The area I think most of us aspire to eat in, is expensive, natural food. This is organic food, local food and the like.

The area I’m interested in exploring is up here in extremely cultivated food. Food made in a laboratory maybe.

One of the only known truths about laboratory-grown meat—the only real thing we know about it at the moment—is that the meat has to be very thin for the oxygen to get to it. If it weren’t thin, you’d need to grow blood vessels and that would make it a much more complicated exercise.

It’s wet and very flat.

Now in the way new technologies emerge and change markets, often it’s companies that have something quite strange and simple in common with the technology that do well. It’s a bit like the way wire manufacturers started making fibre optic cables, just because they were good at extruding miles of stuff—even though there doesn’t seem to be any other relationship between the two technologies apart from their physical similarity.

In this case I’ve started to look at photo processing labs as systems that deal with wet, flat material. They include wet paper, and highly engineered processes.

My contention is that AGFA or some photo processing company would start producing lab-grown meat machines.

This work talks about how the lab-grown meat transition will affect the public-facing processes of food and its consumption, and also how it will affect craft and expertise in the world of food.