In Vitro Nuggets Please. No Ketchup.
Promises and fears are associated with food technologies producing fake meat. One method associated with biotech industries is termed, by the Australian-based artists Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, “victimless meat”; another is cloned cattle and goats that enter the food chain as a product of medical technology.
In the essay, "Tissue-cultured Meat, Genetically Modified Farm Animals, and Fictions," Susan McHugh comments, "While outbreaks of viruses like swine and avian flu make headlines, more insidious threats like drug-resistant strains of bacteria quietly grow endemic within meat industries. With little hope of solving these problems through business as usual, proponents of the increasingly centralized and globalized meat-making industries focus
instead on mitigating a still more pervasive sense of discomfort with cross-species intimacies at the site of slaughter. Facing enormous pressures to meet rising consumer demands, producers pin their hopes on technologically reconfiguring meat itself through
tissue culturing, producing “real artificial meat” in vitro, in a Petri dish, rather than in whole-animal form."
Is tissue-cultured meat (meat produced in vitro, in a cell culture, rather than from an animal) the solution?
Will fake meat reverse the eco-catastrophes wrought by modern meat industries?
Is laboratory meat-making more humane than conventional meat production?
Oron Catts notes that meats grown outside of their hosts’ body has a long history. J. M. J. Jolly invented a technique for sustaining tissues from complex organisms in 1903. It was perfected in 1910 by Alexis Carrel, who coined the term “tissue culture”. Eighty years later, Joseph Vacanti
and Robert Langar invented the degradable scaffolding technique that allows cell clusters to be grown in three dimensions. This enabled the creation of the infamous mouse with a human ear growing on its back that revolutionized biomedical capabilities.
The animal rights organization ‘People for the EthicalTreatment of Animals’ (PETA) obviously believes vitro meat is more ethical than farm raised meat. The organization is offering a million dollar prize for the first company to bring real artificial meat to market. The PETA contest aims specifically to provide artificial chicken “nuggets.”
Yet PETA members may be surprised to learn that in vitro technology still relies on animals and animal products. The ‘meat’ is typically cultivated from goldfish, sheep, and toad cells that are kept alive with serum derived from other kinds of animals.
Catts and Zurr are intent on addressing the ethical issues associated with their art practice. That is why the refer to their creations as “semi-living sculptures.” The term calls attention to the fact that these creations are not simulations or variations on existing life forms to be commercially exploited. They exemplify “a type of being (semi-being, semi-living) that does not fall under current biological or cultural classifications.” It is “a new class of being” that raises unique concerns about ethics and rights and technology. Catts and Zurr question how the fragile are the dependent life forms of cells and tissues made to live outside bodies.