Meat Planet, Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft
Meat Planet, Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft
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Meat Planet
Artificial Flesh and the Future of Food

Author: Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft

Narrator: Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft

Unabridged: 10 hr 8 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 12/19/2019


Synopsis

Meat Planet explores the quest to generate meat in the lab—a substance sometimes called "cultured meat"—and asks what it means to imagine that this is the future of food.

Neither an advocate nor a critic of cultured meat, Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft spent five years researching the phenomenon. In Meat Planet, he reveals how debates about lab-grown meat reach beyond debates about food, examining the links between appetite, growth, and capitalism. Could satiating the growing appetite for meat actually lead to our undoing? Are we simply using one technology to undo the damage caused by another? Like all problems in our food system, the meat problem is not merely a problem of production. It is intrinsically social and political, and it demands that we examine questions of justice and desirable modes of living in a shared and finite world.

Benjamin Wurgaft tells a story that could utterly transform the way we think of animals, the way we relate to farmland, the way we use water, and the way we think about population and our fragile ecosystem's capacity to sustain life. He argues that even if cultured meat does not "succeed," it functions—much like science fiction—as a crucial mirror that we can hold up to our contemporary fleshy dysfunctions.

About Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft

Benjamin A. Wurgaft is a writer and historian. His previous books include Meat Planet: Artificial Flesh and the Future of Food and Thinking in Public: Strauss, Levinas, Arendt.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Benji

'A biotechnological nature walk, an assemblage of detours through the history of the future of food, a collection of meditations on meat, attentive not only to the ideas of scientists and engineers but also the way they serve as catalysts for philosophical, anthropological, and historical inquiry. N......more

meat planet. Meat Planet. MEAT PLANET. MeAt pLaNeT. Meat. Planet. My sister gave me this book as a gag gift because I once spent a holiday quite a few years back ranting effusively about the potential of in vitro MEAT (‘cultured meat,’ Wurgaft informs us it is now being branded) and I guess it left......more

Goodreads review by Larissa

Wurgaft makes you think!......more