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In Vitro Meat

Encyclopedia of Food and Agricultural Ethics

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Synonyms

Cultured meat; Lab meat

Introduction: A Strange Yet Hopeful Idea

The idea of in vitro meat (IVM from hereon), or cultured meat, is to grow meat from animal cells with the help of tissue engineering and/or 3D printing technology.

The basic idea is not new. Early in the 1930s, when the French scientist Alexis Carrel attracted attention by having kept chicken tissue alive for over 20 years, Winston Churchill (1932) wrote that in the future “we shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium.” Some decades later, the Dutch business man Willem van Eelen, who started brooding on new forms of food production after his experiences of severe hunger in Japanese internment camps during the Second World War, was another visionary.

For many decades, IVM was just a strange and hardly known idea. But then the problems associated with meat started to increase. From the 1970s onward, animal...

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Communication, philosophy and technology, Wageningen University, 8130, Wageningen, The Netherlands

    Cor van der Weele (Professor of humanistic philosophy)

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  1. Cor van der Weele
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Correspondence to Cor van der Weele .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Michigan State University Dept. Philosophy, East Lansing, Michigan, USA

    Paul B. Thompson

  2. University of North Texas Dept. Philosophy & Religion Studies, Denton, Texas, USA

    David M. Kaplan

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van der Weele, C. (2013). In Vitro Meat. In: Thompson, P., Kaplan, D. (eds) Encyclopedia of Food and Agricultural Ethics. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6167-4_106-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6167-4_106-1

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  • Online ISBN: 978-94-007-6167-4

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Chapter history

  1. Latest

    In Vitro Meat
    Published:
    29 September 2018

    DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6167-4_106-3

  2. Cultured Meat
    Published:
    16 February 2018

    DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6167-4_106-2

  3. Original

    In Vitro Meat
    Published:
    10 February 2014

    DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6167-4_106-1

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