From'meat Culture'to'cultured Meat': Critically Evaluating the Contested

This may be the author’s version of a work that was submitted/accepted for publication in the following source: Johnson, Hope (2019) From ’meat culture’ to ’cultured meat’: Critically evaluating the contested ontologies and transformative potential of biofabricated animal material on culture and law. M/C Journal, 22(2), pp. 1-5. This ﬁle was downloaded from: https://eprints.qut.edu.au/128934/ c 2019 The Author(s) Open access article. Moral rights of author apply. M/C Journal holds re- maining rights. License: Creative Commons: Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 Notice: Please note that this document may not be the Version of Record (i.e. published version) of the work. Author manuscript versions (as Sub- mitted for peer review or as Accepted for publication after peer review) can be identiﬁed by an absence of publisher branding and/or typeset appear- ance. If there is any doubt, please refer to the published source. http:// journal.media-culture.org.au/ index.php/ mcjournal/ article/ view/ 1504 M/C Journal, Vol 22, No 2 (2019) From “Meat Culture” to “Cultured Meat”: Critically Evaluating the Contested Ontologies and Transformative Potential of Biofabricated Animal Material on Culture and Law Hope Johnson Abstract Introduction According to its proponents and developers, we will soon be consuming animal flesh that has been manufactured outside of an animal’s body using a suite of technologies and processes that fall under the broad banner of biofabrication. This flesh, termed “clean meat” by proponents, is expected to be safer, healthier, victimless and far more environmentally benign than flesh derived from an animal’s body within intensive animal agriculture systems. As the Good Food Institute, an established non-governmental body for reducing meat consumption through the creation of new products, claims: Clean meat is one breakthrough solution to the problems associated with raising animals for food. Clean meat is created by growing meat outside of an animal from a small cell sample, eliminating the need for factory farming and slaughter. This kind of narrative has dominated media and scholarship on the new material, which this article refers to as biofabricated animal material (see, e.g., Dilworth and McGregor; Driessen and Korthals; O’Riordan et al.). Recently, however, a counter-narrative about the material has entered key discursive spaces. Triggered by lobbying efforts of meat industry stakeholders and taking place largely in the legal terrain, the counter-narrative is not critical of the technologies and processes deployed to bring the material about. Rather, and at this stage, it largely casts doubt on the nature of the material itself and what actions bring meat into existence. This line of discussion is concerned with the ontology of meat and of biofabricated animal material, that is, it is concerned with what an object is in reality to different groups, how it comes to be that object, and the ways in which these varying understandings of the reality intersect, diverge and influence outcomes (Mol, Body Multiple; Law and Lien). Before public attention was drawn to this new material and the suite of related, emerging technologies being developed to create it, what meat was and how it came about has been relatively stable. We generally understood meat to be specific kinds of animal flesh, prepared in particular ways in accordance with cultural norms, and which were extracted from a dead animal in a farming context. Even with the rise of plant-based norms within meat cultures, meat was still understood as being animal flesh. Indeed, the animal welfare and animal rights movements have in part reinforced the ontology of meat with their emphasis on the interests of the animal in the context of meat production and consumption, while the cognitive dissonance that “guilty meat-eaters” experience when consuming meat stems in part from their understanding of meat as animal flesh derived from an animal killed in order to provide flesh. Yet, the accepted reality—i.e. the ontology—of meat has recently become destabilised. Meat is now the subject of multiple interpretations, or ontologies, of how meat is meat, which realities compete in debates about legal definitions of meat. Broadly, proponents of biofabricated animal material understand meat to be anything that is animal flesh regardless of the processes that made it come about, including whether the flesh was ever part of a body. This ontology is being deployed in a political way to support the collective, discursively constructed expectations that biofabricated animal material will disrupt meat culture, while assuring consumers that the material is, in reality, still meat. Meanwhile opponents focus on the enactment of meat, that is, the agricultural practices that go into making “animal flesh” and turning it into meat. These contesting ontologies are playing out in largely legal arenas to date, suggesting that what is legally defined as meat will have political and cultural consequences for the future of food. Yet, this article calls into question how different the parallel ontologies of meat are in terms of the realities they enact. It argues that while biofabricated animal material is expected to transform the production and consumption of meat, the material’s ontologies reinforce existing interrelationships between the dominant meat culture and the law. Additionally, the expectations surrounding biofabricated animal material vests the material with transformative power, even though it does not challenge the structural factors, namely law and culture, which underlie the exploitation and commodification of animals. I begin by delineating the co-constituting relationship between law, the realities of meat production and consumption, and meat culture. I then unpack the interface between different ontologies of meat and consider why the contest has taken place in legal terrains. From here, I consider the key expectations that have assigned transformative power to biofabricated animal material. I suggest that these expectations work to reinforce existing meat culture, and the configurations of power that benefit from it, as supported via legal instruments. Meat, Meat Culture and the Law Central to cultural legal studies is the theory of “law as culture” rather than law and culture being separate spaces that occasionally intersect (Mezey; Sarat and Simon; Ewick and Silbey; cf. Schlag). This understanding sees law and culture as non-static dimensions co-constructing each other, and law as a particular cultural product through its ability to make and stabilise meaning (Weisbrod; Mezey). Scholars in this space have unpacked some of the ways in which the meanings, practices and sources associated with the law influence ways of being, sensing and knowing on a day-to-day level by “shaping consciousness and making asymmetries of power seem, if not invisible, then natural and benign” (Sarat and Simon 19; see also Marusek). Drawing on this body of work, law and meat culture can be understood as mutually building and reinforcing each other; simultaneously, relevant laws are an artefact of meat culture. Potts (19–20) uses the term “meat culture” to refer to expressions of carnism (Joy chap. 2), including “the representations and discourses, practices and behaviours, diets and tastes that generate shared beliefs about, perspectives on, and experiences of meat.” Carnism is the ideology that condones and legitimises the killing and eating of particular animals. Expressions of carnism construct meat as a food that is “natural, normal, necessary and nice” (Piazza et al.). Laws that condone and enable intensive animal agriculture are an expression of meat culture, as are legal definitions that demarcate the material dimensions of meat. Simultaneously, the role of law in representing and locking-in meat culture is an outcome of socio-cultural processes that diffuse meat culture based on carnism. This co-constructing relationship between law and meat culture is especially evident in the statutory provisions that recognise animals as capable of being the object to which private property rights determine relations (for instance, s. 12 of the Animal Care and Protection Act 2001 (Qld)). Humans, as opposed to animals, are positioned as having a higher moral status that automatically attracts rights to life and to a certain standard of treatment by others and governments (Universal Declaration of Human Rights). Hence, animals are objects of human and corporate ownership rather than holders of rights due to their intrinsic worthiness as living beings. This understanding of animals as commodities both embodies and reinforces contemporary meat culture, and especially Western notions of human-animal relations based on subordination and domination (Huggan and Tiffin 10). The absence of formal law further enables meat-eating cultures stemming from a carnist ideology. In Australia, animal welfare laws recognise that farm animals experience pain and suffering via generic animal cruelty offences that would consider as “cruel” many routine husbandry practices and animal slaughtering. However, most animal welfare laws provide a defence to, or exemption for, actions of a producer that would otherwise constitute an animal cruelty offence if the same actions were directed towards companion animals. In order to provide an effective defence or exception, the producer must have acted in compliance with codes of practice set by farm industry groups (see, e.g., Animal Welfare Act (SA) s. 43). Unsurprisingly,

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