Cultivating Meat from Cells

Rather than the end of industrial animal agriculture or its ultimate form, cellular meat represents what French sociologist Jocelyne Porcher calls the anthropological rupture of the relation between humans and animals in farming (Chapelle, 2014). In Marxist terms, this means that rather than proposing an alternative to animal farming, laboratory-grown meat represents the ultimate stages of industrial agriculture, not its antithesis (Porcher, 2010). It is its continuation of the industrialization trends observed since the nineteenth century and it constitutes animal exploitation and factory farming by other means.