Meat Planet

"The quest to grow 'meat' in a lab--a sci-fi concept turned reality--has repercussions far beyond food. What is the distinction between artificial and natural? How does our understanding of 'meat' change when we are its architects? From ethics to economics, Benjamin Wurgaft's new book opens up these questions, making the debate over lab-grown meat into a powerful lens for examining the future of food."--Nicola Twilley, cohost of Gastropod podcast "Benjamin Wurgaft is an engaged and omnivorous historian of ideas, and his Meat Planet is a welcome, wide-ranging, illuminating reflection on the changes underway in how we think about and produce edible animal flesh."--Harold McGee, author of On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen "As a thoughtful and informed meditation on the ambiguities of killing animals and eating their flesh, Meat Planet offers a welcome change from the boosterism of the proponents of cultured meat on the one hand and the shrill anthropomorphism of many opponents of meat eating on the other."--Rachel Laudan, author of Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History "As new forms of post-animal protein hit our dinner plates, meat has become edible sci-fi. In his savory new book, Benjamin Wurgaft shows how technology and design are reshaping the future of food, with implications for human evolution, how we define our fellow animals, and even where we draw the line between life and death."--Geoff Manaugh, author of BLDGBLOG and the New York Times bestseller A Burglar's Guide to the City "Benjamin Wurgaft's account of his five years stalking the promise of a lab-grown burger is a restless narrative, told with grace and wit, about our modern hunger for meat. Meat Planet questions what it is to be an eating, thinking human, caught between the imagined past of bucolic farms and a hyped future of gleaming bioreactors."--John Birdsall, James Beard Award-winning food writer "Neither alarmist nor Pollyannish, Meat Planet explores what meat means to us as a species, to the billions of us who like to eat it, and to those people engaged in the complicated, uncertain, techno-entrepreneurial work of reinventing and remaking meat--or something quite like it--in vessels other than animals. This is an innovative, engaging ethnography, conveyed through a wry and world-wise first-person narrative spanning scales from the petri dish to the planetary."--Mike Fortun, Department of Anthropology, University of California, Irvine