The first bite: Imaginaries, promotional publics and the laboratory grown burger

Abstract

In this article, we analyse a 2013 press conference hosting the world’s first tasting of a laboratory grown hamburger. We explore this as a media event: an exceptional performative moment in which common meanings are mobilised and a connection to a shared centre of reality is offered. We develop our own theoretical contribution – the promotional public – to characterise the affirmative and partial patchwork of carefully selected actors invoked during the burger tasting. Our account draws on three areas of analysis: interview data with the scientists who developed the burger, media analysis of the streamed press conference itself and media analysis of social media during and following the event. We argue that the call to witness an experiment is a form of promotion and that such promotional material also offers an address that invokes a public with its attendant tensions.

Promise and Ontological Ambiguity in theIn vitroMeat Imagescape: From Laboratory Myotubes to the Cultured Burger

“…Elsewhere, one of us has described IVM as an ‘as-yet undefined ontological object’ (Stephens, 2010 , p. 400; cf. Driessen and Korthals, 2012 ; Chiles, 2013b ; Stephens, 2013 ; van der Weele and Driessen, 2013 ; O'Riordan et al , 2016 ). Stephens argues that IVM does not easily fit existing ontologies around meat and animal kinship, as prominent markers of ‘meatness’ in meat production as traditionally recognised have significantly reduced prominence.…”

“…On 5th August 2013, a press conference was held in London, in which a cultured beef burger was cooked and eaten. This is a defining moment in the emergence of IVM technology and remains the most high-profile instance within the field (O'Riordan et al , 2016 ). The press conference had an associated web page (culturedbeef.net) containing images associated with the launch.…”

Blood, meat, and upscaling tissue engineering: Promises, anticipated markets, and performativity in the biomedical and agri-food sectors

“…Cultured meat anticipates a more novel type of consumer public, embedded clearly within food consumption in sites of the home and restaurant. The anticipated cultured meat consumer publics are ethically informed, politically active citizens, who seek to remove ethically and environmentally problematic elements of their consumption without becoming vegetarian or vegan (Stephens, 2013;O'Riordan et al, 2017). The consumer's capacity for choice is central to how they are anticipated: they choose cultured meat to contribute to a better world without experiencing a change in their experience of eating.…”

“…' As the Dutch group's project came to an end in 2010, one of the team, Professor Mark Post of Maastricht University, commented in a newspaper report (Specter, 2011) that, if he had sufficient funds, he could develop the world's first laboratory-grown hamburger. He subsequently secured funding for this enterprise, leading to the most high-profile moment in N. Stephens et al cultured meat technology in 2013, when he and his team, funded by Google cofounder Sergey Brin, staged a press conference in which the world's first cultured burger was cooked and eaten in front of the world's media (O'Riordan et al, 2017). With the cultured burger came a shift from 'in vitro meat' to 'cultured' as the preferred term (Datar, 2016;Stephens and Lewis, 2017).…”

“…Shifting tissue engineering into the agri-food sector engenders ambiguity, as it clashes with well-established understandings of what meat is and how it should be produced. In other work, Stephens (2013) argues that promissory narratives are used in an attempt to resolve the ontological ambiguity of cultured meat, and that the cultured burger press conference was a key moment in stabilizing both its meanings and the potential consumer publics that will buy it (O'Riordan et al, 2017;Stephens and Ruivenkamp, 2016). Here we close by exploring the sectoral ontologies of cultured blood and cultured meat and the impact this has on the performative potential of promissory narratives to bring their promises into being.…”