Abstract
In vitro meat (IVM), also known as cultured meat, involves growing cells into muscle tissue to be eaten as food. The technology had its most high-profile moment in 2013 when a cultured burger was cooked and tasted in a press conference. Images of the burger featured in the international media and were circulated across the Internet. These images—literally marks on a two-dimensional surface—do important work in establishing what IVM is and what it can do. A combination of visual semiotics and narrative analysis shows that images of IVM afford readings of their story that are co-created by the viewer. Before the cultured burger, during 2011, images of IVM fell into four distinct categories: cell images, tissue images, flowcharts, and meat in a dish images. The narrative infrastructure of each image type affords different interpretations of what IVM can accomplish and what it is. The 2013 cultured burger images both draw upon and depart from these image types in an attempt to present IVM as a normal food stuff, and as ‘matter in place’ when placed on the plate. The analysis of individual images and the collection of images about a certain object or subject—known as the imagescape—is a productive approach to understanding the ontology and promise of IVM and is applicable to other areas of social life.
Highlights
In vitro meat (IVM), known as cultured meat, involves tissue engineering muscle that could potentially be eaten as meat
In this paper we have asked two questions: (i) how do images that show us IVM suggest what it can accomplish? And (ii) how do these images suggest we should understand what IVM is? The answer is that images afford readings that are cocreated with the viewer, different types of image do this work through different narrative infrastructures
Images confer meaning through signs that can be analysed through visual semiotics
Summary
In vitro meat (IVM), known as cultured meat, involves tissue engineering muscle that could potentially be eaten as meat. Visual semiotics and narrative analysis point us towards the specific readings that an image affords In this framework, these images (1) can circulate as entities in their own right, (2) carry meaning that is independently organised, but (3) convey messages in combination with the frame in which they are presented, and (4) allow for the co-creation of messages through the interpretation of the reader. In the absence of any culturally available definition, the tissue can all too be perceived as uncomfortably straddling boundaries between the present and the future, tissue engineering and animal rearing, the laboratory and the kitchen, and the routinely slaughtered and the never-born.5 This notion of ontological ambiguity points to ambiguities around both what IVM is and how it relates to existing classifications around food, science, and technology. This allows us to comment on the ontological status of the tissue within a classificatory order in each depiction
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