A specialty meat grower of the future talks about his profession.

This project is based on a brief received at the RCA in 2005 which starts like this:

Scientists are developing methods of growing meat in labs using animal cells. This area of research, called ‘in-vitro-cultured meat production’ raises all sorts of complex issues about the meaning of food, our relationship to animals (and nature), human values and behaviours, and even taboos.

If in-vitro-cultured meat became a wide-spread, commercial commodity it would re-invent the meat-producing market sector and trades.

How would the producers of this meat try to create distinguishable and competitive value for their customers and which working trades would arise and replace our traditional meat-related professions?

The value of the meat we eat

In order to compete in the market place, in-vitro meat producers would inevitably try to create a recognisable value around their lab-grown meat. At the current state of this biotechnology, notions of quality of the resulting meat are rarely addressed and one can only assume and imagine them. Could this quality be measured and tasted? After all, a cell is a cell and a petri dish is a petri dish. So what marks the difference?

Looking at today’s speciality meat production, the sense of quality and value is created by using traditional procedures, by guaranteeing quality ingredients and by the reassuring poetics of hand-production.

Traditional parma ham production in Italy

Consumers of in-vitro meat would need to learn a new vocabulary for judging the quality of lab-grown meat. Phrases such as ‘carefully injected with healthy Omega 3 fats’, ‘hand-exercised by experienced meat growers’ and ‘all cells derived from our genetically superior mother cow’ may be found on the packaging of lab-grown meat.

Experienced meat growers hand-exercise the meat cultures and carefully inject healthy Omega 3 fats into the stem cells which have derived from the genetically superior mother cow

The tools of the trade

Today’s tools and procedures for turning dead animals into meat for consumption follow the properties of the animal (size, shape, weight and texture). The fast, bold axe stroke performed by the butcher when he chops animals into pieces stands in direct contrast to the movements which are required to grow meat in laboratories. Growing meat in laboratories follows the properties of cell-cultures and the movements related to them are small and delicate. Thus, in a world of in-vitro grown meat, the image of the blood soaked hands and arms of a butcher would be replaced by the one of the white-gloved hand injecting organic solutions into the meat fibre.

Tools of the butcher, tools of the lab-meat grower

Considering Marshall McLuhan’s viewpoint when he says: “We shape our tools and forever thereafter they shape us.”, it is interesting to ask how such procedures of lab production would change our relationship to animals, to the meat we eat and ultimately change us. They would certainly add a revolutionary different layer to our meat culture, such as digital technology has to our communication and print culture.

Listen to a speciality meat grower of the future

We do not know how the introduction of in-vitro cultured meat would change our society, but we can start imagining possible stories, people and consequences.

What if a new trade of meat growers emerged and what if their measures of quality and value sounded strangely familiar to those of traditional meat production? – Listen to a speciality meat grower of the future talking about his trade (spoken by Graham Headicar).