ABSTRACT
What is beef? That’s a biomimetic question with planetary implications, since meat production is one of the main drivers of climate change. What if we were to go beyond soft robotics, and begin to produce metaphors made of biotic materials, to build an animal body from biochemical building blocks rather than hardware and software? The answer is on the Burger King menu right now. But what’s really happening here is a collision of pastoral and technological metaphors, which this chapter sets out to explore. The arrival of the Impossible Burger raises questions that are simple but profound: What is meat? Is it a practice, or a product? What is the value of the original source in this translation between animal and food? To get a sense of the metaphoric and literal dimensions of this carnivorous terrain, the narrator visits the traditional reindeer herding area of northern Norway and Finland. Then the chapter considers cellular agriculture by visiting the production facility of Impossible Foods, where the narrator tastes this biomimetic meat tartare—that is, raw. The narrator also samples “vegan blood,” a concentrate of the heme molecule produced from genetically modified yeast. The experience of sipping vegan blood offers a visceral illustration of the way biomimetics translates metaphor into material, into tangible phenomena that challenge conventional boundaries between the technological and the natural, the living animal and the nonliving object, making us think again about the natural world and our place within it.
