BackgroundCultured meat forms part of the emerging field of cellular agriculture. Still an early stage field it seeks to deliver products traditionally made through livestock rearing in novel forms that require no, or significantly reduced, animal involvement. Key examples include cultured meat, milk, egg white and leather. Here, we focus upon cultured meat and its technical, socio-political and regulatory challenges and opportunities.Scope and approachThe paper reports the thinking of an interdisciplinary team, all of whom have been active in the field for a number of years. It draws heavily upon the published literature, as well as our own professional experience. This includes ongoing laboratory work to produce cultured meat and over seventy interviews with experts in the area conducted in the social science work.Key findings and conclusionsCultured meat is a promising, but early stage, technology with key technical challenges including cell source, culture media, mimicking the in-vivo myogenesis environment, animal-derived and synthetic materials, and bioprocessing for commercial-scale production. Analysis of the social context has too readily been reduced to ethics and consumer acceptance, and whilst these are key issues, the importance of the political and institutional forms a cultured meat industry might take must also be recognised, and how ambiguities shape any emergent regulatory system.

This article explores the author's experiences of conducting both face-to-face and telephone interviews with elite and ultra-elite respondents. It draws upon the author's PhD research that uses a Sociology of Scientific Knowledge perspective to understand the social construction of macroeconomics. The article demonstrates how this perspective, and contributions from broader methodological texts, shaped the evolving research practice. The author reflects upon the distance between themselves as a relatively novice researcher and the high status position of the elite and ultra-elite respondents. This is followed with a discussion of several practical issues that arose from the research experience that would usefully inform the work of any researcher considering utilising telephone interviews. The article concludes that telephone interviewing with elite and ultra-elite respondents is both a productive and valid research option.

Cultured/clean/cell-based meat (CM) now has a near two decade history of laboratory research, commencing with the early NASA-funded work at Touro College and the bioarts practice of the Tissue Culture and Art project. Across this period the field, or as it is now more commonly termed, the “space,” has developed significantly while promoting different visions for what CM is and can do, and the best mechanisms for delivery. Here we both analyse and critically engage with this near-twenty year period as a productive provocation to those engaged with CM, or considering becoming so. This paper is not a history of the field, and does not offer a comprehensive timeline. Instead it identifies significant activities, transitions, and moments in which key meanings and practices have taken form or exerted influence. We do this through analyzing two related themes: the CM “institutional context” and the CM “interpretative package.” The former, the institutional context, refers to events and infrastructures that have come into being to support and shape the CM field, including university activities, conferences, third sector groups, various potential funding mechanisms, and the establishment of a start-up sector. The latter, the interpretative package, refers to the constellation of factors that shape or assert how CM should be understood, including the various names used to describe it, accounts of what it will achieve, and most recently, the emergent regulatory discussions that frame its legal standing. Across the paper we argue it is productive to think of the CM community in terms of a first and second wave. The first wave was more university-based and broadly covers the period from the millennium until around the 2013 cultured burger event. The second wave saw the increasing prevalence of a start-up culture and the circuits of venture capital interest that support it. Through this analysis we seek to provoke further reflection upon how the CM community has come to be as it is, and how this could develop in the future.

Over the last decade, several clusters of scientists have been using animal cells in an attempt to grow meat. Known as in vitro, or cultured, meat, the technology involves tissue engineering muscle cells for potential consumption as food. Those supporting the technology articulate a diversity of potential benefits in producing meat in this way, which include environmental-, health-, innovation-, and animal-welfare-related benefits. This essay reports on interviews with scientists and animal activists involved in making and promoting in vitro meat (IVM). While the technology remains in its infancy, its promotion has assertively been pursued with a set of promissory narratives designed to enroll potential funders, commercial investors, and consumers. The essay explores the ethical boundary-work —the drawing of boundaries around what constitutes ethical scientific practice—pursued in the creation of socio-technical expectations around IVM. In particular, it focuses on the emergence of an animal-libratory promissory narrative by exploring how ethically correct practice toward animals is constructed and used to underpin notions of what IVM is and what it can do . The key contributions of the essay are to provide a detailed analysis of the situated ethics of IVM, and to make explicit the relatedness among ethics, promise, and ontology.

Low levels of physical activity have been reported in South Asian Muslim women. Mosques could be beneficial in providing physical activity opportunities for Muslim women. This study examined the feasibility, acceptability and effectiveness of a mosque-based physical activity program for South Asian Muslim women in Canada. Sixty-two South Asian Muslim women participated in a 24-week mosque-based exercise intervention. Feasibility, acceptability and effectiveness of the program was evaluated by pre-post survey questions from the Duke Activity Status Index (DASI) and International Physical Activity Questionnaire among 28 women who consented to the research data collection. Nineteen women were assessed pre-and post-intervention. The women demonstrated increase in median scores of self-efficacy (90 pre vs. 100 post; p = 0.004) and the importance of engaging in regular physical activity (90 pre vs. 100 post; p = 0.01). Fewer participants were classified as inactive at the end of the intervention (42 % pre vs. 10 % post; p = 0.006). There was a mean increase in DASI scores (39.2 pre vs. 44.6 post; p = 0.06) reflecting an improvement in peak aerobic capacity and functional quality of life. Culturally relevant structured networks such as mosques are important assets when designing healthy lifestyle interventions for South Asian Muslim women.