Wurgaft zeroes in on those contradictions, and uses them as a cultural prism. The technological achievements are impressive. But what else might we surmise about a world where we’re making good on a desire to eat an animal without killing it? And what does it say about our ambition that we’re using this new, god-like ability to make hamburgers? Meat Planet is a balm for those weary of the lab meat bluster—people tired of the endless promises, and done waiting for the better days ahead, which Wurgaft calls “future fatigue.” We talked on the phone from Cambridge, where he is a visiting scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

So how’d you get into this? Why meat?

My mother’s an anthropologist, and I grew up with her field work, which often had to do with food. Her name is Merry White. She wrote a book about coffee in Japan that may not be that well-known, but is well-known to some. She and I just finished co-authoring a short book on food history, which I’m submitting to a press pretty soon.

In my mid-20s, I went out to Berkeley for graduate school. Food writing was my way of eating slightly better than I would have been able to afford on my school stipend. I wrote about a lot of different topics—I wrote about the relationship between food smells and ethnic tension, I wrote about the cost of expensive meals, I wrote about cheese and organic food. And I wrote about meat for a kind of art magazine [Meatpaper]. There were all kinds of articles about clothing made from meat, and all forms of delicious meat, and the undeliciousness of meat production.

In Meat Planet, you explain that “protein is protean.” Meat means different things to different people. What does it mean to you?

Meat is usually the proteinaceous, optional thing. It is the thing that I tend to eat more of than I need. It’s from an animal—I don’t use the word “meat” to describe nuts. I definitely think that meat involves, on some level, the death of an independent organism. But you know, when you get adjectival, it obviously gets different. Mushrooms have a meatiness.

Is making meat from animal cells a way to raise the morale of more people—the rising middle classes in countries like China and India, who want beef, too?

I used to think that lab-grown meat was going to be about China and India, and it was going to be about avoiding the problem of a billion new meat eaters in the 21st century who wanted their meat the old-fashioned way—which has dire environmental consequences. But it’s become clear that the goal, for some people, is to replace conventional meat here, and get people like me to see lab-grown meat as the equivalent of meat that we already eat. My financial ability to eat meat three meals a day—which I don’t do, but could if I really wanted to—reduces the meaning of it, in a sense.

You talk about some of the early experiments with culturing meat, when artists start messing around with the technology, just to see what’s possible.

Look at The In Vitro Meat Cookbook, which was based on a series of workshops these design professors did with their students at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands. They collected a whole bunch of visual imaginings of the future of lab-grown meat. There’s origami meat. There’s a meat flower that would expand in broth. There was meat yarn that you could knit. There were all kinds of shapes of meat that are non-normative shapes of meat.

And it was a really fun project, because it was a way of saying cultured meat can be strange, it can be multiple, it could be Whitmanesque in its containing of multitudes. It was exactly the opposite of what a lot of the entrepreneurs in the lab-grown meat world would like people to imagine. They are trying to stress the way in which what they’re doing will be the same as the meat. They want a lab-grown meat that reproduces familiar forms. I think some people are worried that there will be an earmouse—that somebody will, in a joke, graft a tiny pork chop onto a mouse’s back.

Why would that worry them?

I don’t think it’s something that they’re really explicitly worried about, but it’s an example of something that would alarm them, because it would be seen as a way of stressing the unnaturalness of this, and there’s a sort of anxiety about naturalness that cultured meat people at least imagine people will have.