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As we confront the environmental challenges of the Anthropocene, cellular agriculture has emerged as a revolutionary technology promising to reshape global food systems. Dead Meat offers a critical examination of this biotechnological shift, exploring how cultivated meat production reconfigures the relationship between life, death, and food in the context of competing ecological, social, and ethical imperatives. Elisabeth Abergel provides a compelling analysis of cultivated meat through the lens of “competing vitalities”, questioning how these new forms of food production are narrated and imagined in the Anthropocene. She delves into the sociotechnical imaginaries that promise sustainability, animal welfare, and climate resilience, while probing the tensions between these narratives and the political economy of industrial food production. Drawing on interdisciplinary perspectives from the environmental humanities, science and technology studies, political economy, and political ecology, Abergel critiques the idea that cultivated meat is a simple technological fix to the climate crisis. Instead, she exposes how these innovations both challenge and reinforce capitalist logics that dominate agricultural systems. Dead Meat is essential reading for scholars and students in environmental sociology, food politics, science and technology studies, environmental humanities, and political economy, as well as for activists and policymakers interested in sustainable food futures and planetary health.

Plant-based and cell-cultured meat, milk, and egg producers aim to replace industrial food production with animal-free fare that tastes better, costs less, and requires a fraction of the energy inputs. These products are no longer relegated to niche markets for ethical vegetarians, but are heavily funded by private investors betting on meat without animals as mass-market, environmentally feasible alternatives that can be scaled for a growing global population.This volume examines conceptual and cultural opportunities, entanglements, and pitfalls in moving global meat, egg, and dairy consumption toward these animal-free options. Beyond surface tensions of “meatless meat” and “animal-free flesh,” deeper conflicts proliferate around naturalized accounts of human identity and meat consumption, as well as the linkage of protein with colonial power and gender oppression. What visions and technologies can disrupt modern agriculture? What economic and marketing channels are required to scale these products? What beings and ecosystems remain implicated in a livestock-free food system? A future of meat without animals invites adjustments on the plate, but it also inspires renewed habits of mind as well as life-affirming innovations capable of nourishing the contours of our future selves. This book illuminates material and philosophical complexities that will shape the character of our future/s of food.