Abstract
Today plant-based alternatives to animal-agricultural products are made available or developed alongside ‘cultured’ meat, and products utilising genetic modification. To proponents, this signifies the emergence of ‘cellular agriculture’ as a food-production field or the possibility of a ‘post-animal bioeconomy’: a way to safely and sustainably produce animal products without animals. Drawing on previous work on ontological politics enables acknowledging how these novel objects unsettle animal products’ ontological stability, thereby offering a practical case of how the world is multiply produced. An important emphasis within this tradition is the situated nature of reality-making practices. Consequently our analysis, focusing on different practices, sites and objects compared to influential studies of ontological politics, necessitates bringing in hitherto relatively unexplored political-economic relations and legal processes. As global processes and problem formulations, laboratories, and national or regional regulations come together to remake realities the ontological-political dynamics determining the fate of cellular agriculture or a post-animal bioeconomy becomes shaped by a combination of conflicts and budding collaborations between proponents of new technologies and established livestock interests. Understanding these dynamics requires tracing both how post-animal products reshape the world they are introduced into, and acknowledging the friction evident as reality-carrying objects leave their laboratories.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Journal | Science as Culture |
| Volume | 28 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| Pages (from-to) | 70-97 |
| Number of pages | 28 |
| ISSN | 0950-5431 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2 Jan 2019 |
Keywords
- Faculty of Humanities
- Meat, milk, biotechnology, ontological politics, food
