A recent wave of plant-based meat substitutes has gained a cultural toehold, spearheaded by Impossible Foods’ Impossible Burger and its franchised brethren, such as Burger King’s Impossible Whopper and Starbucks’ Impossible Breakfast Sandwich. In a similar vein are nascent attempts to synthesize comestible meat from cultured animal cells, ranging from San Diego startup BlueNalu’s yellowtail fish to Higher Steaks’ bacon and pork belly. Unsurprisingly, these products have research and industry overlaps with technologies that support manufacturing human organs for medical purposes including transplantation and pharmaceutical testing.
These products’ Gothic implications and connections to touchstone works such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are overt, and they unearth a complicated tangle of cultural issues. The blurred distinctions between plant and animal, natural and synthetic, human and non-human provide an uncanny reminder that such divisions are enforced rather than innate. This talk traces how the phrase “lab-grown” and its offshoots has been applied to food in news articles, and it uses Bruno Latour’s concept of hybrids to clarify its mingling of politics, ethics, science, technology, and nature.