobsters and fish are shown until they are chosen to be eaten. It created uneasiness among the audience when the source of their food looked back at them. But the chirping frogs in the verdant gardens also suggested that in vitro meat is closer to cultivating edible plants than to raising and slaughtering live-stock (Carruth 96). Ionat Zurr describes the installation as follows:

Semi-living frog steaks were grown, thus poking fun at the French taste and their resentment toward engineered food (…) Frog skeletal muscle was grown over biopolymer for potential food consumption, while the healthy frogs lived alongside as part of the installation. In the last day of the show, the steak was cooked and eaten in a Nouvelle Cuisine style dinner and the four frogs that were rescued from the farm were released to a beautiful pond in the local botanical gardens (Catts and Zurr, Disembodied Livestock 107).

With their installation Catts and Zurr introduced a new kind of organism, the ‘‘semi-living’’, a category that skirts the edges of the animal, plant, microbial and synthetic worlds’’ (Catts and Zurr, Disembodied Livestock 93). If parts of living beings are taken out of the context of the host body and further abstracted from it by technological mediation and fed with blood plasma, what kind of matter are we creating? We are creating in vitro life, consisting of living and non-living materials. These cells are freed from the animal body and thus form the

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natural life span of their original organism, which makes artificial meat a human-animal interaction open to long-term, even life-long, engagement (Kelly 220). If we can endlessly produce new cells out of this tissue that will disperse with a chain-letter effect, does this mean we are creating an immortal object?

FIG 7: Disembodied Cuisine as installed in the bioart exhibition in Nantes in 2003 (TC&A Project). This question reminds us of the world famous case of Henrietta Lacks in 1951, in which living human material was used as a morphological and pathological specimen in medical research for the first time. A happening that created fascination with the world from 1951 until now. When Henrietta Lacks walked into the hospital in Baltimore she was suffering from a big tumour on her cervix. They took a fragment of her living tissue in order to imitate the function of the body in the lab to such a degree that human cells could be grown apart from the body and used in its place in experiments (Landecker 140). The so-called ‘‘HeLa’’ cell line was created. When it appeared her cells could be indefinitely reproduced and distributed, this became the first human contentious cell line ever. The distribution to and the presence in laboratories all over the world of what had been a single specimen from one person was an utterly new mode of existence for human matter (Landecker 140). Most notable is that Henrietta died of her illness eight months after the biopsy, but her cells

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