Eating for the post‐Anthropocene: Alternative proteins and the biopolitics of edibility

Abstract

This paper explores the status and formation of edibility as a new site of food biopolitics. It builds directly on recent debates in geography that have examined the biopolitical mechanisms by which consumers are responsibilised to become “good” eaters. To date, these literatures have largely focused on already‐familiar food products. In contrast, this paper examines the biopolitics of novel foods – specifically, a range of new alternative proteins (APs), including cellular agriculture, edible insects and plant‐based proteins. Through their use of (bio)technology, APs claim to overcome the environmental and ethical crises that increasingly define the current livestock industry, and indeed our current epoch, now commonly referred to as the Anthropocene. They consequently offer individuals the choice of consuming their way to a more stable and ethical post‐Anthropocene. Critical to consumer adoption, however, is public acceptance of APs as “food.” Given that their raw materials and production methods are unfamiliar to many consumers’ food practices, there is much work to be done by AP developers to convince people that their products are indeed edible. It is in this process of edibility formation that I identify new biopolitical potentialities – what I refer to as the biopolitics of edibility. Drawing on recent critical geography literatures that have examined how “things become food” (Roe, ), the paper identifies two distinct yet co‐productive ways in which AP developers are conducting this transition from inedible to edible: first, through material interventions on the molecular, physical and visceral characteristics of APs; and second, through discursive interventions that work to normalise APs through textual and visual language. It concludes by reflecting on the biopolitical implications of these processes and how the edibility formation of APs is both entangled and implicit in current politics around “good” eating and the individualised project of realising the post‐Anthropocene.

Food as Software: Place, Protein, and Feeding the World Silicon Valley–Style

“…Assemblage thinking and the concept of embeddedness-which views economic activity as entangled in cultures, networks, and territories-are just two of the ways in which food scholars have enlivened geographic analyses of food economies and made sense of the prevailing significance and resistance of place in contemporary global foodways (Whatmore and Thorne 1997). From such viewpoints, agrifood capitalism does not run uninterrupted across surfaces, but rather snags in places, meeting resistance in the climatic contexts and biologies of the eaten (Goodman, Sorj, and Wilkinson 1987), and the visceral and cultural expectations of the eater (Guthman 2015;Sexton 2016Sexton , 2018. The continued significance of place is perhaps most salient in the resurgence of localism in AFNs.…”

“…The geographies of quality that have mattered for APs to date, then, are less attentive to the terroir of ingredients and more on the terroir of innovation that brings them into being. A key consequence of this reimagining of food as tech has produced new and influential spatial realities of protein food production that have led to Silicon Valley, a technoindustrial region previously disinterested in food ventures, becoming a leading hub in the race to fix food in the Anthropocene (Sexton 2018).…”

“…This divorcing of animal products from animal bodies has created an unprecedented juncture in the ontological politics of food. Cowless milk and slaughter-free meat have not only created new questions and possibilities of what these foodstuffs are but also what they can and should be (Stephens 2013;Sexton 2018;Jönsson, Linné, and McCrow-Young 2019). Social scientists have begun to document the promises, technologies, regulations, and capital through which the meanings and materialities of APs are being constructed, and ultimately serving to materialize a future market (Stephens 2013;Jönsson 2016;Mouat, Prince, and Roche 2019;Sexton, Garnett, and Lorimer 2019).…”

“…The specifics and processes of this resistance offer further themes for future geographic research. A fruitful avenue would be to engage economic geography with materialist-focused work in food geography (e.g., Roe 2006;Goodman 2016;Sexton 2018) and critical agrifood scholarship (Goodman 2004;Guthman 2015) that has documented similar examples of the material and reputational limits that prevent, or at least complicate, the capitalist appropriation of food. Bringing these debates together promises new insights on the particularities that set food apart from other commodities (Goodman 2011) and that, in the case of APs, have remained a key barrier to their complete rendering as software.…”

Cell-Based Fish: A Novel Approach to Seafood Production and an Opportunity for Cellular Agriculture

“…The challenges of feeding the world's growing population in a healthy way and in the context of sustainability has been presented (Lindgren et al, 2018). In this thesis, "Eating for the post-Anthropocene: Alternative proteins, Silicon Valley and the (bio)politics of food security, " novel animal proteins as a new locus for biopolitical disruption are presented as agents that affect culture and geographies (Sexton, 2018).…”