Technology as Responsibility: Failure, Food Animals, & Lab-grown Meat

Our relationships with animals, especially in agriculture, are problematic. So too are our attempts to fix those problems. One such potential solution, in vitro (or lab-grown) meat, embodies all the hope of the technological fix –- inventing the problem away by changing the nature of what we eat so that we can keep eating it without requiring any change from us. Environmental ethicist and technology studies scholar Prof. Galusky argues that it’s the technological aspect itself that merits evaluation, because it is this aspect that reflects our orientation to the natural world. What do we expect nature to be in this context? Why do we have such expectations? In what ways does in vitro meat further our technological zeal for controlling and defining the nonhuman world? Asking about the dynamics of the human-animal relationships helps to show that the more humans try to take responsibility for nature (animal bodies, in this case, or even just parts of bodies) the more we demand an environment that reflects our conditions, the less tolerant we become of failure, and the more likely we are to fail.