Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Precision fermentation seeks to replace animal foods with recombinant proteins made in microbes. Using metabolism as an analytic lens, this paper shows how stakeholders’ perception of microbes both shape and are shaped by the materializing infrastructure and its socioecological entanglements.

Paper long abstract

Precision fermentation (PF) envisions a sustainable food future in which animal-based foods, such as milk and eggs, are replaced by identical recombinant proteins produced in microbial hosts. PF falls under the umbrella of cellular agriculture, a field that is shaped by a powerful imaginary of dematerialized protein production (e.g., Guthman & Biltekoff, 2021). Yet as industrial-scale production is only beginning to materialize, the tension between these imaginaries and the metabolic realities of PF production remains largely unexamined.

This paper analyzes the embedded metabolisms of PF through interviews with Finnish stakeholders. Following Landecker (2023), I approach metabolism not only as an empirical site but also as an analytic heuristic that foregrounds how energy and nutrients circulate through PF infrastructures and wider ecosystems – including microbial bodies whose metabolic labor sustains this production. This approach highlights how stakeholders attempt to optimize the metabolic potentialities of their engineered microbes while negotiating the economic, legal and biological constraints inherent to their mission. I argue that the metabolic lens offers a more nuanced understanding of how emerging PF infrastructures and their socioecological entanglements both shape and are shaped by stakeholders’ interpretations of microbial metabolic potentiality.

In the context of the politics of precision, PF extends industrial spatio-temporalities by intensifying reliance on monocultural feedstocks and generating novel streams of genetically modified microbial waste, thereby enacting food futures that appear efficient and widely controllable while, in reality, they obscure the material dependencies on which such systems are built.