Meat Planet : Artificial Flesh and the Future of Food Hardback

by Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft

Part of the California Studies in Food and Culture series

Hardback

Available to Order - This title is available to order, with delivery expected within 2 weeks

Description

In 2013, a Dutch scientist unveiled the worldâ€™s first laboratory-created hamburger.

Since then,Â the idea of producing meat, not from live animals but from carefully cultured tissues, has spread like wildfire through the media.

Meanwhile,Â cultured meat researchers race against population growth and climate change in an effort to make sustainable protein.Â Meat Planet explores the quest to generate meat in the labâ€”a substance sometimes called â€œcultured meatâ€â€”and asks what it means to imagine that this is the future of food. Neither an advocate nor a critic of cultured meat, Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft spentÂ five years researching the phenomenon.

InÂ Meat Planet, heÂ reveals how debates about lab-grown meat reach beyond debates about food, examining the links between appetite, growth, and capitalism.

Could satiating the growing appetite for meat actually lead to our undoing?

Are we simply using one technology to undo the damage caused by another?

Like all problems in our food system, the meat problem is not merely a problem of production.

It is intrinsically social and political, and it demands that we examine questions of justice and desirable modes of living in a shared and finite world. Benjamin Wurgaft tells a story that could utterly transform the way we think of animals, the way we relate to farmland, the way we use water, and the way we think about population and our fragile ecosystemâ€™s capacity to sustain life.

He argues that even if cultured meat does not â€œsucceed,â€ it functionsâ€”much like science fictionâ€”as a crucial mirror that we can hold up to our contemporary fleshy dysfunctions. Â