Food technopolitical innovation and the geographies of inequality

The environmental impact of livestock farming challenges human-animal relations. In this context, cell-cultured meat, or meat made in the lab, emerges as a technopolitical innovation to multispecies entanglements, promising solutions to some of the most devastating impacts of food protein production. We conceive of synthetic protein production as a promissory assemblage, which means that cultured meat includes a set of uncertainties which, paradoxically, nurture the industry’s promissory lure. While it could deliver some positive impacts, we wish to highlight other, far less calculated risks, such as the mobilization of new food supply chains across the world and the creation of new inequalities. These new geographies also create new entanglements and inequalities between Global North and Global South as suppliers and consumers of these new products. To reduce the negative environmental impact of carbon-intensive industrial livestock farming, alternative proteins might transform those production chains, and particularly re-locate them to those countries where the technology is more advanced. This has been the case in the development of cell cultured meat, a high tech innovation process, the advancement and regulation of which is centered in Europe, USA, and Israel. In this respect, then, the meat "revolution" can actually reproduce "durable" (Tilly, 1998) inequalities. Our contribution is based on expert interviews with scientists, food designers, investors and politicians, as well as visual analysis of synthetic food products’ promotion. Looking at cell-cultured meat as a “cluster of promises” (Berlant, 2011), we side with attempts within STS to imagine an alternative techno-scientic future for meat production and consumption.