Techno-utopian Imaginaries and Anthropocene Narratives

The narratives contained within cellular agriculture consist of the alignment of economic interests concerned with land scarcity and demographic predictions, the exhaustion of the global agri-food productivist system and its unsustainability, yield losses and the diminishing value of animal and plant production, food scares and zoonotic transmissions of disease, as well as the food crisis of 2007–2008, which significantly highlighted our dependence on land-based, highly financialized, and cartel-controlled industrial food systems. These events have led to crop failures, food insecurity, and economic losses, exacerbating challenges in the global food supply chain. More recently, catastrophic events such as the COVID-19 pandemic, various major zoonoses such as swine and avian flu during and since 2020, the war in Ukraine and droughts in the Horn of Africa (2020–present), India and Pakistan (2022), the Yellow River Basin in China (2022), as well as Thailand, Cambodia, and Myanmar have had a major impact on agricultural supply chains, including meat exports. At the same time and in some of the same regions, massive flooding has affected agricultural lands in Pakistan (2022), China (2020), Brazil (2024), and several parts of Europe (2021, 2022, and 2023). The increasing frequency and intensity of droughts and floods, in grain-growing countries, have severely interrupted global agricultural supply chains and created havoc in terms of market availabilities and pricing. These combined events have seriously impacted the livestock industry not only in terms of diminished numbers of animals for market—the swine flu meant the destruction of millions of pigs—but grain and cereal supply chains needed for animal feed were also affected. As a result, meat prices and scarcity as well as food safety and environmental concerns created opportunities in the meat analogue and alternative protein market starting in the year 2020. These scenarios of food insecurity and climate catastrophes constituting the stories occurring in the past and present serve to shape the meaning of what the future might look like. They constitute narratives of destruction and climate uncertainty and remind us of the fragility of our world. They also serve as a reminder of the utopian potential of technoscience to address food and other forms of insecurity, offering a counternarrative of possible futures.