Meat without meat – The found science of meat and contemporary vegan biotech

Keywords: meat, found meat, founded concepts, found science, food science and technology, Impossible Burger, Beyond Meat, Just Meat
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Friday
Session Start / End Time: 2/25/2022 11:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/25/2022 12:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 58

Abstract

I have previously argued that some everyday ideas get transfigured into new scientific concepts by being founded in scientific knowledge-making practices (Efstathiou 2009, 2012, 2016; Efstathiou et al. 2019). These new, founded concepts often keep their everyday names but work as scientific ideas sustaining and generating more science. For example, when economists measure ‘wellbeing’, they are not using some everyday idea of wellbeing, but first found a common idea in an epistemic-metaphysical-social context of economics, thereby articulating it as a new, founded, economics concept which they can operationalise and measure (Efstathiou 2016). But can founded concepts jump back to everyday life and how? This talk explores how science travels back to everyday life by examining meat and meat concepts.

I propose that this type of creative meaning-making is happening with ideas of ‘meat’ (and ‘burger’, ‘mince’, etc.) within food science and technology practices. Companies like Impossible Burger, Beyond Meat or, cultured meat company, Just Meat are founding everyday ideas of meat into novel plant- or cell-based food biotechnology contexts creating new founded, meat concepts. They do this through activities ranging from imitating the molecular properties of (animal-based) meat or growing tissue in a lab, to vision-statements and marketing matching the “good stuffs” of meat (Sexton 2016). Though the result here is not, or not only, found science but found meat. This paper argues that these founded meat concepts can and are entering the culinary practices of everyday life, bringing meat to the plate in new forms.