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The Political Economy of Cellular Agriculture : Delineating Tension Points in the Development of Cultivated Meat Products

Author
Baker, Siena
Published
[University Park, Pennsylvania] : Pennsylvania State University, 2021.
Physical Description
1 electronic document
Additional Creators
Alter, Theodore R. and Schreyer Honors College
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Open Access.
Summary
The United States economy has long thrived on the breeding, feeding, and slaughtering of livestock to fuel a collective appetite socialized to revere meat consumption in abundance. Concern for the environmental and epidemiological damages of industrial animal agriculture has facilitated the rise of the rapidly innovating industry for cell-based meat alternatives. Cultivated meat products are produced by growing stem cells harvested from livestock muscle tissue in an artificially replicated growth environment, resulting in a mass with biological equivalency to conventional meat. Although still in the research and development process, cultured animal proteins have achieved prototypic success and are nearing market readiness. These lab-grown meat products comprise a larger "foodtech" revolution to create a post-animal bioeconomy, foreshadowing disruptions to agricultural stakeholders across the food industry. Using an analytical framework rooted in political economy and institutional and behavioral economics theory, this inquiry seeks to map out and understand the political economic ecosystem of the emerging cell-based meat industry: to coherently identify political, economic, sociocultural, and legal "tension points" in product deployment, as well as the relationships that exist -- or could exist-- between disparate agricultural stakeholders. Through an extensive review of existing literature, as well as thematic analysis of interviews completed with conventional agribusiness stakeholders, I have elucidated some of these key tension points and the power dynamics inherent in them. Market entry for cellular agriculturalists is currently entangled in a myriad of issues: technical challenges to safely expanding production to industrial scale; politically fraught discord over regulation, labelling, and the very definition of meat; access to long-term financial capital amid the alacrity and caprice of venture capitalists; and intimate debates about consumer food culture. Perhaps most contentious are the promises of cultivated meat entrepreneurs to fracture the hegemony of the industrial meat complex and bring a new wave of synthetic animal products to the burgeoning global population and the nutritional requisites of its consumers. While there is a growing body of literature from the social sciences on the social and ethical implications of cultivated meat, this inquiry also provides a vision for better understanding the role of power and institutional rules governing the creation of novel meat products -- and who will "win" and "lose" as a result.
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Dissertation Note
B.S. Pennsylvania State University 2021.
Technical Details
The full text of the dissertation is available as an Adobe Acrobat .pdf file ; Adobe Acrobat Reader required to view the file.
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