Who Hates Cultured Meat? Examining Public Opposition to Cellular Agriculture
摘要
Despite its limited availability as a consumer product, recent years have witnessed significant scepticism, concern, and outright rejection regarding the emerging science and industry of cultured meat. Far from a cohesive group, opposition comes from a diverse assemblage of stakeholders, motivated by a heterogeneous set of sometimes contrasting ideological principles and personal incentives. The aim of this chapter is to catalogue the networked actors, arguments and broader socio-technical ideologies that are reflected in this diffuse opposition to cultured meat. We suggest that methods from consumer psychology and marketing, which have been used extensively to understand public opposition, are valuable but incomplete for understanding this terrain; instead, the task calls for greater engagement with conceptual principles highlighted in critically-oriented domains such as the social studies of science, communication and media studies, and the anthropology of food. Through this lens, issues related to culture, ideology, power, politics and our unique digital communication environment become vital to understanding the cultured meat debates. From this foundation, the chapter explores the perspectives of vocal advocates against the technology, describing three broad but intersecting perspectives, based in cultural tradition, techno-economic critique, and conspiracy, that have featured prominently in the oppositional coalition.