Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft

Harvard Book Store welcomes writer and historian BENJAMIN ALDES WURGAFT for a discussion of his latest book, Meat Planet: Artificial Flesh and the Future of Food.

About Meat Planet

In 2013, a Dutch scientist unveiled the world’s first laboratory-created hamburger. Since then, the idea of producing meat, not from live animals but from carefully cultured tissues, has spread like wildfire through the media. Meanwhile, cultured meat researchers race against population growth and climate change in an effort to make sustainable protein. 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.

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.

Praise for Meat Planet

“As a thoughtful and informed meditation on the ambiguities of killing animals and eating their flesh, Meat Planet offers a welcome change from the boosterism of the proponents of cultured meat on the one hand and the shrill anthropomorphism of many of the opponents of meat eating on the other.” —Rachel Laudan, author of Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History

“Ben Wurgaft’s account of his five years stalking the promise of a lab-grown burger is a restless narrative, told with grace and wit, about our modern hunger for meat. Meat Planet questions what it is to be an eating, thinking human, caught between the imagined past of bucolic farms and a hyped future of gleaming bioreactors.” —John Birdsall, James Beard Award-winning food writer

"Neither alarmist nor pollyannish, Meat Planet explores what meat means to us as a species, to the billions of us who like to eat it, and to those people engaged in the complicated, uncertain, techno-entrepreneurial work of reinventing and remaking meat—or something quite like it—in vessels other than animals. This is an innovative, engaging ethnography, conveyed through a wry and world-wise first person narrative spanning scales from the petri dish to the planetary." ––Mike Fortun, Department of Anthropology, University of California, Irvine