Americans will eat about two billion chicken nuggets this year, give or take a few hundred million. This deep-fried staple of the nation’s diet is a way of profiting off the bits that are left after the breast, legs, and wings are lopped off the nine billion or so factory-farmed chickens slaughtered in the country every year. Like much else that is ubiquitous in contemporary life, the production of nuggets is controlled by a small group of massive companies that are responsible for a litany of social and ecological harms. And, like many of the commodities produced by this system, they are of dubious quality, cheap, appealing, and easy to consume. Nuggets are not even primarily meat but mostly fat and assorted viscera—including epithelium, bone, nerve, and connective tissue—made palatable through ultra-processing. As the political economists Raj Patel and Jason Moore have argued, they are a homogenized, bite-sized avatar of how capitalism extracts as much value as possible from human and nonhuman life and labor.
But if chicken nuggets are emblematic of contemporary capitalism, then they are ripe for disruption. Perhaps their most promising challenger is a radically different sort of meat: edible tissue grown in vitro from animal stem cells, a process called cellular agriculture. The sales pitch for the technology is classic Silicon Valley: unseat an obsolete technology—in this case, animals—and do well by doing good.
Intensive animal agriculture, which produces nuggets and most of the other meat that Americans consume, keeps the price of meat artificially low by operating at huge economies of scale and shifting the costs of this production onto people, animals, and the planet. The industry deforests the land, releases hundreds of millions of tons of greenhouse gases every year, creates terrible working conditions at slaughterhouses, and necessitates abhorrent animal treatment on farms, all while engaging in price fixing, lobbying for environmental and labor deregulation, and pushing for unconstitutional anti-whistleblower laws.
The problem is that people love eating meat, with global production and consumption growing steadily and little sign of a collective vegan epiphany on the horizon. This makes intensive animal agriculture a wicked problem: something so obviously detrimental, and yet so politically and socially entrenched, that it is unclear where reformers should even start. Cellular agriculture, however, seems to offer a potential socio-technological hack: it could eliminate much of the damage that system causes, without requiring consumers to sacrifice meat.
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Gender, Sexuality Feminist Studies