On breweries and bioreactors: Probing the “present futures” of cellular agriculture

Abstract

Set against the attention given to animal-agricultural geographies and animal agriculture's environmental impacts, proponents of cultured meat (i.e., biomass cultured from cells) and genetic modification-based “cellular-agricultural” technologies today promise that the production of animal products could become more sustainable if animals were taken out of the equation. Though future visions for such a shift have often centred on how much land could be saved through the deployment of new biotechnologies, proponents and researchers today increasingly also foreground the future economic geographies and sites of production that these should engender. In this paper I explore such envisioned geographies, building on 24 interviews with cellular-agricultural actors and on observations during meetings. Essentially echoing an ecomodernist embrace of the Anthropocene as a great opportunity, cellular-agriculturalists frequently promise that the technologies they advocate should offer the possibility to unfetter the production of animal products from spatial constraints. (Post-)animal products can now be produced anywhere. But in assuring that products and production processes should feel familiar, they frequently also describe a world where microbrewery-like facilities and transparent production processes supplant industrialised animal agriculture's remote slaughterhouses. Hence, a kind of craft-emphasising “recombinant” ecomodernism emerges. In exploring cellular-agricultural future visions, my aim is not to determine whether, or which, particular visions might be realised. Rather, I centre on descriptions of future spaces of production and economic geographies in order to explore contemporary biotech boosterism. Engaging with these visions, as well as the often unchronicled creative destruction that they could entail, thus allows me to contribute to an emerging set of texts that scrutinise the current and intended political economy (and ecology) of cellular agriculture, as well as texts emphasising the necessity of pondering Anthropocene spatialities.