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Paper short abstract

This paper explores the politics of moves seeking to integrate cultured meat within traditional farming. It draws upon 15 years of interviews to explore how cultured meat as continuity is constructed and mobilised, and then interpreted and in some instances resisted by those within farming.

Paper long abstract

This paper explores the politics of moves seeking to integrate cultured meat - meat grown from cells as opposed to cut from carcass – within traditional farming environments. Early cultured meat pioneers in the 2010s framed their technology as a clear alternative, indeed potential replacement, to livestock farming. However, increasingly, some within the cultured meat sector have sought to align cultured meat as a form of adaptive continuity within farming, with a varying range of responses from farmers. One example is Respect Farms, a Dutch initiative that in November 2025 installed a cultured meat production facility on a farm that ‘integrates… into existing farm operations’. Another example is start-up company Everygreen, who use living cow's plasma as cultured meat culture media, to ‘partner with global meat producers to create year-round stability’. This paper draws upon 15 years of interviews within the cultured meat community, and most recently stakeholder interviews including farmers in the UK, to explore how cultured meat as continuity is constructed and mobilised, and then interpreted and in some instances resisted by those within farming. Attention is paid to the moral framing of continuity, how it is embedded within a ‘just transition’ discourse, through which cultured meat protagonists perform a particularly constituted network of relations of care towards farmers, and how farmers rearticulate this relationship from their own perspectives. In all, the paper considers the social and political stakes of positioning an alternative as integrable.