Meat Planet: Artificial Flesh and the Future of Food (California Studies in Food and Culture)

by Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft

In 2013, a Dutch scientist unveiled the world’s first laboratory-created hamburger. Since then, the idea of producing meat, not from live animals but from carefully cultured tissues, has spread like wildfire through the media. Meanwhile, cultured meat researchers race against population growth and climate change in an effort to make sustainable protein.  Meat Planet explores the quest to generate meat in the lab—a substance sometimes called “cultured meat”—and asks what it means to imagine that this is the future of food. Neither an advocate nor a critic of cultured meat, Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft spent five years researching the phenomenon. In  Meat Planet, he reveals how debates about lab-grown meat reach beyond debates about food, examining the links between appetite, growth, and capitalism. Could satiating the growing appetite for meat actually lead to our undoing? Are we simply using one technology to undo the damage caused by another? Like all problems in our food system, the meat problem is not merely a problem of production. It is intrinsically social and political, and it demands that we examine questions of justice and desirable modes of living in a shared and finite world.

Benjamin Wurgaft tells a story that could utterly transform the way we think of animals, the way we relate to farmland, the way we use water, and the way we think about population and our fragile ecosystem’s capacity to sustain life. He argues that even if cultured meat does not “succeed,” it functions—much like science fiction—as a crucial mirror that we can hold up to our contemporary fleshy dysfunctions.  

Genres: Food, Science, Nonfiction, Audiobook, Animals

262 pages, Hardcover

First published September 3, 2019

Reviews

[Radiantflux · Rating 4 out of 5]

5th book for 2020.

A fascinating, discursive ethnographic, historical and philosophic reportage by Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft relating his five year (2013-2018) exploration of the promise and startup hype surrounding cultured meat (i.e., meat grown in vitro).

4-stars.

[Benji · Rating 5 out of 5]

'A biotechnological nature walk, an assemblage of detours through the history of the future of food, a collection of meditations on meat, attentive not only to the ideas of scientists and engineers but also the way they serve as catalysts for philosophical, anthropological, and historical inquiry. Not to set up manifestos for the future, but so that we might better know ourselves today.'

Erudite, witty, ironic, and sincere; made me 'remember that the uncompleted project of becoming what we might be starts with questions.'

[billyskye · Rating 3 out of 5]

meat planet. Meat Planet. MEAT PLANET. MeAt pLaNeT. Meat. Planet.

My sister gave me this book as a gag gift because I once spent a holiday quite a few years back ranting effusively about the potential of in vitro MEAT (‘cultured meat,’ Wurgaft informs us it is now being branded) and I guess it left an impression. But the joke is on her. I read the whole thing and gained immeasurable power. I am an unstoppable MEAT computer piloting a MEAT puppet as it navigates this MEAT PLANET.

About 75 pages in you will be forced to reckon with the unsettling fact that this is not at all what you thought it was. It’s so much stranger. By this point, Wurgaft will have managed to talk about quite literally everything encircling the topic of ‘artificial flesh and the future of food’ while artfully managing to avoid touching the issue itself with any weight at all. He quotes Nietzsche and Lacan and Arendt and Schopenhauer. He divulges the etymological origins of many words and describes the decor of the many rooms in which he MEETS (and conducts ultimately unsatisfying conversations with) many people from tangentially related fields. He brings us along on his trips to Europe and doesn’t neglect to trace the inspiration of Soylent all the way back to its earliest literary source. He confesses his hopes and dreams and fears. It’s like a surreal portrait of a man who has lost all semblance of what Keats would call the ‘negative capability’ and is thereby unable to commit to any definitive statement on the topic in question. Like a really erudite student filibustering their way through a neglected class presentation, Wurgaft gish gallops the page count away, concluding only that this book was written too early to draw conclusions about the subject it was commissioned to explore.

The resulting text is wild. It’s like Ben Lerner does Out of Sheer Rage, but about MEAT instead. Subtextually, this book is not about the artificial flesh industry at all; it’s a subtle tale of a man’s slow descent into madness when confronted by the yawning inscrutability of existence. Wilder still, unlike the aforementioned works, this creation deadpans the entire thing. My guy Wurgaft writes a borderline stream-of-consciousness, meta-nonfictional academic fever dream called MEAT PLANET without winking to the reader even once.

Thank you, MEAT PLANET, for all the good times. Most of all, I’d like to thank you for introducing me to the gloriously repulsive term MEATSPACE – Wurgaft’s suggestion for how we might refer to the physical plane as a contrast to ‘cyberspace.’ I use it all the time. Once, I used it in a pitch meeting so much that a dude interrupted me to scream, “FOR FUCK’S SAKE JUST CALL IT IRL!” But fear not. I won’t stop. I’ll never stop.

One sweet quote by way of valediction:

“Perhaps what is truly unsettling about the concept of cannibal tissue culture experiments is not that we might eat one another, or ourselves, but that technology might introduce a new plasticity into our concept of what it is to be human. The flesh in the bioreactor is not sleeping; we are not waiting for it to wake up and be freshly animated by human will. Our cells, grown in tissue culture, implicate us in the order of livestock, and to eat them would mean embracing this reordering of the human condition.”

[Larissa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wurgaft makes you think!

[Roosevelt · Rating 3 out of 5]

Considering that while this book’s topic has the potential to explode, splattering itself across a plethora of pop culture discussions around our food industry, anthropological studies on the Agricultural Revolution, moral-philosophical oppositions, meat eating culture, political agendas, cattle farming sustainability, accessible food for all wealth classes, and the ethical conversation of whether science experimentation should really interfere with our everyday bread-and-butter. It’s plausible that the writer, and also likely most readers have gotten lost in this intricate web of discourse.

One must have to imagine the difficult task to balance between presenting scientific as well as historical and academic data into which all crammed under 200 pages writing is quite an ambitious task. Yet, we can’t help but to fantasize about that day when we could grab a hold onto a piece of work that has the answer to whether we are approaching the end of traditional animal farming since the Agricultural Revolution; transitioning into the beginning of the fine dining steak nights era delivered straight to you from a friendly local sourced lab. Perhaps let’s propose that lab-grown patties were even plausible, could it really adequately quench our deep affection toward meat to which humankind has been taught and accustomed to for thousands of years?

The craving from our curiosity into this futuristic endeavor might perhaps still within its premature stage from being fully fed. While it might come with a few dings and scratches, this -Meat Planet- isn’t a bad appetite to kickoff the conversation.

[Taryn · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book takes what is an interesting question of our time - do we eat cultivated meat and what does it mean if we do? - and makes it into an astonishingly uninteresting book. Each chapter is an entirely new idea that doesn't feel fully fleshed out (pun intended). In fact, the whole book reads more like the publishing company got tired of waiting for something to happen with the industry and decided to publish a series of essays on what cultivated meat could, possibly, potentially, one day mean philosophically for a handful of people. If you're willing to wade through the tangents and personal ramblings of the author.

Hopefully soon something better will come out!

[YHC · Rating 3 out of 5]

肌纤维分为两种：白肌纤维，能令物疾速或猛然行动；红肌纤维，能令动物维持长时间活动。活动较敏捷的动物，如兔类动物（家兔、野兔和鼠免），往往有较多白肌纤维。而长时间持续运动的动物，如鲸鱼，其发力部位往往有较多的红肌细胞。白肌纤维由糖原（一种葡萄糖结构）供能，存储于纤维内部；而红肌纤维由脂肪供能，依靠一种把脂肪转化为能量的生化机制。该机制包含了构成肉类基本颜色的细胞色素（三种在细胞代谢与呼吸中起重要作用的化合物，由血红素分子与蛋白质键合而成）和肌红蛋白（一种能结合铁与氧的蛋白质）。肌纤维不含脂肪，但脂肪细胞群通常分布在肌纤维及周围结缔组织之间。要注意的是，瘦肉中大约75%为水，20%为蛋白质，3%一5%为脂肪。脂肪对肉味的构成起到了很大的作用。肌肉周围的结缔组织（很多肉块切面上看到的银色“薄面”）有两大主要功能。首先，它支撑肌肉的结构；其次，它将肌肉连到骨头上。构成肌肉的细胞型对于肉的口感自然重要，但肌肉结构也很重要。
https://medium.com/%E9%9A%A8%E7%AD%86... 寫得很好! (朝聖!)

https://taster.life/book-20210128/

[Seb · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow! A truly fascinating book, jam-packed with interesting insight about meat and humankind’s relationship to it. A few detours here and there into Greek mythology and the like, but always interesting - so certainly not a complaint. Anyone interested in anthropology and grappling with the most interesting ethical questions of our era will likely enjoy this book.

[Kai Norden · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was written at least 5 years too early, and perhaps because of that, had very little substance on cultured meat

[Ben · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was surprisingly uninteresting. I had high hopes for the content, but was let down unfortunately.

[Sara Chen · Rating 1 out of 5]

在中文版書目出來之前，先把心得給寫了。

合先敘明，這本書我真的是沒辦法看完QQ
不知道是不是預設錯誤才看不下去，初衷是想了解人造肉帶來的社會問題等等，但這本書實在過於哲學了，看得我昏昏欲睡，即使如此，繼續想看完也做不到，因為在他的哲學討論中，我甚至抓不清楚每個章節的問題意識，讀起來像個人手札的喃喃自語。不得不放棄