On Resurrected Nuggets and Sphincter Windows: Cultured Meat, Art, and the Discursive Subsumption of Nature

ABSTRACT

In this article, I scrutinize three art, design, and architecture projects engaging with “cultured,” or “in vitro,” meat (primarily muscle cells cultured outside of bodies) to illuminate the entanglements of academic and extra-academic environments that have characterized cultured meat’s history to date, and the conversations that this technology has spurred. In envisioning new ways of eating, and living, these projects (a book of hypothetical recipes, The In Vitro Meat Cookbook, Catts and Zurr’s bioartistic engagements with tissue engineering, and Terreform1’s tissue-house prototype “The In Vitro Meat Habitat”) illustrate cultural practices thought to be enabled by cell culturing’s new applications. Emphasizing such visions and conversations allows me to highlight an inattention to discursive dynamics within research on natures subsumed to industrial production processes (Boyd, Prudham, and Schurman 2001). But engaging with the “subsumption of nature” framework simultaneously allows me to problematize artistic visions presenting nature as fully malleable.

KEYWORDS:

• Art
• biotechnology
• discourse
• meat
• representations
• subsumption of nature

Acknowledgments

This article emerged from a session, “Exploring the subsumption of nature: Real and/or formal?,” at the 2015 meeting of the Association of American Geographers. I thank Wim Carton for co-organizing this session with me, those participating in the session, and Gavin Bridge and Beatriz Bustos for organizing a similar session (“Harder, Faster, Deeper, Stronger: Ecological Restructuring and the Primary Sector”), which ensured that we could attract a crowd dedicated to discussing how environments are treated. I would also like to thank the Society & Natural Resources editorial team, the three anonymous reviewers for their constructive criticism, and John Elrick and Katherine Burlingame for forcing me to further develop my argument.