Meet Shmeat: Food System Ethics, Biotechnology and Re-Worlding Technoscience

摘要

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1 Fortun's analysis of promising is largely inspired by Jacques Derrida's deconstruction of promising as a condition of thought and language in general, rather than as a singular and intentional speech act. This dislocation is an important element of my methodology in this paper. The ‘promise’ and ‘inevitability’ of cultured meat does not exist as a specific act on the part of its proponents, but is rather a condition of its plausibility as a sustainable source of protein. Thus my sources move between mainstream journalism, professional ethicists and the claims made by scientists – the promise is not easily located and there lies its discursive power. M Fortun, Promising Genomics: Iceland and DeCODE Genetics in a World of Speculation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). 2 Sarah Franklin, ‘Ethical Biocapital: New Strategies of Cell Culture,’ in Remaking Life and Death: Toward An Anthropology of the Biosciences, eds. Lock Margaret and Sarah Franklin, School of American Research Advanced Seminar Series (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research, 2003); S Franklin, ‘The Cyborg Embryo: Our Path to Transbiology’, Theory, Culture & Society, 23.7–8 (2006). See also: Stefan Helmreich, ‘Species of Biocapital’, Science as Culture, 17.4 (2008). 3 Nikolas Rose, The Politics of Life Itself. Biomedicine, Power and Subjectivity in the 21st Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). 4 It's not clear where the portmanteau ‘shmeat’ or ‘schmeat’ was coined. In a segment on the satirical news television show The Colbert Report, one of the primary scientists working on cultured meat, Vladamir Mironov, claimed that the name is a combination of ‘shit’ and ‘meat’. I suspect that it is a less vulgar slang of appending ‘sh’ sounds to names in order to mockingly diminish their authenticity and importance. The World of Nahlej: Shmeat (Comedy Central, March 17, 2009), < http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/221975/march-17-2009/world-of-nahlej–-shmeat> [22/09/2012]. 5 Rose describes molecularization as a process that ‘strips tissues, proteins, molecules and drugs of their specific affinities – to a disease, to an organ, to an individual, to a species – and enables them to be regarded in many respects, as manipulable and transferable elements or units, which can be delocalized – moved from place to place, from organisms to organisms, from disease to diseases, from person to person’. Rose, The Politics of Life Itself, p.15. 6 Richard Twine, Animals as Biotechnology: Ethics, Sustainability and Critical Animal Studies (London: Routledge, 2010), p.121. 7 Astrid Schrader, ‘The Time of Slime: Anthropocentrism in Harmful Algal Research’, Environmental Philosophy 9.1 (2012), pp.71–94. 8 Alfred Nordmann, ‘If and Then: A Critique of Speculative NanoEthics’, NanoEthics 1.1 (2007). 9 Nordmann, ‘If and Then’, p.41. 10 Biomedicalization is a term coined by Clarke et al. to describe the process of defining ever more aspects of life as a matter for intervention by molecular biosciences. A E Clarke et al., ‘Biomedicalization: Technoscientific Transformations of Health, Illness and US Biomedicine’, American Sociological Review (2003), pp.161–194. 11 Hannah Landecker, ‘Food As Exposure: Nutritional Epigenetics and the New Metabolism’, BioSocieties 6.2 (2011). 12 Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto (New York: Penguin, 2009). 13 Pollan, In Defense of Food, p.102. 14 Paul Rabinow, Hubert Dreyfus and Michel Foucault, ‘On the Genealogy of Ethics: Overview of Work in Progress,’ in Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954–1984, Volume 1: Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth (New York: New Press, 1997), p.259; Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure (Random House Digital, 2012). 15 Rabinow, Dreyfus and Foucault, ‘On the Genealogy of Ethics’, p.256. 16 Colin Koopman, ‘Genealogical Pragmatism: How History Matters for Foucault and Dewey’,