For a biosemiotics of cultivated meat: cell-based food and its positioning between nature and culture

Abstract

For a Biosemiotics of Cultivated Meat: Cell-Based Food and Its Positioning Between Nature and Culture The production of cultivated meat, which allows companies to produce meat without raising or killing animals, may potentially solve many of today’s problems connected to meat production. However, cultivated meat is too often seen as “artificial”, “synthetic” and in the end “against” something else. This also raises issues concerning the ethics of communication, very often based on this misleading opposition. This article challenges the philosophical stance at the basis of this misrepresentation and suggests an advanced vision enabling a new and more balanced vision. It starts from the idea of the relationship between Nature and Culture. Theoretically, thus, this article draws on biosemiotics, and specifically on Sebeok and Martinelli, who prefigure a different relationship between Nature and Culture, where Culture is not separated from or in contrast to Nature,but is a part of it. Beyond culture, this article even philosophically supports the idea that cultivated meat is not an absolute novelty suddenly landed on the planet Earth and contrasting all the notions and the rules regulating the cycle of meat. It is instead a further step of a long cultural process leading to consider non-human and human animals as citizens of the same environment. In this light, cultured meat is more simply a new kind of meat, the last type of it so far: a product that is more related to traditional meat than old rigid paradigms could theorize. It is under these new perspective, thus, that cultivated meat may be communicated in a more informed and balanced way.

Keywords

• biosemiotics
• cultivated meat
• nature