Abstract

While it is still some way from commercial production, in vitro meat is drawing significant media coverage. IVM’s promise is meat without suffering, with a diminished ecological footprint and potential for addressing global food shortages. For all its novelty, IVM has been present in creative literature since at least 1881, with a particular concentration of references appearing in Cold War science fiction. After an initial survey of the literary pre-history of in vitro meat, this chapter focuses on Frederik Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth’s 1952 novel The Space Merchants, a stinging critique of post-war programmes of agricultural intensification that revolves around Chicken Little, a decades-old “hundred-ton lump of grey-brown rubbery flesh”. Although the novel nostalgically valorises a lost pastoral world of purportedly authentic human–animal relations, The Space Merchants is not a straightforwardly conservative text, however, but one which raises crucial questions about the cultural meaning and ideological function of IVM.