Introduction

Throughout history we have adapted our food systems and transformed our environments in order to meet specific challenges (wars, famines, natural disasters, disease, etc.) and created the material conditions to develop and expand the edible resources around us. The environmental historian Donald Worster says that ‘our most vital, constant and concrete’ connection to nature has been growing, procuring, and eating food (Worster, 1990). The history of food and agriculture has been marked by our most intimate entanglements with nature on the one hand, as eating literally metabolizes organic matter, but also, on the other hand, by a desire to transform the life conditions and the beings that we consume, to keep us alive. The advances made in the life sciences in the last 50 years have led us to this point, where the creation and production of new forms of vitality, in the laboratory, have become possible for biomedical and agricultural research and now, we are told, for the purpose of producing lab-grown edible animal tissues as a replacement for traditional meat. Throughout the various chapters, I aim to explore the fundamental ideas that compelled me to delve into the world of cellular agriculture (CA) and its implications. At the heart of this inquiry is the examination of how these newly engineered forms of vitality challenge and redefine the processes by which food is understood as purely biological. This ontological shift has profound implications, not only for the future of food production but also for the relationship between consumers and what they consume. By analyzing these transformations, I seek to understand how these technological innovations are reshaping our conceptions of life and nourishment, ultimately altering the very fabric of what it means to eat today.