Start Date
27-5-2026 12:15 PM
End Date
27-5-2026 12:30 PM
Description
The contemporary crisis of industrial meat is typically framed in environmental, ethical, or technological terms. This paper argues instead that the crisis is fundamentally epistemic, exposing the conceptual limits of modern food systems organized around abstraction, purification, efficiency, and control. Drawing on critical theories of modernity, political ecology, and design, it reframes meat not as food but as a designed industrial artefact. Through the lens of ruin, industrial breakdown is read as material disclosure, rendering visible the violences, dependencies, and exclusions that sustained modern abundance. Against technological solutionism and post-meat futurism, the paper develops decomposition as an alternative epistemic and ethical framework grounded in relationality, reciprocity, and uncertainty, arguing that inhabiting breakdown may enable more livable, just, and regenerative food futures.
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Included in
After Meat: Ruin, Decomposition, and the Epistemic Collapse of Industrial Food Systems
The contemporary crisis of industrial meat is typically framed in environmental, ethical, or technological terms. This paper argues instead that the crisis is fundamentally epistemic, exposing the conceptual limits of modern food systems organized around abstraction, purification, efficiency, and control. Drawing on critical theories of modernity, political ecology, and design, it reframes meat not as food but as a designed industrial artefact. Through the lens of ruin, industrial breakdown is read as material disclosure, rendering visible the violences, dependencies, and exclusions that sustained modern abundance. Against technological solutionism and post-meat futurism, the paper develops decomposition as an alternative epistemic and ethical framework grounded in relationality, reciprocity, and uncertainty, arguing that inhabiting breakdown may enable more livable, just, and regenerative food futures.