Bioengineering, telecoupling, and alternative dairy: Agricultural land use futures in the Anthropocene

Newman, Lenore; Newell, Robert; Mendly-Zambo, Zsofia; Powell, Lisa Jordan

doi:10.1111/geoj.12392

Cited by 17 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 66 publications

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“…A few studies have focused on the social and economic implications of AFD. Newman et al ( 30 ) explored the potential influence of AFD on future land use change, with a particular focus on the environmental implications of using sugar as a feedstock for cellular dairy production processes. They noted that, depending on the industry's development and agricultural approach, a mix of potentially environmentally harmful or positive land use approaches could take shape.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Framing the futures of animal-free dairy: Using focus groups to explore early-adopter perceptions of the precision fermentation process

Broad

Thomas²,

Dillard

et al. 2022

Front. Nutr.

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This paper reports on the findings from a series of virtual focus groups that explored consumer perceptions of animal-free dairy (AFD), an emerging type of animal product alternative produced using the tools of synthetic biology and precision fermentation. Focus group participants came from an international sample of potential “early adopters.” To stimulate conversation, participants were presented with a series of visual “moodboards” that framed key arguments both in favor of and in opposition to AFD. Three primary thematic clusters emerged from the discussion. The first focused on issues of “process, safety, and regulation,” centered on the general reaction of participants to the concept of AFD, their primary concerns, key questions, and the assurances they would need in order to support its advancement. The second focused on issues of “consumer preferences and priorities,” highlighted by the often complicated, and sometimes outright contradictory, stated consumer interests of the participants. The third focused on issues of “food technology and the future,” wherein participants expressed broader views on the role of food technology in society, generally speaking, and the potential futures of AFD, specifically. The general consensus among participants was a cautious openness to the idea of AFD. Outright opposition to the concept was rare, but so too was unabashed enthusiasm. Instead, respondents had a number of questions about the nature of the technological process, its overall safety and regulatory standards, its potential contributions to individual health and climate change mitigation, as well as its organoleptic qualities and price to consumers. Among the positive frames, claims about animal welfare were deemed the most pertinent and convincing. Among the negative frames, concerns about messing with nature and creating potential health risks to individuals were seen as the strongest arguments against AFD. The findings suggest that the key to AFD's future as a viable market option will depend in large part on the extent to which it can clearly demonstrate that it is preferable to conventional dairy or its plant-based competitors, particularly in the arena of taste, but also across considerations of health and safety, nutrition, environmental effects, and animal well-being.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Framing the futures of animal-free dairy: Using focus groups to explore early-adopter perceptions of the precision fermentation process

Broad

Thomas²,

Dillard

et al. 2022

Front. Nutr.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…This approach to overcoming care's distance-decay problem has better fit with the agri-food literature reviewed above. There, care is messy (not codifiable), context-specific (not universalizable), and the product of ongoing engagements (not discrete governance mechanisms) between different actants in the multispecies assemblage in question (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Care is thus based on “ontological rather than moral or epistemological” foundations (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017: 69). It is the function of the mutual ontological constitution of humans and nonhumans in agroecosystem-nature cultures, and the responsibilities this entanglement produces.…”

Section: An Agricultural Ethics Of Carementioning

confidence: 99%

Metabolic agricultural ethics: Violence and care beyond the gate

Cusworth

2023

Progress in Environmental Geography

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A substantial body of scholarship now exists describing an agricultural ethics of care. This work has integrated insight from feminist ethicists into research on food production, human–nature relations, and agricultural land use. As scholars elsewhere in the humanities have discussed, though, there is often a violence committed in care's name. In the case of food production and farming, I argue that the focus on affect, local multispecies relations and a proximal encounter-based ethics risks obscuring ethically significant and potentially violent food system dynamics that unfold beyond the farm gate. To better accommodate these remote yet important outcomes, I argue that scholars deploying an ethics of agricultural care should pay greater attention to the metabolisms of the farms, labs, nurseries, gardens, and allotments they study. Such an approach can accommodate those things that enter the case study site (fertilizer, animal feed, seed, etc.) and those things that leave it (vegetables, grain, pollution, etc.) as well the more-than-human transformations and interactions that take place within it. By being attentive to these material inflows and outflows, new ethical responsibilities emerge to act in the speculative hope that violence can be minimized, and care can flourish across a broader spatial range.

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“…Indeed, "the synthetic revolution could also lead to the intensification of production and expansion of markets in ways that could look far less liberatory than imagined" (Abrell, 2021, 45). Newman et al (2021) apply a telecoupling method to study socioeconomic and environmental implications over distances and relevantly point out, as an example, how cellular-ag dairy substitution in Canada would affect sugar plantations in an environmentally and politically vulnerable Brazil if cane sugar were chosen as an industrial raw material for production. The complications are vast, and to think that these research efforts on transnational geopolitical consequences of postanimal industrialization are as-yet speculative further emphasizes the need for caution in simplistic, overly optimistic projections.…”

Section: The Story So Far: Consmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cultured meat, clean meat,… queer meat? A vegan queer ecofeminist perspective on the implications of cellular agriculture

Rodríguez

2023

Front. Sustain. Food Syst.

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This perspective article briefly explores the social implications of cellular agriculture from a Vegan Queer Ecofeminist point of view by referring to a synthesis of currently agreed-upon (possible) positive and negative effects of post-animal agriculture and highlighting how these effects actually ignore key ethical problems inherent in animal agriculture itself. By invisibilizing these, discussions of cellular-ag remain in danger of obscuring the ways in which an intact and unexamined paradigm based on capitalist, patriarchal speciesism will continue to foment exploitative and unjust practices in a dying planet. The article emphasizes the urgent need to address the complexities of cellular-ag from a multidisciplinary perspective that actively engages with the demands of true global justice for all, nonhuman and human.

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Bioengineering, telecoupling, and alternative dairy: Agricultural land use futures in the Anthropocene

Abstract: The information, practices and views in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG).

Cited by 17 publications

References 66 publications

Framing the futures of animal-free dairy: Using focus groups to explore early-adopter perceptions of the precision fermentation process

Framing the futures of animal-free dairy: Using focus groups to explore early-adopter perceptions of the precision fermentation process

Metabolic agricultural ethics: Violence and care beyond the gate

Cultured meat, clean meat,… queer meat? A vegan queer ecofeminist perspective on the implications of cellular agriculture

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