Sex Robots and Vegan Meat

by Jenny Kleeman

  But for now it is only a shiver of disgust. I wipe my daughter’s chin and fetch her milk.

  CHAPTER EIGHT Aftertaste

  Oron Catts has made a career out of cultivating disgust. Today, he is growing mouse scar tissue in foetal bovine serum, using an incubator made of manure. ‘It’s sixty-five degrees Celsius, that compost pile,’ he declares, gesturing towards a wrought iron cage containing a tissue culture flask on top of an imposing heap. ‘It’s made from woodchip and horse shit from the mounted police.’

  We are standing in a courtyard of King’s College, London, with the Shard so close it’s almost impossible to see its pinnacle, beside a truncated pyramid of dung. This is Oron’s latest artwork, entitled Vessels of Care & Control: Compostcubator 2.0, and he has travelled from the University of Western Australia in Perth to see it exhibited. The strangely beautiful compost heap is the first piece visitors see as they enter the Science Gallery London’s Spare Parts exhibition. The Compostcubator uses principles of permaculture, with microbes in the compost generating the heat necessary to grow mouse connective tissue entirely off-grid. It’s supposed to make us examine how human beings think we can control and replicate life. ‘It will be one of the first times that a piece of cultured mouse will be presented outdoors,’ Oron says with pride.

  Oron has spent twenty-five years using living tissue as his medium of artistic expression. Along with his partner in art and life, Ionat Zurr, he has grown wing-shaped objects out of pig tissue (Pig Wings, 2000), a living jacket made from cultured mouse cells (Victimless Leather, 2004) and made a domestic bioreactor for farming in vitro insect meat (Stir Fly, 2016). But he is also perhaps the most unsung pioneer and unwitting trailblazer in the world of clean meat. In 2003, his Disembodied Cuisine exhibit was the first time on earth anyone had ever grown and eaten in vitro meat, nearly a decade before Mark Post lifted the cloche on the Sergey Brin-funded burger. With a single five-gram frog steak marinated in Calvados, Oron jump-started the industry that is exploding in Silicon Valley and beyond. He’s now its most outspoken critic.

  Hardly anyone in Silicon Valley knows his name, but Oron is a distinctly memorable man. He looks like a wizard: his mesmerizing beard is long, curly, bushy, grey and very pointy, and his hair is slicked back into a ponytail of tumbling curls. He has so much to say, and he says it too fast. I wanted to meet him to hear about the frog meat, but when we sit down to talk he wants to tell me the entire story of his professional life. My questions almost get in the way.

  ‘My background is in product design,’ he begins. ‘What I recognized in the early nineties – and what is becoming painfully obvious now – is that biology becomes an engineering pursuit, and life becomes a raw material to be engineered. It provides a new palette for artistic possibilities.’ Instead of designing biological products, Oron chose to become an artist. ‘I felt that as an artist I have a licence to problematize things rather than be a solutionist.’ In other words, Oron is allowed to ask questions without any obligation to answer them.

  He calls his creations ‘contestable objects’. ‘I found the whole idea of designing with life a contestable idea, not something we should accept at face value.’

  ‘Although a lot of people do,’ I manage to interject.

  ‘Certainly, that’s right, and it’s becoming worse and worse. And in a place like San Francisco, you realize those people have no trace of self-reflection.’

  Meat has been on Oron’s mind since he grew up force-feeding geese for foie gras on a farm in Israel. In the mid-nineties he teamed up with Ionat, a scientist, who taught him the techniques of tissue culture. ‘It’s not difficult to learn how to do. It’s a craft, not a science,’ he says, tugging on his fabulous beard. ‘I thought I might be on to something that could solve problems in the world. The more I dug into it, the more I realized it’s an extremely problematic approach.’

  Oron says humans are not ready to control biological systems because we don’t properly understand what life is. If the cells in the corneas of a rabbit are still alive hours after the heart has stopped beating, is the rabbit still alive? Is it semi-alive? ‘We only have one word for life in the English language, whereas we have fifty words to describe shit. So we can’t even put into words what we are doing.’ And that mindset, that lack of nuanced understanding while tinkering with life, could lead to ultimately horrific possibilities. ‘We suffer from cultural amnesia when it comes to our control of living systems. What we choose to do with life, we will end up doing to ourselves.’ The systematic breeding of animals led to the eugenics of the twentieth century, he says; who knows where the systematic growing of animal flesh will lead us.

  ‘The solution to the problem that in vitro meat is trying to solve can be much more easily solved by the reduction of meat consumption. From a perspective of efficiency, it’s overshoot engineering,’ he tells me. ‘But it produces this seductive narrative that everything will be OK, we don’t need to change our behaviour, because those smart scientists will figure out a way, business as usual, and we can increase consumption.’

  The Disembodied Cuisine installation, which took place in a converted biscuit factory in Nantes, France, in March 2003, was always intended to provoke uncomfortable feelings. ‘We played on what constitutes foul food. We knew that French people don’t like the idea of engineered food much, and we chose frogs because most other cultures find the idea of frogs unappetizing.’

  They built a tissue culture lab and a dining room in the gallery, behind plastic sheeting curtains emblazoned with biohazard signs. They cultured cells from the African clawed frog for three months, while members of the public looked on. On the final day of the exhibition, six people – Oron, the exhibition curator, the director of the museum and three members of the public – ate the frog meat. (Ionat was pregnant and excused from the table.)

  Oron flips open his laptop to show me a film of the history-making frog-eating culmination of the artwork. The diners sit at an immaculately laid table. Oron is dressed as a waiter, but wears latex gloves. He still has the beard, but it is shorter and blacker. A French chef fries the Calvados-marinated frog steaks in a miniature pan on a camping stove, and the diners smoke while they wait to be served: very artsy, very French, very much a product of another era. Then the globules of frog are dished up with tweezers onto large white plates. ‘Bon appétit!’ someone says, and the diners slice into the meat with scalpels. No one looks like they are aware that they are about to make history when they put it into their mouths.

  ‘I was quite concerned about health and safety, so I asked the chef to cook it in a garlic and honey sauce, which are well-known antibacterial agents. The sauce was amazing,’ Oron remembers. ‘We were able to grow about five grams and to distribute it between six people. It was the ultimate nouvelle cuisine.’

  But there was a problem with the polymer scaffold on which the frog tissue had been grown. ‘The polymers were designed to break down within the context of growing mammalian cells and warm-blooded cells, at thirty-seven degrees. The frog cells were growing at room temperature, so it didn’t break down properly. The polymer is like felt, so it still had a very strong texture of fabric, and the frog cells, even though they were muscle cells, we didn’t exercise them. They were more –’ he searches for the right word – ‘jelly.’

  ‘It sounds absolutely disgusting.’

  ‘Exactly!’ he exclaims with delight. ‘Three of us swallowed it, three just couldn’t. They spat it out, which was great for us because we could use what they spat out in the follow-up exhibition, which was called The Remains of Disembodied Cuisine.’

  It is all so arch, so knowingly playful, and it’s a missed opportunity, in a way: Oron’s critique is presented as a beard-stroking curiosity, something for a tiny audience of art lovers and intellectuals to ponder, rather than the catalyst for a very necessary and wide public debate about the future of food. The first piece of clean meat ever eaten was produced in order to highlight how problematic this potential technology
could be, and the world received the product but not the message alongside it.

  ‘We anticipated that it would generate interest, but there was very little coverage,’ he concedes. ‘The main thing was that the world was busy with something very different, and that was the second Gulf War in Iraq.’

  Oron and Ionat moved on to other things, like the tiny jacket made of living mouse tissue (which the curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York had to ‘kill’ by switching off the incubator because it was growing too fast). Meat wasn’t their focus, but it was pretty much off the menu: Oron says he gave up eating anything warm-blooded after the frog. Then, in 2011, someone sent him a link to a story about a Dutch scientist who was claiming he was going to be the first person to grow and eat in vitro meat, and was planning to do it in some kind of live show. ‘This was kind of amazing. This was too much.’

  The Dutch scientist was Mark Post, of course. Oron sought him out and got him to agree to participate in another of his artworks, 2012’s ArtMeatFlesh 1  : a cooking show in Rotterdam in front of a live audience with judges and tastings, and a debate between scientists, artists and philosophers about meat. None of the meat cooked was lab-grown, but every dish contained something disgusting and thought-provoking that could be the future of food, be it mealworms or FBS. ‘It was a real multimedia experience, and very enjoyable for everyone. We were able to get into some very serious conversations,’ Oron says. ‘Mark played along, that’s why I have so much respect for him. And he likes to cook. He was wearing a chef hat.’

  There are clips of ArtMeatFlesh 1 online. There’s Mark, the esteemed scientist and father of clean meat, complete with chef’s hat, laughing and joking and dishing up revolting things. Although it’s in many ways the opposite of his humourless 2013 burger reveal, when you watch the two events alongside each other it’s obvious that Mark borrowed several ideas about how to engage an audience – how to put on a show – from being part of Oron’s piece. There’s a heavy irony to all this: Oron’s work was only ever meant to be a performance, and now we have a clean meat industry based on performance, from Mark’s burger to the JUST nugget.

  ‘You’re the first person to have grown meat in a lab and eaten it, but nobody knows it’s you. How do you feel about that?’ I ask.

  For the first time in an hour of talking, Oron pauses. ‘I have an ego. I care about it to some extent,’ he finally says. ‘One thing that I found amazing – this is how fucked up the media is – after Mark’s burger thing, only two media outlets in the whole fucking world approached me for comment. One of them was Time magazine, and one was a rural ABC radio show. I spent quite a lot of time with the Time reporter, telling her the whole story, and it ended up being just one tiny sentence. She emailed me an apology and said, “Unfortunately the editor didn’t feel that your story contributed to the narrative that we wanted to have.” They wanted to have a good news story.’ For a moment there is a bitterness in his voice. But then he adds, gently, ‘Mark is interesting, because there are a few cases where he actually did give us credit, in a kind of offhand way.’ But the world-saving burger in a Petri dish is a much neater story than the vomit-inducing frog meat nouvelle cuisine, so that’s the story that gets told.

  ‘Your ArtMeatFlesh thing and Mark’s launch have a lot in common. Maybe his burger wouldn’t have had as much impact if it wasn’t launched as a performance?’

  ‘This is where it makes things quite powerful. This is one beautiful example where science follows art.’

  ‘But how do you feel about being the unintended forefather of this new industry, an industry that clearly troubles you?’

  ‘It’s not what we intended, but quite an important part of our work is our critique of the psychopathologies of control: we’re trying to control systems that existed outside of our control for millennia,’ he replies. ‘One thing which was very important for us from the beginning of our practice was to not try to take control of it. Once our work is out there in the public domain, it would generate its own stories and narrative.’ He smiles. ‘I’m fascinated to see where it goes.’

  * * *

  There is no campaign against clean meat. The few individual voices I’ve found who are prepared to criticize it are overwhelmingly drowned out by the chorus of positive messages sent out by the clean meat industry. But, despite the culture of irrepressible inevitability promoted by the start-ups and the GFI, no one has any idea where clean meat is going to go.

  Bruce, Josh and Mike had been so confident that consumers were going to accept clean meat, that they wouldn’t care that it came from a lab, that they would prefer it to meat grown in animal bodies, but the ‘ick factor’ is actually a serious problem for the industry. Bruce is totally unfazed by any suggestion that people are grossed out by the idea. ‘I’m not concerned when polls show some portion of the population is no more eager to accept in vitro meat than their grandparents were to accept in vitro babies,’ he wrote in the L.A. Times in 2018. ‘There will always be Luddites who decry and resist new technologies. That’s to be expected. But the rest of us will happily enjoy conscience-clearing clean meat.’

  Yet the conscience-clearing benefits of clean meat are also contested, as I discover once I take a proper look at the few academic papers available that examine the claims made by the industry and GFI. Most worryingly, I found at least four pieces of research that conclude that, while it might be more efficient in terms of land, water and energy use than beef production, clean meat produces more greenhouse gases than raising poultry – as much as 38 per cent more, according to one study. We’d be better off eating chicken to save the planet. (In fact, two of these papers say we’d be much better off eating insects, but that’s another challenge, as far as ick factor goes.)

  All of these studies used very speculative estimates of the inputs of clean meat production; scientists and entrepreneurs are still working out how to grow meat in labs, and production methods are bound to grow more efficient. But the point is that nobody can really say for sure whether clean meat is better for the planet at the moment, and that’s a worrying ambiguity given the certainty with which its conscience-clearing environmental benefits are being sold to investors and consumers today.

  And, of course, clean meat is still bad for us. The risks of eating mountains of red meat won’t go away just because it’s been grown in a lab. It will still give us cancer and heart disease, it still has cholesterol, fat and no fibre, even if it can be engineered to be a little better for us one day. The danger is that, if we are told the meat we are eating is ‘clean’, we might feel that we have a licence to eat as much of it as we please, and it is nonetheless more damaging for the planet and for our bodies than a plant-based diet.

  So is plant-based meat the answer? Those bleeding Impossible Burgers and juicy Beyond Burgers? Maybe. Perhaps not. Plant-based imitation animal products are ultra-processed foods, made from an eye-watering number of components. When I look up the ingredients of the JUST Egg I ate it reads like the apparatus list of a chemistry experiment, a roll call of isolates and gums and oils and extracts and flavourings, tetrasodium pyrophosphate, transglutaminase, potassium citrate and more. The Beyond Burger is billed as being made of pea protein and coconut oil, but it also contains something called methylcellulose, maltodextrin, vegetable glycerine, gum arabic and succinic acid. You need to do a lot of tinkering to turn plants into something resembling animal products. And when you add up the miles required to ship all these components to the factory, and the nutrition they all provide, or don’t provide, in comparison to vegetable dishes that aren’t pretending to be meat, that anyone could make from ingredients they can grow in their back garden, it seems like quite a silly idea to be going to all this effort.

  Vegan meat depends on a pessimistic view of human beings: the belief that we are incapable of changing the way we eat. But the only way to be absolutely sure our food isn’t costing the earth is for us to lose our taste for meat. After all, the problem isn’t really animal agricultur
e, it’s human appetites.

  This doesn’t have to be about absolutes, though. ‘Even the possibility that this technology slows future potential increase in livestock meat would be a form of victory, a form of success,’ says Dr Neil Stephens, a sociologist at Brunel University, who probably knows more about the industry than any other academic in the world, and is the only person I’ve spoken to so far who is at pains to be even-handed and cautious. Neil is vegan, but it feels incidental to his work. He has been studying clean meat since 2008, looking at the politics, ethics and regulatory issues this form of food production would create, and I’ve just read a paper he wrote on ‘challenges in cellular agriculture’ which is so balanced it almost knocked me off my chair. I’ve rung him up in search of some much-needed sanity.

  ‘If the clean meat industry gets it right, and works out how to make something that’s really equivalent to meat, what challenges should we be concerned about?’ I ask.

  ‘Concern is too strong a word,’ Neil says, carefully. ‘We should be mindful of what the implications might be. Currently the technology is being developed by sets of companies and people in universities supported by a whole other set of people who are all genuinely concerned by the state of the world today, and genuinely committed to dedicating their lives, their intelligence and their passion to doing the best thing to address that through technology. You would expect, looking at other start-up cultures, that ownership could well change, through licensing, or companies being bought out. Who may be owning this technology in twenty years’ time, and what their values are, and how they relate to profit margin, may shape how it’s used.’