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“HOW MUCH OF AN ANIMAL has there to be for it to be a dead animal?” asks anthropologist Garry Marvin on the subject of taxidermy, and such a question also applies to the modern experience of meat.1 Well-meaning people may eschew terms such as “meat animals” and “farm animals” because they reduce forms of life to a usevalue. But such moves alsohelp to empty out the histories of livestock husbandry conditioning the lives of companion species , and so intensify the evacuation of any sense of agency of all life forms involved in meat production, including that of meat itself. Transformed from the fly-covered wares of slaughtering butchers to the plastic-wrapped fixture of supermarkets’ refrigerated shelves, meathasbecome far more than a “symbol” of modern societies.2 For historians, meat-eating patterns provide a “vernacular taxonomy” for the formation and global dissemination of national identity and as well for activists, “an index of racism .”3 Even in traditionally vegetarian cultures, consumer demand for meat is increasing rapidly, reflecting the changing relations of people and animals that propel the meat industry into an unprecedentedboom.4 Withworld consumption scheduled to double by 2050, meat is now implicated in an array of animal stories, which at once proves an index of global consumerism and a significant contributor to its problems. The incredible, unprecedented numbers of animals raised to be killed for food threaten the health and environment of nearly every species. While virus outbreaks such as swine and avian flu make headlines, many drugresistant strains of bacteria quietly grow endemic within industries that signi ficantly contribute aswell to climate change. Withlittlehope of solving these problems through business as usual, proponents of the increasingly centralized and globalized meat-making industries focus on mitigating a still-more pervasivesenseof discomfortwithcross-speciesintimaciesatthesiteof slaughter . Facing pressure to change, spurred in large part by animal advocates, Chapter 4 The Fictions and Futures of Farm Animals: Semi-Living to “Animalacra” Pig Tales 163 some have begun to pin their hopes on technologically reconfiguring meat itself as a nonanimal product, and in doing so reveal a deepening sense of confusion about the lives that converge in meat animals and farm stories. The Web site New Harvest, established in 2004, claimedthattissue-cultured meat, or “meat produced in vitro, in a cell culture, rather than from an animal ,” is thebestbet for “advancing meat substitutes.”5 Although packaged as the cutting edge in food science, this technological potential emerges from developments inbiomedicine and fine art,which in turn draw from nearly a century of “tissue-culture” (andwithin the past twentyyears, tissue-engineering) research.6 “Real artificial meat” is another term for its goal, and one that more accurately reflects the contradictions built into this spectral commodity.7 New Harvest’s claims thatlaboratory meat-making is “morehumane than conventional meat” lead some critics of the industry to the erroneous conclusion that the product is “violence-free meat.”8 So, in 2008, the prominent animal-rights organization PETA announced a controversial million-dollar prize to the first outfit to bring real artificial meat to market. Animal advocacy efforts may be bolstered by the claims of philosophers and policymakers that they are “morally required to support” what appears to be simply an “interesting technological phenomenon.”9 Looking closely at the technical details reveals how such responses portend misunderstandings not only of how animals and animal parts are involved in these processes but also of meat’s liminal life among human and animal bodies. Although the PETA contest aims specifically for real artificial chicken “nuggets,” the most successful of the tissue-cultured meat experiments to date have produced a ground- or minced-meat-like substance grown from pigs, muscle-derived stem cells (MDSC) that are cultured on an embryonic cell isolated from piglets. As artificial-meat promoters are quick to note, it is “because of the animal-friendly image cultivated meat must maintain” that they emphasize the potential use of nonanimal polymer scaffolding (required toreproducethethree-dimensionaltextureof meat)andacell-growthmedium derived from maitake (hen-of-the-woods mushrooms).10 Genealogically linked back to in vivo farm animals, and closely connected to in vitro meat cultivated from goldfish, sheep, and toad cells kept alive with serum derived from other animal species, real artificial meat promises transcendence from animal life but pursues this dream in ways that further compound the numbers and kinds of bodily intimacies that converge in meat eating.11 In the rush to find...

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