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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how alternative protein producers enact a “good protein economy.” Drawing on ethnography in Czechia, it shows how sustainability metrics coupled with narratives of crisis and innovation turn uncertain futures into economic and moral promises.

Paper long abstract

The alternative protein industry—spanning companies developing cultivated meat, insect-based foods, and plant-based protein sources—presents its products as unquestionably good for the climate, human health, and the economy. To substantiate these claims, companies mobilize sustainability metrics—emissions reductions, land-use efficiency, and feed conversion ratios—as tools of valuation for defining what counts as “good” protein.

Building on and provincializing the concept of the “good economy” (Asdal et al., 2021), we ask: what versions of the good are woven into alternative protein economies in Czechia, and how are they enacted through numbers? Drawing on ethnographic research with cultivated meat and edible insect companies, we examine how quantification practices help articulate visions of sustainable food futures.

We argue that quantification in this context does not operate through mechanical (Porter, 1995) but reflexive objectivity (Reinertsen & Asdal, 2019): future uncertainties and qualitative speculations are acknowledged, stabilized, and subsequently decoupled from the quantified promises foregrounded in corporate presentations and investment pitches. Figures shift from serving as indices to functioning as slogans to persuade consumers. At the same time, numbers alone are insufficient: companies move beyond metrics and mobilize broader narratives of crisis, innovation, and moral responsibility to render these futures credible.

We show that while the original study by Asdal et al. identifies the “good economy” in Norway with the promise of the bioeconomy, in Czechia the goodness of bioeconomic futures remains contested and contextually negotiated. Alternative protein companies are thus forced to actively establish—rather than simply assume—the moral and economic value of bio-based innovation.

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Paper short abstract

This paper examines technovisions in the cultured meat industry, analysing their coordinative and normative functions. Using secondary data analysis and statistical methods, it reconstructs inclusion/exclusion mechanisms shaping the social construction of future food production.

Paper long abstract

Lab-grown capitalism: Technovisions, Cultured Meat, and the Socio-Technological Construction of the Future

Key words: cultured meet, performing the future, technovisions

The contemporary capitalist economy is undergoing profound restructuring driven by the convergence of biotechnology, genetic engineering, and artificial intelligence. Among the most significant manifestations of this process is the emergence of the alternative protein industry and, in particular, cultured meat (lab-grown meat) produced through the proliferation of animal cells in specialised bioreactors. This paper examines this development through the analytical lens of technovisions, understood as socially constructed and performative images of the future that serve coordinative, normative, and mobilising functions within processes of technological innovation. The study pursues three interrelated research objectives. First, it seeks to reconstruct the technovisions articulated by key actors in the cultured meat industry. Second, it identifies the mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion embedded within these technovisions analysing what is foregrounded and what is systematically marginalised. Third, it assesses the social efficacy of the future-performative processes through which a coherent, publicly acceptable image of an inevitable food production future is constructed. The research draws on complementary methodological approaches. The first objectives are addressed through the analysis of secondary data, including industry websites, expert publications, and corporate communications in which technovisions are produced. The third objective is addressed through statistical analysis of indicators reflecting the representation of future social order and human-technology relations in these materials enabling evaluation of the effectiveness with which technovisions conceal hidden tensions, exclusions, and contested assumptions associated with the cellular food production.

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This paper critically interrogates the role of quantification in managing food systems. Juxtaposing the genealogies of food waste quantification in Czechia and the Netherlands, the paper shows ties between quantification and urgency, distribution of blame, and obscuring capacities of quantification.

Paper long abstract

Waste prevention and reduction have become an inherent part of food systems. A crusade against food-related profligacy and wastefulness relies on a notion of urgency. This paper examines the role of quantification in invoking urgency. A contrasting semiotic pair of food and waste, as life-giving and life-abandoning, provides a potent resource for crafting urgent messages, which can be magnified by the power of numbers. The authors approach quantification as a technology of urgency that awakens society and calls it into action. They analyse the contingencies of quantification in two countries, Czechia and the Netherlands, that have different histories and approaches to food-related policies. The paper traces the emergence and formalisation of key enumeration categories, as well as their use in number narratives to convey a sense of urgency across diverse actors, including researchers, representatives of NGOs and businesses, and state officials. Although the two case studies demonstrate shared patterns of responsibilization, particularly of households, they also reveal differences in the framing of number narratives and the degree of quantitative dependence. The paper concludes that as a technology of urgency, quantification not only reveals but also diverts attention from powerful sources of wastefulness that may include those embedded in the economic systems in which we live (e.g. hegemonic market logic, profit-making, and growth imperatives), in the material-spatial realities of life in which food-making and eating are increasingly separated from one another, and in linear modes of living and thinking (as opposed to circular).

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Paper short abstract

Examines Stalk Market Report (1996–2025), a CSA newsletter archive that blends narrative and numbers to rethink agricultural knowledge beyond quantification, emphasizing relational seasonal practices.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the Stalk Market Report (1996–2025), a weekly newsletter produced by Neu Erth Wormfarm in Reedsburg, Wisconsin and distributed through a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program. The newsletter documents farming life through crop updates, recipes, drawings, essays, and community announcements, offering a 30-year longitudinal record of agricultural practice.

While contemporary food systems increasingly rely on quantification—yield metrics, carbon accounting, food waste statistics, and policy targets—the Stalk Market Report embeds numerical references within narrative, anecdotal, and relational forms of knowledge. Numbers appear not as authoritative abstractions, but as situated and partial, often destabilized by uncertainty, humor, and the variability of seasonal cycles.

Drawing on this archive, the paper asks: what forms of agricultural knowledge are rendered invisible by quantitative frameworks? What temporalities are suppressed when food systems are reduced to metrics? The SMR foregrounds practices often excluded from quantification, including self-provisioning, shared labor, taste, and affect, while emphasizing the unpredictability and contingency of farming.

The SMR archive is situated alongside other agrarian knowledge infrastructures, including The Greenhorns Agrarian Library in Maine, which contains over 9,000 catalogued volumes and organizes knowledge across disciplines such as food studies, marine ecologies, and political ecology. Relying on cataloging and classification systems that enable navigation and comparison, the SMR archive resists easy indexing, accumulating meaning through repetition, seasonality, and collective authorship over time.

Positioning the SMR as both archive and method, it contributes to critical discussions of food quantification by proposing longitudinal, narrative, and participatory practices as alternative modes of making food systems visible.