Cultivated meat in fictional works
One of my favorite television shows in recent years, Upload, features a minor appearance of cultivated meat. The series is set in the near future, and is a nice mix of comedy, romance and science fiction. You should watch it if you haven’t already.
Anyway, in one scene, a father, played by Chris Williams, makes slaughter-free meat for his daughter, who’s portrayed by Andy Allo. “I’m printing a Jamie Oliver steak design he tweeted this morning,” Williams says. It’s not the most sympathetic depiction of the technology. Allo’s character complains the printer’s fat cartridge is low.
It got me thinking about other works of fiction that feature cultivated meat. I’ve been meaning to read The Space Merchants, a 1952 novel that apparently falls into this category, but I haven’t gotten around to it. So I decided to ask people interested in cultivated-meat development what their favorite such works are.
Paul Shapiro, the author “Clean Meat: How Growing Meat Without Animals Will Revolutionize Dinner and the World,” highlighted Star Trek: The Next Generation. In one episode, William Riker, played by Jonathan Frakes, explains humanity has moved beyond traditional agriculture.
“We no longer enslave animals for food purposes,” Riker says to an alien questioning his diet. “You’ve seen something as fresh and tasty as meat, but it’s been inorganically materialized out of patterns used by our transporters.”
Shapiro views this as a favorable depiction of something like cellular agriculture. “I fantasize about such a future in which humanity can enjoy all the meat it wants without having to exploit animals for it,” he said. “It's a positive portrayal of clean meat in that it suggests that using animals for food is regrettable.”
Unfortunately, Shapiro was the only person who got back to me. I know, however, that there are other examples of cultivated meat in fiction. There’s a long Reddit thread with a large list of them. So I leave it to my readers. What are your favorite such works?
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