Meat Mimesis

Abstract

This article examines an emerging form of contemporary food biotechnology, laboratory-grown or “cultured” meat, that often seeks to copy conventional “in vivo” animal flesh by using in vitro techniques. The ultimate goal of cultured meat research is to devise an alternative to the environmentally damaging and ethically undesirable infrastructure that makes “cheap” industrial-scale meat possible. Formal research into cultured meat has been underway since the early 2000s. However, after almost two decades of experiments, it is still unclear if this avenue of research will produce a viable meat product at scale, or if it is even possible to perfectly copy the physical characteristics of in vivo meat. There are technical limitations on scientists’ ability to reproduce the precise textures, tastes, and overall “mouthfeel” of familiar types of meat gleaned through butchery. Cultured meat proceeds from a premise we might call “biological equivalency,” the view that animal cells grown in a bioreactor will have the same characteristics as their in vivo counterparts, and it breaks from a standing approach in food science that we might call “sensorial equivalency,” which seeks to reproduce not meat itself but rather the sensory experience of eating meat, usually starting with a substrate of plant cells. This article, which draws from five years of ethnographic fieldwork in the cultured meat movement, seeks to illuminate not only the historical but also the philosophical questions raised by efforts to copy meat. Drawing on the work of the intellectual historian Hans Blumenberg, this article concludes with an exploration of mimesis itself, understood as the imitation of nature.