Making Value Out of Ethics: The Emerging Economic Geography of Lab-grown Meat and Other Animal-free Food Products

Animal-free animal food products, such as lab-grown meat and synthesized milk, are on the cusp of appearing in the supermarket. With the network of techno-science startups and university laboratories with venture capital, research grants, and donations flowing into them, the transition from techno-fantasy to actually existing industry could occur in the next few years. But the emerging animal-free food industry is a site of social and economic experimentation beyond what is occurring in the laboratory. A particular ethical and moral claim is at the center of this industry-in-potential, with it offering a food future free from the environmental degradation and animal cruelty of existing animal agriculture-led food chains, and it is around this claim that experiments with the construction of value are occurring. Drawing on assemblage theory, we argue that practices associated with things like veganism and beneficent techno-scientific research emerge from existing assemblages, including agrifood production networks, and get arranged and deployed in ways that are potentially economically productive in the making of this industry. This demonstrates how ethics are not just something folded back through the production process from the consumption end but are at the heart of how value is formed within it.