Open Collections

Ness, Nathanial J.

University of British Columbia

The concept of lab-grown meat as a viable alternative to animal agriculture has gained serious traction in recent conversations about the future of food. On the one hand, it is framed as a solution to the ecological and ethical effects of the livestock industry; on the other, it is framed as another industrial venture: the cellular livestock industry. In their efforts to appeal simultaneously to legislative bodies, investors, and the consumer public, stakeholders in the “emerging meat-space” have developed elaborate discursive strategies to appear “disruptive,” while maintaining the status quo. For my project, I will examine these discursive strategies from a rhetorical perspective as they are performed in Paul Shapiro’s Clean Meat (2018). I will argue that, despite engaging with necessary conversations about food, consumption patterns, and the ramifications of meat writ large, the clean meat “solution” is conceptually undergirded by the same industrial capitalist logic that caused the problem in the first place. As such, I propose reading Shapiro’s text as a mechanism that both abstracts and enables the gross accumulation of resources for an increasingly insulated sector of the global population. In the first chapter, I will explore how this works through the rhetorical use of narrative by examining the imaginative resources informing Clean Meat’s story-world. With an understanding of narrative as “worldbuilding for some purpose” (James 2022), I will highlight the narratives of human exceptionalism that not only make clean meat persuasive, but imaginatively delimit alternative approaches to the future of food. In the second chapter, I will examine how Shapiro enlists the rhetorical figure of the body as a way to foreground and foreclose the “good” and “bad” elements of meat and clean meat, and in so doing portray clean meat as “real,” ethical, and detached from relational materialities. In response, I read Clean Meat through a relational and materialist lens as a way to highlight the dangerous fiction of what I am calling Shapiro’s dis/embodied clean meat rhetoric.

Text

2024-04-15

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/87832

English

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/