The Biopolitics of Cr/Edibility: The Construction of Taste

A few years prior to scientists getting involved in the production of in vitro meat, bioartists Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, part of the bioart collectives SymbioticA and the Tissue Culture & Art (TC&A), were also experimenting with growing animal cells outside of animals’ bodies in an exhibition entitled Disembodied Cuisine shown in 2003. As part of a longer project entitled Semi-Living Steak, they explored “the implications of a near-future scenario in which lab-grown tissues” become a source of food (TC&A Project, 2000). Semi-Living Steak came about during their residency at the Tissue Engineering and Organ Fabrication Laboratory at Harvard Medical School in 2000. The proposition of growing food in the laboratory had not yet been explored even though the idea, as we saw, had been around for a long time. In this experimental work, cells were collected from an unborn fetus, exploring in utero tissue culture (Hauser, 2003). The original idea of growing meat came about in the laboratory when: