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Cultured Meat and Cowless Milk: On Making Markets for Animal-Free Food

Article  in  Journal of Cultural Economy · February 2018

DOI: 10.1080/17530350.2018.1452277

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 Cultured Meat and Cowless Milk: On Making Markets for Animal-Free Food

Michael Mouat and Russell Prince*

2018

Forthcoming in Journal of Cultural Economy

(edited 5/3/2018 to correct error on heme based meat producers)

School of People, Environment and Planning

Massey University
Palmerston North
New Zealand
r.j.prince@massey.ac.nz

*corresponding author

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Abstract

According to its proponents, animal-free animal food products, such as cultured meat and synthetic
cow’s milk, has the potential to overcome various environmental, health and ethical challenges that
have emerged around global animal product consumption and the industrial agriculture that is needed
to support it. Apart from the myriad of technical problems making animal-free food products, critics
have pointed out the blurry ontological status of the food and the ethical challenges therein, and have
questioned the veracity of the various promissory narratives being produced. This paper considers
animal-free food from a social studies of economies and markets (SSEM) perspective. As a market that
currently mostly only exists in potential, an SSEM perspective can reveal the various social and material
relations that comprise the (bio)capital formation that will underpin any market-to-be, an aspect of
markets that are often invisible once markets are up and running. Moreover, this perspective details the
intimate role markets have in establishing the ethical and ontological aspects of animal-free foods in a
political economy shaped by neoliberalisation and financialisation.

Keywords: In-vitro meat; clean meat; synthetic proteins; cellular agriculture; marketization; biocapital.

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Introduction

What we call here animal-free animal food products (hereafter: animal-free food) is known by many
names, including ‘in-vitro’ (Stephens 2010), ‘lab-grown’ (Galusky 2014), ‘cultured’ (Post 2012),
‘synthetic’, and ‘clean’, the products of ‘cellular agriculture’. There are multiple names because they
are contested (Stephens and Lewis 2017), and there is no agreed term to cover all of the different
categories. Our own choice is problematic because many of the products still involve cells extracted
from animals, although the burden on them is considerably reduced. We would argue that ‘animal-free’
and ‘cultured’ captures the spirit of what these products are, but it is still an arbitrary designation for
the purposes of this paper. Moreover, this issue of naming, as we shall see, goes to the heart of what we
are concerned with (Kramer 2015).

Social scientific studies of animal-free food have tended to focus on the ethical implications of this new
type of food (e.g. Hopkins and Dacey 2008) and the various promissory narratives associated with it
(e.g. Jönsson 2016). Less remarked upon has been the fact that it is emerging in a world variously
described as neoliberalised, financialised and globalised. As a result, markets, both for the products
themselves and for the funding and investment required to make them, are central to its constitution.
Animal-free foods are an attempt to fabricate a differently constituted world (Metcalf 2013, Galusky
2014), one where the ontological productions of science are cast by ideological imaginaries, and we
want to extend this by displaying the creation of markets as concurrent sites of ontological as well as
ideological contest (Chiles 2013). The central aim of this paper is to consider how markets are central
to the world that is being imagined and engineered with animal-free food. To this end we consider what
a social studies of economies and markets perspective (SSEM) can bring to the analysis of animal-free
animal food products (Callon 1998, Callon et al. 2007, MacKenzie et al. 2007, Ouma 2015, Çalışkan
and Callon 2009, 2010). This perspective emphasises that markets are achievements and this is useful
in helping to focus on how market processes, or more particularly pre-market making processes, are
contributing to the negotiation over what animal-free food is.

The making of markets is usually analysed post hoc, looking back to see how market stability was
achieved, and will focus on those that materialise rather than get consigned to the experimental dustbin
of history. Animal-free food, however, is mostly a potential market, some plant-based meat analogues
aside. Becoming a market will require more investment. Orienting the SSEM literature to consider
markets-in-formation rather than already-existing markets has the effect of recasting the literature to
consider (bio)capital formation. In this way, we add to SSEM knowledge by revealing a market under
construction, where the black boxes of market making processes are not yet closed. The next section
summarises current research on animal-free food that considers its social implications, arguing that little
has been made of the wider market context of these emerging food technologies. This is followed by an
outline of some of the key SSEM concepts that we draw on, arguing that these contribute to biocapital
formation. The empirical analysis proceeds in four steps: first highlighting the wider community of
concern that animal-free food is embedded in, second demonstrating how animal-free food actors
construct agency by manipulating circulating materials and narratives from within that community,
third reviewing the ways in which animal-free foods are warranted as a techno-solution, and finally
through explaining the role of finance in creating this potential market.

Animal-free food?

Both animal-free meat and milk products claim to replicate in the laboratory the metabolic processes
achieved by farmed animals. For cultured meat, stem cells extracted from an animal biopsy are cultured
in a bioreactor to produce strings of myocytes (muscle cells) which are combined and expanded until

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they acquire a form indistinguishable from processed meat (Post 2012). Alternatively, there is the latest
iteration of a long lineage of plant-based meat analogues that replicate the taste, texture, even sizzle and
smell of meat, in the case of the ‘impossible burger’ using ‘heme’, an iron containing molecule found
in blood (hence haemoglobin) that gives animal meat its distinctive flavour, which also occurs in plants
like the soybean. Soybean genes that contain the information for heme proteins are transferred to yeast
and then fermented so that the yeast as cellular machine, begins to mass-produce the proteins (Hoshaw
2016). The process is similar for milk. Four casein proteins and two whey proteins regarded as essential
for milk’s taste are rendered to their amino acid sequence, then converted to a DNA sequence which is
mixed into a population of yeast again using the bioreactor and cell as the architecture in place of an
animal (Pandya 2014). As well as animal-free meat and milk there are plans to replicate lobster, chicken,
shrimp, pork, turkey, egg-whites and shark fins (New Harvest 2017).

Proponents claim that animal-free foods can provide the solution for animal welfare, environmental,
and public health concerns associated with animal agriculture (Hopkins and Dacey 2008, Steinfeld et
al. 2006, Bhat and Fayaz 2011). This provides an imagined food future where humanity can still enjoy
the products that have resulted from generations of nature’s pacification, but without the guilt that
comes with awareness of the negative consequences. Animal product consumption ‘without the cruel
factory conditions’ (Schaefer and Savulescu 2014, p. 189), that provides speculative but alluring
quantifications of environmental advantages (Steer 2015a, Tuomisto and Teixeira De Mattos 2011),
may provide safe, sustainable, and maybe even ‘designer’ food (Bhat et al. 2015).

Such talk is well ahead of the reality of producing cultured meat. The televised 2013 cooking and eating
of a £250,000 cultured hamburger in front of a live studio audience graduated cultured meat from
theoretically imaginable to materially actual (O’Riordan et al. 2017). Numerous technical barriers
inhibit production at a level that would compete with conventional animal products (see Datar and Betti
2010, Pandurangan and Kim 2015, Post 2012) and current production costs prevent parity with
conventional animal foods (Van Der Weele and Tramper 2014). Consumers, too, are not necessarily
going to accept animal-free food (Van Der Weele and Tramper 2014, Tucker 2014, Hocquette 2016),
perhaps because they originate in labs, imagined as spaces where unnatural and potentially dangerous
non-humans are negotiated by biohazard suit wearing technicians.

While an ethical case can be made in support of animal-free food (Hopkins and Dacey 2008, Schaefer
and Savulescu 2014), other questions are raised (McHugh 2010, Miller 2012, Dilworth and McGregor
2015, Stephens 2010). Galusky (2014) reads cultured meat as symptomatic of a failure to create a
sustainable food system and similarly Metcalf (2013) argues it re-routes the problems of animal
agriculture via techno-fix, rather than addressing the central social and economic issues that produce
meat in its current form. Mattick, Landis, and Allenby (2015, p. 249) are wary of the rationalisations
for cultured meat and warn of ‘the almost certain unanticipated consequences’. These critiques rarely
address the construction of markets as a site of ethical contestation.

Another related strand of criticism considers the role of promissory narratives in the political economy
of these products. In response to early assertions that animal-free meat might be a ‘moral obligation to
develop’ (Hopkins and Dacey 2008, p. 579), both Stephens (2013) and Chiles (2013) analyse this
moralistic certainty using the sociology of expectations to highlight how discursive speculations are
used to warrant this technology as valuable in order to attract investment and enrol adherents. The
boundary work on behalf of animal-free foods selects and mobilises narratives that pre-suppose an
inevitable salvation, while the silences of economic relations such as the role of farm labour remain
unaddressed (Jönsson 2016). The hamburger event is an example of a performance that enacts the
promise of animal-free foods and enrols viewers as potential investors and consumers, but once again

4
‘animals and workers in meat farming are excluded from the address’ (O’Riordan et al. 2017, p. 149).
The discursive weight of events, texts and the mobility of different animal-free foods ‘imagescapes’
(Stephens and Ruivenkamp 2016) enable an ecosystem of communication for beginning to normalise
the technology in a transformative process of ‘visioneering’ (Ferrari and Lösch 2017, Chiles 2013,
Bissell and Fuller 2017). Animal-free foods (other than plant-based meat analogues) have not yet
manifested in scalable forms, have unclear ethical implications, and are permeated with uncertainty
about its ability to realise the promises made on its behalf. Regarding cultured meat, Stephens (2010,
p. 400) judgement of a few years ago still holds true: that it remains an ‘as-yet undefined ontological
object’. What animal-free foods are and will be, in relation to each other as well as to ‘traditional’ food,
is still being negotiated. In what follows we demonstrate the ways in which markets are an arena in
which this negotiation is occurring.

‘Biocapitalisation’: social studies of the economies and markets of animal-free food

Animal-free foods are an iteration of biocapital (Jönsson 2016, Franklin 2006), similar to genetic
engineering and biomedicine, where ‘the latent value in biological processes is captured’ and biological
material is leveraged into ‘biovalue’ (Rose 2008, p. 42). Birch and Tyfield (2013) argue for engaging
with political economy to understand how the financial world mediates value in this space because the
financial artefacts and architecture is at least as important as the biological material for extracting value.
Following the same line, we argue that the SSEM literature offers a powerful way of conceiving how
value is imputed onto biological material like animal-free food, rendering it as biocapital. The promises
of animal-free food to solve the problems of animal agriculture have a corollary in the possibility that
there will be a market for it. This is what creates the investment flows that realise biocapital. But as the
SSEM literature demonstrates, indeed, its very premise: making the market requires considerable work.

SSEM provides tools for grasping the material work of constructing a market for animal-free foods.
From this perspective, markets are ‘an achievement rather than a starting point or pre-existing reality
that can simply be revealed and acted upon’ (Çalışkan and Callon 2009, p. 370). ‘Economic markets
are better described as calculating devices that facilitate encounters between agents’ and they are
possible in part due to the ‘framing’ of interactions that are agreed upon by the actors taking part (Callon
2007b, p. 348). This agreement can be by formal contract, although that need not be the case (Callon
1998). In this way a market for animal-free foods means nothing without pre-established frames such
as those governing property rights. Property rights are possible with biological material when they have
been successfully negotiated as objects. This ‘objectification’ packages things as commodities, whose
constituent characteristics are transformed ‘from wild unknowns to things with fixed qualities’
(Çalışkan and Callon 2010, p. 6). The objectification of biological material, now a commodity,
‘facilitates its framing for exchange’, but increasingly relevant are the ‘marketing technologies that
singularise’ the commodity and ‘attach consumers to their products’ (Ouma 2015, p. 36-37, Callon
2016, Callon and Muniesa 2005, Stock et al. 2016). Indeed, objectification and singularisation occur
alongside one another (Cuckston 2013, Gottschling 2016, Callon et al. 2002). These socio-technical
assemblages highlight the importance of framing and objectifying the non-human, assuming that the
non-human consents to being pacified rather than express its agency in ways that might exclude it from
becoming marketable.

Marketisation and economisation processes can give the impression that markets are assembled in an
orderly fashion. However, as crucial to the way many new markets are assembled is the disassembly of
a prior market and its disruption through ‘counterperformativity,’ where the ‘conditions of felicity’ that
were fulfilled are no longer seen as warranting credibility (Callon 2007b, p. 326). Frames inevitably
overflow. The unexpected behaviour of a commodity, especially relevant to biological material, is an

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overflow already discussed with respect to the fear of ‘unanticipated consequences’ with cultured meat
(Mattick, Landis, and Allenby 2015, p. 249). Overflows can also be ‘externalities’, such as polluted
water, emissions, and animal cruelty. Not all overflows are negative, and all can give the oxygen to
what Callon (2007a, p. 144) calls ‘affected groups’. These communities of concern are a part of a
‘proliferation of the social’ that Callon argues is accelerating due to the new innovation regimes, within
which animal-free foods comfortably sit. The proliferation of the social can give rise to practices that
affect modern markets.

In sum, capital formation, and in this case biocapital formation, involves the constitution of potential
value in a way that attracts the investment flows necessary to fund the material labour that will convert
this into actual value. SSEM provides some tools for analysing this by drawing our gaze to processes
of framing, overflow, singularisation, objectification, and counter-performativity, and the way these
make and break markets. By linking market formation to capital formation in a study of markets still
being negotiated, we extend SSEM to consider how finance capital comes to invest in new markets,
which is certainly still the case with animal-free foods.

The discussion below draws on a wide range of secondary sources collected and tracked over 2016-17.
The animal-free food movement is internet and social media savvy, meaning there is a lot of information
about the different parts of the industry freely available on websites, in newspapers, and on Facebook,
Twitter, and YouTube. This is in the form of company statements, newspaper articles, interviews with
key players, seminars, presentations, and performances intended to demonstrate what things like
cultured meat might look like. This material is supplemented with information garnered from research
papers written about other aspects of the industry-in-waiting (e.g. O’Riordan et al. 2017; Fowler 2017).

Biocapital formation: making a market for animal-free food

Here we detail four different aspects of market making that underpin biocapital formation in relation to
animal-free foods. This is not exhaustive in regard to how biovalue is being produced. There is more to
be said around labour and production (see AUTHORS 2017), for example. Although it is arranged in
some approximation of chronological order, these processes are more integrated and entangled than
this. It is better understood as looking at an emerging market assemblage from several different angles
of vision that gazes upon ‘the continuous work of pulling disparate elements together’ (Li 2007, p. 264).
Animal-free food actors often refer to their own collective singularity as ‘the movement’ (Pandya 2016,
Kim 2016b, Valeti 2016) and we will make use of this shorthand from time to time. In the first
subsection, we discuss how ‘the movement’ exists because of the ‘community of concern’ that has taken
shape as result of the overflows of animal agriculture and could not exist without meat and dairy
consumers having been so successfully produced in the first place. One particular set of overflows are
then considered - imagery, and how these are used and manipulated to construct agency for the
movement. These are linked to struggles over naming. Arguably the most important non-human actor,
the molecules that make up food, is illustrated as having been pacified and objectified through the
‘practices of calculation’ in the third empirical section. Finally, we show how ‘venture capital’ is
injected like adrenalin into the heart of the assemblage, to kick start animal-free food’s journey into
becoming a market. This is the flow of money that realises these biocapital relations.

The overflows of animal agriculture and its communities of concern

Animal-free food as we know it does not exist without large-scale animal agriculture. One of the
overflows of animal agriculture has been the constitution of entire societies where the daily
consumption of meat is easy and unremarkable. For the first time in human history, in especially

6
wealthier parts of the world, animal meat has become readily available for consumption without the
palaver of having to kill it yourself first. Large swathes of humanity have been systematically produced
as meat and dairy eaters. Without this pre-existing large scale demand for animal food products, there
would be no motivation on the part of bioengineers to take the risk of expending resources making
animal-free food.

But animal agriculture produces other significant overflows. The nature of these overflows is evident
everywhere in the advocacy of animal-free food. One of the earliest academic statements about the
possibility of culturing meat introduces the topic with reference to the problems of meat consumption
and production, including ‘nutrition-related diseases, foodborne illnesses, resource use, pollution and
abuse of farm animals’ (Edelman et al. 2005, p. 659). More recently, Bhat et al. (2015, p. 242)
effectively parrot the same line, arguing that ‘in light of the sizable negative effects of current meat
production on environment and human health, a viable solution lies with in-vitro meat production, a
process that poses to revolutionize human existence.’ It can be seen in presentations to wider audiences
by advocates like Isha Datar, Executive Director of cellular agriculture promotional charity New
Harvest. In her presentation to the ‘Bitten’ festival in February 2016 for example (Datar 2016), she
begins her talk on cellular agriculture by referring to environmental degradation, pathogen risks, and
animal welfare problems as issues arising from current animal agriculture practices. Animal agriculture
occupies a complex relationship to animal-free food as both the source of its potential consumers and
its essential constitutive outside.

Datar and her fellow travellers’ condemnations of industrial animal agriculture are not new. The
upscaling and industrialisation of agriculture has been celebrated and condemned in equal measure.
Since the 1950s, it has seemed to both assure a future free of lack and famine, while sowing the seeds
of our doom. Narratives like these are overflows of the industrialisation of agriculture, existing
alongside, and as a consequence of, the more material overflows that come with the construction of
large-scale agricultural markets. The latter set has included concerns over environmental degradation,
animal welfare, climate change, and a variety of health concerns, from the transmission of animal borne
diseases to illnesses caused by the consumption of meat.

These overflows of shit, microbes, carbon and anxiety produce communities of concern, manifesting
most visibly in forms of activism, from Greenpeace to PETA, but also in the work of scientists,
journalists, academics and politicians. In the process, it has transformed what we call the social (Callon
2007a, Latour 2005), bedding in new ethical ideas, behaviours, practices and subjectivities. The rise of
‘green’ parties and ‘green’ policies in the party politics of the state all signal this transformation.

This is a textbook example of what Callon (2007a) refers to as the proliferation of the social from the
construction of markets, in this case, large-scale markets for animal food products. It is these diverse
communities of concern, unified by the fact they form out of the overflows produced by animal
agriculture, that underpin the contemporary rise of animal-free food. The 1931 statement by Winston
Churchill featuring prominently on the New Harvest website that ‘we shall escape the absurdity of
growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a
suitable medium’ (Churchill, cited in Bhat et al. 2015, p. 242) is very much from another time, when
the possibilities of science seemed limitless and the questions were over what this meant for our
collective humanity. Today, in a world where people are perhaps more uncertain about the gifts of
industrial science, the movement is embedded in communities that are suspicious of animal agriculture
rather than celebratory of them.

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This is not to say that it is only this community involved in assembling the market. For one, there are
actors within the community that are keen to link with the existing supply chains for conventional
protein. One ambitious example from ex-New Harvester Gilonne d'Origny (2016, p.) is McDonalds
where ‘making their patties in a central location instead of importing from Latin America would be a
big transformation for them’. Additionally, conventional meat multinationals are taking an increased
interest in alternative proteins (more on this later). This reflects the complex topology of the animal-
free foods assemblage. It rejects and others industrial animal agriculture, and yet its existence depends
on the supply of consumers industrial animal agriculture has produced, hence it is no surprise the other
becomes involved in its ongoing assemblage.

Moreover, without these overflows there is no possibility of a market, both in the traditional sense of a
supply of willing consumers, and in the sense found in the SSEM literature where these communities
provide many of the socio-technical materials and agencies through which the market might be
achieved. But this achievement is far from being as simple as providing a product. Considerably more
work has been and is required: work that makes use of the various materials circulating through the
concerned communities.

Seeing, saying, naming: constructing ethical agency for animal-free food

Achieving what Callon and Muniesa (2005) refer to as ‘singularisation’ between the product (animal-
free food) and its markets requires material and immaterial work. We have argued that animal-free food
actors are constituted by the communities concerned about animal agriculture’s effects. Importantly,
these communities are constituted by more than just people. The immaterial narratives condemning
animal agriculture and that hold the community together circulate in various forms, from books, to
newspaper articles, to internet memes. But many are not necessarily friendly to the animal-free food
project. While animal-free food is presented as a solution to the problems of animal agriculture and so
to the very ‘concerns’ that constitute the ‘community of concern’, many are likely to question whether
this kind of techno-fix, with its dependence on capital-funded laboratories, is any kind of solution
(Metcalf 2013, Galusky 2014, McHugh 2010). Achieving singularisation, then, requires the
manipulation of these circulating narrative forms to construct new ontologies of animal-free food and
animal agriculture where its problems and solutions are framed in ways that make the former a rational
solution to the problems of the latter. The agency of actors, such as Datar, to make a market for animal-
free food depends on this kind of work.

Others have pointed to the imagescapes and performances being produced in association with animal-
free foods, drawing attention to the way that these do ontological and promotional work to make animal-
free food like cultured meat acceptable (O’Riordan et al. 2017, Stephens and Ruivenkamp 2016). This
is important work for the making of markets. Here we make a slightly different point about the kinds
of images that are used to construct narratives about animal-free food as a solution. These are images
circulating in the broader ‘community of concern’, but which originate outside of the movement, and
were constructed for other purposes. For example, at around 7:33 of a presentation to the ‘Bitten’ food
futures festival, Datar (2016) uses an image showing the considerably larger breasts of a young chicken
in 2008 compared to an older 1950 version. This is used to problematise farming that has been enhanced
by science. This image originates from the 2008 film Food Inc. (Kenner 2008), which is a critique of
the industrialisation of agriculture in the USA and the growing dominance of just a few food producers
in that country.

This image of ‘a Texas feedlot’ shown at Figure 1, is used by Datar (2016) to describe how ‘they ruin
the environment’. She goes onto say how factory farm runoff has created this algal bloom. The ‘Tascosa

8
Feedlot’ is an image constructed by Henner (2014) out of satellite imagery and is intended to highlight
hidden landscapes.

We can quibble about the extent that Datar is misappropriating these images for her own purposes.
Henner’s and Food Inc.’s images seemingly highlight the same problem that Datar wants to highlight.
But do they agree with the solution animal-free meat presents? Certainly Food Inc.’s message about
making a return to smaller scale, organic food production does not chime with that of animal-free food.
But the point we want to make is that this work of manipulating imagery circulating in the community
of concern is a key way that actors like Datar construct ethical agency for animal-free food. This
circulating imagery and their associated narratives have a form of agency (Bissell and Fuller 2017) that
helps to reproduce the community by continuously problematising animal agriculture. Without this
community there is no animal-free food movement, so these images are part of what makes an animal-
free food market possible. But achieving the market, achieving singularisation with the community
(Ouma 2015, Callon and Muniesa 2005), requires that the agencies of these images are formatted and
redeployed in an assemblage where they tell a particular story about the problem of animal agriculture
in which animal-free food is the solution. Meanwhile, it avoids a story where the problem may be to do
with the interests of capital in food production, where the solutions that animal-free food presents might
seem less convincing. If it is successful, subjects constituted by the community of concern just might
become willing consumers of animal-free food.

Names are important too, and these are tested in a continually evolving feedback loop of market
research. What was called ‘in-vitro’ meat in the early 2000’s changed to ‘cultured’ meat in recent years.
Chiefly thru the efforts of New Harvest, ‘cultured meat’ was argued to be more scientifically accurate
in that it doesn’t have to be produced ‘in glass’ (i.e. in-vitro), although other justifications about the
association of something becoming ‘cultured’ through enlightenment and civilisation were also offered
(Datar 2015). Perhaps because of the ‘negative perceptions of cultured meat’ terminology detected by
a survey of consumer perceptions (Datar 2017), a new term – ‘clean’ meat – emerged to describe both
plant-based and cultured meat (Kateman 2017).

The 2011 ‘workshop in In Vitro Meat’ revealed the contest between terms, some in the field preferring
the more ‘scientific’ in-vitro meat term, reflecting the precarity of the community’s internal micro-
politics (Stephens and Lewis 2017). When does scientific terminology yield to marketing? Who gets to
name which product? Which product can claim this term or that more reliably? And, will consumers
care? This demonstrates the micro-politics of naming (Callon and Muniesa 2005, Ouma 2015), which
in turn betrays awareness of the function names perform. For example, New Zealand’s Chief Science
Advisor describes ‘synthetic food’, and especially the spectre of ‘synthetic milk’, in terms that seem to
make it an economic sword of Damocles (Pullar-Strecker 2017). In a nation that understands itself as
economically dependent on agricultural food production, it is reasonable to assume the selection of this
term reflects the desire to other these new foods as ‘synthetic’, fake versions of the ‘real thing.’
Constructing ethical and so economic agency for animal-free food through practices of singularisation
will be an ongoing, fraught, and heavily contested process.

Here comes the future! Imagining and calculating animal-free food

The work of singularisation can be difficult to separate from the work of objectification (Gottschling
2016, Cuckston 2013, Callon et al. 2002). This involves ontological boundary work which objectifies
animal-free food as inevitable, providing a spectre of credibility. From this point of view, the state has
had an important role in market formation. Government organisations were instrumental in enabling the
material possibility of cultured meat. For example, researchers at Tuoro College in New York proposed

9
an ‘in-vitro muscle protein production system’ as a ‘nutritious food for space voyagers on long journeys’
under a NASA contract (Benjaminson et al. 2002, p. 879). Governments also secure property rights
over commodities, and so the US government allowed a patent for ‘producing tissue engineered meat
for consumption’ in 1998 (Stephens et al. 2015, p. 4). More recently, the Dairy Pride Act currently
before the US Congress would require the sanctioning of companies that make an identity claim that
their product is ‘milk, yoghurt or cheese’, if it hasn’t arrived via ‘lacteal secretions’ of a hooved mammal
(Watson 2017). Cow-free milk may be lumped in with soy, almond and acidophilus milks, undermining
its claims to be the same as milk from a cow. In New Zealand, a plant-based chicken analogue company
is facing legal action from the Poultry Industry Association for using the image of a chicken on its
‘chicken-free chicken’ product (Junn 2017).

Alongside these legal entanglements and struggles, ontological boundary work occurs in other ways
too. The singularisation of consumer and good is arranged in unison with the practices of objectifying
that good (Ouma 2015). Already highlighted are the names of different animal-free foods, although
most notably in-vitro meat, that keep tentatively changing toward a more marketable signifier that
appeals to different consumer subjectivities. Meanwhile the consumer is asked to adapt and become
differently constituted food eaters (Stock et al. 2016). There is something for nearly everyone in the
promotional memes and names. Consumers are asked to be ethical consumers that desire less cruel ways
of eating animal products and the environmental benefits of cultured meat and cowless milk are
calculated through Life Cycle Assessments that show how much less land, water, and greenhouse gases
cellular agriculture emits compared to conventional animal agriculture (Steer 2015b, Tuomisto and
Teixeira De Mattos 2011, Mattick, Landis, Allenby, et al. 2015). Health conscious consumers are asked
to be mindful of inter-species zoonosis, anti-biotic resistance and the effects on heart health of trans-
fatty-acids (engineered out of cultured meat), both implicate animal agriculture in the worldwide
proliferation of the harmful microbial (Valeti 2016).

Narratives are also constructed to objectify animal-free food in ways consumers might accept (Stock et
al. 2016). For example, in Figure 2, Datar (2016) offers the image of a beer brewery as a placeholder
that normalises the future bioreactors that produce meat and milk. This brewery narrative associates
animal-free food with the socially acceptable, even cool, process of brewing beer. There are human
visitors taking a tour. This ‘visitation’ narrative is common in the work of assembling animal-free foods
and favourably emplaces cellular agriculture against the closed system of factory farms and
slaughterhouses (Kim 2016a, Valeti 2016). Invisible but also present nonetheless are the implied
artisans that create the beer: the brewers, the biotechnology pacifiers that are the equivalent of
tomorrow’s animal-free food producers. The brewery narrative conjures a specific identity of
potentially like-minded consumers who view themselves as socially-conscious, cool, independent
artisans of food.

Photographs imply much about the ontological reality of making animal-free foods (Stephens and
Ruivenkamp 2016). Another way is the memes of simplification that bolster the brewery narrative and
act as an effective comparison to the enemy of factory farming. Here we see how Datar (2016) chooses
to compare animal-free milk and cow’s milk in Figure 3. The process of making cow’s milk starts with
a shadowy figure violating a cow from behind, inserting her into a circular factory, having an apparatus
attached to her nipples and then...milk in a glass. Contrasted is a yeast cell infused with cow DNA,
percolated in a bioreactor and then…milk in a glass. While it is an extreme simplification, this meme
is an actor that can be easily transmitted, easily digested, and contributes towards the singularisation of
both milk (the common white liquid that results from both methods) and of milk consumers (Bissell
and Fuller 2017, Stephens and Ruivenkamp 2016). Of note is that the conventional process is depicted
in a downward trajectory and the biotechnology process ascending upward.

10
Cultured meat has yet to sell a single patty. One way to narrate a story of inevitability is to drip-feed
stories of remarkable progress in scaling products to market. Mark Post’s £250,000 ($330,000 USD)
hamburger for the 2013 TV event garnered a lot of attention due to the astronomical price, which was
arguably the point of releasing the cost information to begin with. Since this cost marker was put in
place, Post’s cultured meat company claimed just 19 months later that the burger would now cost
‘$11.36 per 142 gm patty or $80 per Kg’ (Solon 2015). By February 2016 the cost had seemingly stalled
when Post’s business partner Peter Verstrate is quoted to say in Newsweek that ‘the company can
already make meat that costs $27 to $45 per pound’, which happens to be $59-$99 per Kg, the midway
point being $80 per Kg, the same cost as quoted by Post nearly a year earlier (Burningham 2016). This
may indicate progress has slowed, that no subsequent costing estimates have been produced, or that the
statement was produced to have, despite its precision, a discursive impact that ‘performs’ progress
rather than portray actual costs.

All these practices of calculation are critical in establishing what animal-free foods are (Callon et al.
2002). The value created by calculating the qualities of animal-free foods are sometimes expressed in
terms of dollars, but also in terms of marketable names, the socialising affect which comes from the
knowledge of how animal-free foods are processed, and an expression of a disruptively confronting
efficiency curve and time to market. These practices of naming, calculating and narrating perform a
crucial service in assembling a market by transforming animal-free foods ‘from wild unknowns to
things with fixed qualities’ (Çalışkan and Callon 2010, p. 6). Animal-free foods are starting to make a
spectacle of themselves, but where did they get the funds to even start spectacularising? Venture capital
must have been already enrolled for animal-free foods to get off the start line and their continued
stability is contingent on progress that will bring financial return.

Disruptive culture: venture capital and animal-free food

Before the hamburger event, the mystery benefactor that financed the £250,000 burger was unknown.
Later it was revealed that the funder was Google co-founder Sergei Brin. Plant-based burger producer
Beyond Meat are usually defined as the ‘Bill Gates backed vege-burger’ in the press (Giammona 2017).
New knights of celebrity venture capital continue joining the fight. Richard Branson joined Gates in
financing cultured meat leader Memphis Meats in part of a $17m fundraising round (Cosgrove 2017).
Leonardo DiCaprio recently joined Gates as a funder of Beyond Meat (Shieber 2017). There has been
some state investment in these technologies (Stephens et al. 2015), and New Harvest collects and directs
charitable donations and grants in the industry, but there is no doubt that the association of this iteration
of biological technology with super-rich celebrity investors and venture capital is significant.

Animal-free food is often described as ‘disruptive’ (Brunhuber 2017, Bosworth 2017), including by its
key advocates (see Lever 2015). This is a term used to describe innovations that make existing business
models irrelevant (Christensen 2011). Nowadays, disruption is a business buzzword used to explain
everything from the appearance of electric vehicles, to solar energy in the face of competing interests
from transnational corporations, to the disruptive business models of Uber and Spotify. The role of
venture capital in making a market for technologically advanced products is synonymous with an
investment culture of ‘disruptive’ innovation. For instance, in 2014 Perfect Day (Muufri prior to August
2016) was offered $US2m in seed money from Li Ka-shing’s (Asia’s richest man at the time) Horizons
Ventures. According to one of the partners at Horizons Ventures, Li Ka-shing ‘loves disruptive
innovations and sees it as kind of predictive lenses into the future. He loves to meet and geek with the
founders and CEOs of companies within our disruptive portfolio, to understand their concepts and
missions’ (Shu-Ching 2014). Alongside Perfect Day as portfolio partners at Horizons Ventures are

11
Facebook, Spotify, Skype, Modern Meadow (lab grown leather for disrupting the $90b per year leather
industry) and Impossible Foods (the plant based heme burger rival of Beyond Meat).

Whatever the investors think, animal-free food may or may not be truly ‘disruptive’ of business-as-
usual in the animal products trade. We leave it to others to make that judgement. However, the SSEM
notion of ‘counterperformativity’ may be useful for grasping more about the relationship between
conventional and animal-free food that contributes to the idea that it is ‘disruptive’. The business models
of animal agriculture, which have hitherto done the economic work of framing the efficient operations
that drive down unit costs, are becoming less felicitous with the arrival of animal-free food. Normally,
the arrival of a new market entrant forces businesses to adapt or risk obsolescence. In the case of animal
agriculture, this might be through finding ways to be even more efficient. But animal-free food implies
a new paradigm where the practices of operational efficiency overflow the provisionally stable frames
of animal agriculture. The application of fertiliser, the slaughter of animals, water use, the externalising
of nitrates and methane, are now not merely potentially obsolete but ‘counterperformative’. Animal-
free food turns those practices into a problem, meaning simply becoming more efficient is no solution.
The spectre of disruption is performed through once justifiable practices, now becoming
counterperformatively unjustified (Callon 2007b, p. 326, MacKenzie 2007). Despite the obvious
differences in heritage and methods of production, cultured meat, this generation’s plant-based meat
analogues, and cow-free milk come together as warranting new authenticity through the counter-
performative status quo.

This complex topological relation with emerging animal-free foods may already be changing business-
as-usual in conventional meat production. Conventional meat stalwarts like Cargill Protein and Tyson
Foods have made a small turn toward protein alternatives. Cargill taking their place at the high-rollers
table at Memphis Meat while at the same time divesting of their remaining animal feedlots. Tyson taking
a 5% stake in plant-based meat institution Beyond Meat (Strom 2016).

The flow of money from venture capital to the laboratory in large volumes is a result of the aggressive
business culture grounded in ‘disruptive innovation’. Some value is attached to these nascent
technologies, not only because they can attract capital, but because of who they attract it from. Celebrity
investors can attract other actors, both investors and consumers, as these ‘knowing’ actors can imagine
for themselves having like-minded entrepreneurial identities and values (Mansvelt 2005, p. 89). Venture
capital is not just a source of money, its association with the animal-free food industry is a self-
referential and self-reproducing performance of ‘disruption’.

Biocapitalism

To conclude this section, we return to the question of biocapital. What we have described here is
biocapital in formation – biocapitalisation. Its most immediate manifestation – the investment of money
into labs trying to produce animal-free food – depends to varying extents on the things we have
described in this section: a venture capital industry with a culture that celebrates ‘disruption’; a set of
biotechnical materials and relations that are being pacified into a marketable object; an existing
community of concern worried about the effects of animal agriculture; and the construction of ethical
agency for animal-free food to solve the problems that this community is so concerned with. It is all of
these things that enable value to be leveraged off the biological material that makes up animal-free food,
and so constitutes it as biocapital.

Conclusion: ontologies, ethics, and markets

12
For the SSEM perspective, the study of animal-free foods offers the chance to study a market that
largely does not yet exist, some plant-based meat analogues aside. We have argued that this moment
before the market is fully formed is the moment of capital formation, or, in this case, biocapital
formation – the way that biological material comes to be seen as something that exchange values can
be leveraged from. Birch and Tyfield (2013) argue that financial artefacts and architectures are at least
as important as the biological material itself, and in doing so they extend what makes an object valuable
beyond the object itself to consider the networks and communities that it is a part of. A SSEM
perspective contributes to this project by bringing in not just financial architectures, such as venture
capital, but the practices that constitute the potential market and connect this to those architectures.
From this perspective, a market-in-formation is also a process of capital formation.

Additionally, the SSEM perspective we have brought to the study of animal-free food allows an analysis
of this phenomenon that considers its socio-economic dimensions beyond the more common ethical
critiques (McHugh 2010, Miller 2012, Dilworth and McGregor 2015, Stephens 2010). We have
extended the analysis of animal-free food as a branch of ‘promissory science’ (Stephens 2013, Jönsson
2016, Chiles 2013) to consider how the latter is composed. In particular, we have demonstrated the key
roles of particular communities that are held together by certain ethical imperatives: the ‘community of
concern’ (Callon 2007a) that has problematized animal agriculture, and the branch of venture capital
looking to ‘disrupt’ business-as-usual. The objectification and singularisation of animal-free food with
these communities through the selective deployment of circulating images and narratives, aided by
counterperformativity in the conventional animal agriculture sector, constructs this promissory science
as both a hope for the future and a new source of profit, one which may fabricate a differently constituted
world.

And so the making of animal-free food is also a world-making project (Galusky 2014, Metcalf 2013),
and the legacy of neoliberalism and financialisation has meant this is occurring in particular ways – it
may have looked very different in more state-led economies. Significantly, the ontological status of
cultured meat (Stephens 2010) and of animal-free food remains unclear. This is reflected in the ongoing
struggles and micro-politics that occur around the naming and classification of these products (Stephens
and Lewis 2017, Datar 2015, Kramer 2015). The first paragraph of this paper performed the struggle
we had coming up with a generic name for the purposes of this paper that did not perform one project
while alienating another. The study of markets and the different components of biocapital reveals the
arenas in which this ontological status is being negotiated (Jönsson 2016). It demonstrates how naming
is not simply a matter of scientific, historical or visual accuracy. There is too much at stake for investors,
consumers and producers. The struggle over naming demonstrates the way that markets are not
something in the background or the place where the goods will be sold at the end of a long, careful
process of critical reflection on the ontological and ethical status of food. Rather they are a constitutive
element in how these are being worked out, especially in a world as neoliberalised and financialised as
ours.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Mike Roche, three anonymous reviewers, and the editors for their helpful
comments and points of clarification. Responsibility for errors is entirely ours. Thanks as well to New
Harvest and Mishka Henner for permission to reproduce the images used in the paper.

17
Figures

Figure 1: But they ruin the environment. Source: Datar, I. 2016. On Animal Products Without Animals
(video). Bitten, New York, February 12.Accessed from
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FbQ89PFSsk&feature=youtu.be (accessed 29 June 2017),
original image © Mishka Henner, reproduced by permission.

18
Figure 2: What if this was the farm? Source: Datar, I. 2016. On Animal Products Without Animals
(video). Bitten, New York, February 12.Accessed from
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FbQ89PFSsk&feature=youtu.be (accessed 29 June 2017),
reproduced by permission.

19
 Figure 3: Process for cowless milk. Source: http://www.new-harvest.org/about (accessed 27 November
2017), reproduced by permission.

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