IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2015 - 59

sixth category, global development. Discussions were
not limited to these areas, however. Participants were
asked to inform the researchers regarding the variables
they felt would be most significant or important as tissue engineering techniques develop. Further, discussions of economic and environmental impacts were not
discouraged, though participants were informed that
studies of economic and environmental variables were
being accomplished via alternative methods.
The data collected from the workshops should be
interpreted as future scenarios for consideration and
discussion only. The complex nature of technological
development and its interactions with other systems
preclude the ability to accurately assess causal relationships and make deterministic predictions. Moreover,
the participants were predominantly American scholars.
Their views are thus not representative of a global population, or even all American cultural groups. Nonetheless,
the results presented here are meant to introduce novel
information to discourses and decision-making around
cultured meat development and commercialization.

between cultured and real meat. Others thought that
cultured meat would appeal to Americans' attempts to
remove themselves from the animal. As one participant
noted, "People don't want meat that looks like meat
necessarily. We want it to appear sterile, wrapped in
plastic, in the grocery store." On the other hand, a few
people expressed dissenting opinions and suggested
that, not only do Americans eat a substantial amount
of natural food, the amount of processing required for
production of cultured meat would inhibit people from
eating it even if they are eager to try novel foods. The

The "yuck factor" associated with
cultured meat could play an important
role in its acceptance.

Findings
The discussions during the three workshops did not
result in a unified prediction of social changes that
will accompany a transition from slaughtered meat to
in vitro meat. But that was not the goal. Instead participants discussed a wide variety of possible futures.
Some of the vignettes described could occur simultaneously. In other cases it was clear that only one of
the options could happen. Participants did not spend a
large amount of time debating the likelihood of specific
changes. Rather stories were built as a group - with one
person positing a possibility and others contributing
facts or suggestions that developed a broader picture of
the original idea. This section does not exhaust everything that was discussed, but outlines some of the common themes that arose.

Adoption and Consumption Decisions
Even though factors influencing cultured meat adoption were not a focus of the research, the workshop
groups often could not help but speculate about future
diffusion patterns. In general, people expected an
uneven global adoption rate and thought that Americans and Chinese would be open to the technology
much more than Europeans. In Europe, participants
said, people are more concerned with the source of
their food whereas, in the United States, food is already
highly modified and processed, with a very tenuous
connection to the natural source. Even in the case of
meat, they said, the shift to an "unnatural" product
has already happened. It was further speculated that a
lot of Americans "wouldn't even know the difference"
MARCH 2015

∕

"yuck factor" associated with cultured meat could play
an important role in its acceptance.
Additional factors associated with adoption were
religion and identity. Some participants thought that
religious rules about food would probably remain. Some
even foresaw religious groups with extensive rules
about meat - like Judaism, Islam, and Hinduism - to
playing a role in resistance to in vitro meat. One participant stated, "Religions (e.g., Hinduism) that consider the
cow to be one of their goddesses will not like the idea
of their god being produced or created in petri dish[es]."
In general, American values and cultural myths
became a prominent point of debate in one of the
workshops where, as one participant pointed out, if
the narratives surrounding cultured meat oppose an
important myth or cultural value, as with genetically
modified organisms (GMOs) in Europe, adoption could
be arrested. For example, Americans value independent
farming; therefore, a perceived further erosion of Jeffersonian Agrarianism or elimination of the cowboy might
dissuade Americans from adopting cultured meat. However, another participant countered that our society
has historically been through many shifts in agricultural practices, particularly with respect to labor: "Shifts
associated with cultured meat would not be very different from what we have seen in the past, and would be
unlikely to influence cultured meat adoption. In fact,"
the participant said, "the cowboy is already a myth,
along with the family farm. Neither of these lifestyles
exists anymore, yet their stories persist in romanticized
form. Myths remain incredibly stable in the face of

IEEE TEchnology and SocIETy MagazInE

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2015