Framing the future of food: The contested promises of alternative proteins

The central role played by narratives in shaping how and what we eat has been convincingly argued across social-science research on food (Eden, 2011; Evans and Miele, 2012; Goodman, 2004). The narratives typically analysed in this research are those crafted by food producers and retailers, and are disseminated through the textual and visual language of food labels and other forms of advertising across in-store and online media. Their primary aim is often intended as a ‘knowledge fix’ (Eden, 2011) to help consumers make more informed and ultimately better food choices. Increasingly, this fix has involved attempts to (re)connect food consumers with food producers by making visible the actors and processes involved in food networks (Cook et al., 2004), and in doing so encourage us to cultivate more caring relationships with the ‘distant strangers’ behind our everyday eating (Corbridge, 1998, cited by Goodman, 2004: 893). Food narratives can also evoke and invent more compassionate human–animal relationships (Miele, 2011), as well as stigmatise and revalorise entire dietary lifestyles, such as veganism (Doyle, 2016). Despite their influential role, however, food narratives can often fail in their intended purpose, instead causing confusion and even indifference on account of the sheer volume and contradictory nature of information that modern consumers must navigate within their everyday foodscapes (Eden et al., 2008).

The aim of this paper is to examine the narratives deployed by a new movement of producers and advocates of ‘animal-free’ alternatives.¹ These products have attracted multibillion-dollar investments from some of the biggest names in global business, including Bill Gates and Richard Branson. Over the last decade, key promoters of these products have consistently driven visions across industry and popular media of what the future of food will look like (Carrington, 2018; Chu, 2017). The products can be organised into three distinct categories of alternative: plant-based proteins, edible insects, and a group referred to as ‘cellular agriculture’.² This latter group encompasses products commonly referred to as ‘cultured’ or ‘clean’ meat, milk and other animal products, created either through culturing stem cells outside (in vitro) animal bodies, or through the genetic modification and fermentation of yeast cells.³ While a small proportion of this activity has been driven by university-based research, the majority of these ventures have involved private companies, especially the business models of the Big Tech start-up region of Silicon Valley, California. A collective nomenclature for these foodstuffs is still in flux (see Stephens et al., 2018 for extended discussion). The term ‘alternative proteins’ has been recently adopted within the sector and in related writings (e.g. Carrington, 2018; Chu, 2017). In this paper, we collectively refer to these products as APs, and also as ‘the movement’ in line with other academic writings (e.g. Mouat and Prince, 2018). Our use of this latter term is intended to reflect the sense of collective momentum over the last 5–10 years, particularly within Anglophone regions, that has seen a flurry of academic and entrepreneurial interest in developing alternative approaches to conventional livestock products. This is not to suggest, however, that the AP communities we discuss necessarily and always self-identity as a unified movement. There are instances in which the enactment of a unified community has been welcomed and institutionally endorsed through industry conferences and research grant programs.⁴ Yet there have also been distinct efforts within this community to distinguish their respective endeavours: for example, some proponents of cellular agriculture and plant-based products have explicitly tried to distance themselves from insect-based approaches, often citing the ethical ambiguity of slaughtering insects for food. We thus use the term ‘AP movement’ with awareness of these internal tensions and the continued instability of its associated terminology.

All of the APs we discuss have a degree of precedency: insects and plant-based foods are not entirely novel in the history of human consumption (DeFoliart, 1995; Shurtleff and Aoyagi, 2013), nor are cellular approaches to edible protein production (e.g. single-cell proteins, Quorn).⁵ Yet despite these histories, AP narratives have noticeably cultivated a sense of breaking from what has gone before. As such, their promises have worked collectively to create a vision of APs as a paradigmatic shift in protein production and consumption, through which they make the ultimate promise of a better future food system.

Due to the relative infancy of the sector, many of these APs have been consumed more as narratives than as tangible, eat-able foodstuffs (Mouat and Prince, 2018). There are currently no cellular agriculture products on the market, and while a number of plant-based and insect AP companies have launched products they have until very recently remained within a small number of countries and specialist retailers. Many of these products have relatively high price points.⁶ To create consumer demand and to gain investment capital, AP narratives have so far been characterised by a series of promises of what they will achieve once on the market, and how they will improve the production and consumption of protein foods. We adopt the term ‘promissory narratives’ to capture this characteristic, a conceptual tool borrowed from writings on the sociology of expectations (Brown and Michael, 2003). The value of this concept is that it takes seriously the promises surrounding (food) innovations and their role in summoning particular futures to do important political and material work in the present, such as generating consumer interest and raising venture capital (Brown, 2003). A number of recent studies have adopted this approach to consider the framings specific to cultured meat (Chiles, 2013; Jönsson, 2016; Stephens, 2013). In this paper, we extend this research by considering the promissory narratives at work across the broader pantheon of AP products that have emerged over the last decade, including cultured milk and eggs, plant-based proteins and insect products. To our knowledge, no research has mapped the multiple promises made by this broader AP movement, rather than in relation to individual products.

Through an empirical analysis of the promissory narratives employed by leading AP stakeholders, we develop a typology of five key promises. We title these: ‘Healthier bodies’, ‘Feeding the world’, ‘Good for animals and the environment’, ‘Control for sale’ and ‘Tastes like animal’. We show that these promises work collectively to diagnose a series of problems relating to current livestock production, and to present APs as the effective, logical solutions. Such narratives can be seen to (re)produce the rise of protein as a particular food-related concern across multiple fronts, from the health of individuals to securing a hunger-free and climate-stable future.⁷ It is important to note, however, that while the paper sets out distinct promissory categories, each of the promises we identify are often themselves made up of multiple framings that coexist and overlap, and are sometimes operationalised within different contexts (i.e. to speak about different AP products and appeal to different problems and audiences).

These products enter an already crowded and contested discussion as to how best to deliver a better food system, and specifically what role (if any) livestock should play (Garnett, 2015). As a consequence, there has been a backlash against, and appropriation of, AP narratives by different stakeholders in the current livestock sector in recent years. These developments have yet to be examined in existing AP research. The second part of the paper begins this work by identifying the three key counter-narratives that characterise the livestock industry's response to APs. In doing so, we reveal a series of tensions around which these contested food futures have coalesced, many of which we show in the final section of the paper have long histories in broader debates over what constitutes better food production and consumption. In mapping these contested narratives, the paper builds on our recent work examining how APs are being constructed as ‘food’ by their developers and ‘non-food’ by their detractors (Sexton, 2016, 2018). It also contributes to recent discussions elsewhere on the politics of framing in contemporary foodscapes (Bryant and Goodman, 2004; Evans and Miele, 2012; Goodman, 2004), on the ontological multiplicities of (animal-based) food (Yates-Doerr, 2015a), and in the construction and contestation of food-system futures (Jarosz, 2011, 2014; Margulis, 2013).

Promissory narratives have proven a valuable conceptual lens for the study of technological innovations (Brown, 2003; Brown and Michael, 2003), and have been a key focus in recent analyses of cultured meat (Jönsson, 2016; Mouat and Prince, 2018; Stephens, 2013). As with other innovations, these studies have shown the diverse political, economic and ontological functions of AP narratives and the particular audiences they have attempted to engage. Examples include the recruitment of intellectual power from scientific communities (Stephens, 2013), the creation of prospective markets to attract investors (Mouat and Prince, 2018), and the stabilisation of APs as safe yet exciting, familiar yet progressive, and edible yet novel foods (Jönsson, 2016; Sexton, 2018; Stephens, 2013). These studies have also shown the broad variety of textual media involved in the promissory landscape of APs. This ranges from product packaging and company websites (Sexton, 2016), to photographs (Stephens and Ruivenkamp, 2016), and infographics (Mouat and Prince, 2018). Key promissory work is also done by physical proofs-of-concept, such as the cultured beef burger in 2013 (Post, 2012; Stephens and Ruivenkamp, 2016) and a number of speculative design experiments (Catts and Zurr, 2002; Next Nature Network, 2014).

To extend our analysis beyond cultured meat, we identified the shared promises at work across the different approaches of the AP movement. We selected 12 key AP stakeholders (10 start-ups and 2 non-profit advocacy organisations) for analysis, all of whom have been identified by the movement itself and in media coverage as the key influencers of this emerging sector (see Table 1 for expanded details). This selection process and our data analysis were informed by 30 semi-structured interviews conducted by the first author with company founders, employees, investors, third-sector advocacy groups and other key stakeholders working in the AP movement between 2014 and 2016. The interviewees included representatives from all of the stakeholders listed in Table 1 except two, one of which was due to recruitment issues and the other had not been founded during the fieldwork period. The interviews were conducted in Europe and the US, predominantly within the San Francisco Bay Area (aka ‘Silicon Valley’) but also in Los Angeles and New York City. As with the stakeholders listed in Table 1, the interviewees were largely selected by those identified as industry leaders within the three AP sub-categories of cellular agriculture, edible insects and plant-based analogues. Their status as leaders was typically due to the amount of venture capital and media hype they had raised to date, the scope of their partnerships with the established food sector, and their development of specific production methods and product types. The recruitment strategy involved initial contact through e-mail and phone, as well as face-to-face meetings at industry events; this sampling was snowballed out via recommendations made by interviewees as the research progressed. The response rate was relatively high, an outcome that Author 1 attributes to the timing of the research coinciding with the relative infancy of the sector, thereby allowing greater access to individuals in elite positions (e.g. company founders). Where recruitment difficulties did occur, these were typically with investors, an outcome that is not uncommon in social science research on financial elites (Aguiar and Schneider, 2016; Desmond, 2004).

Our analysis involved a close reading of the official websites and Instagram accounts of the AP stakeholders listed in Table 1. These media have served as core platforms for communicating information about APs to a variety of publics. For the websites, we focussed our sampling on the Home and About Us pages as these were considered key indicators of the messaging given most prominence by each stakeholder to promote both their mission as a brand and their product ranges.⁹ While other social media platforms are used by the AP movement, we focussed on Instagram given its rise as a particularly popular medium for food-related ventures to showcase their brands and establish more direct communication with their followers and customers (Eli et al., 2018; Lupton, 2016). Our sampling also included publicly available online media interviews and presentations (e.g. TEDTalks) given by our chosen stakeholders since 2013.¹⁰

To sample the counter-narratives, we conducted a search of media articles on Google News within the periods 2013–2014 and 2017–2018 using the search terms in Table 2.¹¹ These searches produced hundreds of results, the majority of which were not specifically focussed on the counter-narratives of the conventional livestock industry. To refine our search, we included two further search terms: ‘response’ and ‘reaction’. This went some way to filtering out the more general reviews and news items on the AP movement, and made it easier to collect articles explicitly focussed on counter-narratives. We snowballed out from these initial results to find other links to news articles and supporting documents (e.g. petitions from industry lobby groups). While some material may have remained uncollected, we searched until we were confident we had saturated the dataset and identified a range of core thematic categories that we believe provide a useful first organisational map of recent counter-narratives to APs.

In formulating this overarching promise, conventional livestock systems have typically been framed as outdated, broken and even cruel in AP narratives. In the face of these characterisations, coupled with the rapid growth in AP sales (Ridler, 2017), various stakeholders from across the conventional meat, dairy and egg industries have begun to defend their approaches, often through media interviews but also via blogs, social media and public campaigns. Such responses have come from small to large-scale farmers practising a variety of production methods, as well as industry lobby groups, governmental personnel and multinational corporations. It is important to stress this heterogeneity and note that our use of the terms ‘livestock industry/sector’ in the following section is not meant to suggest a singular entity or voice but is done for ease of reading. A range of counter-narratives has emerged which counteract, and in some cases appropriate, the hype and world-saving messaging that the recent AP movement has cultivated. The following section begins the work of mapping these responses, organising the narratives under three overarching themes.

The first counter-narrative we identify is ‘Not a serious threat’. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this response featured more in the earlier stages of AP development when many of the ventures and technologies that have since gone on to lead the movement were still in relative infancy. The perception of APs as non-threatening to conventional livestock industries has typically operated at two levels: first, scepticism over the technological capabilities of APs being able to produce competitive and satisfying products; and second, anticipation of consumer rejection of the particular technoscientific methods and end products of APs. An example of the former view is an online news article published in New Zealand in 2014 (RNZ, 2014). Entitled ‘Non-dairy milk not aimed at NZ’, the article details the recent formation of a California-based company (Muufri, now known as Perfect Day Foods) intending to make milk from yeast. A comment follows from Fonterra, New Zealand's largest dairy company with revenues totalling around NZ$17.2 billion in 2016. The company's response is to dismiss Perfect Day Foods as not a serious competitor to the nation's dairy sector, and to question the technical viability of their yeast-based approach in achieving nutritional equivalence with animal milk, stating that ‘it would require genetic modification and even then it [is] unlikely that artificial milk could match dairy’.

The characterisation of APs as artificial and synthetic in comparison with conventional animal foods has also been a consistent response by many stakeholders in livestock production. Such framings have reflected the view of many in the livestock industry that APs will not be an appealing alternative for consumers, and instead remain in the category of ‘Frankenfood’. However, with the rapid growth of AP sales over the last decade, livestock advocates have begun to deploy these negative characterisations in a more active and defamatory way. This has resulted in a second counter-narrative category – ‘Not real food’ – which seeks to challenge the ‘clean’ image cultivated by the AP sector through highlighting the techno-scientific nature of its production – specifically the movement's use of biomedical techniques, laboratories and in some cases genetic engineering.

An extreme manifestation of this counter-narrative made headlines on both sides of the Atlantic in 2015 when it was revealed that the American Egg Board (AEB) was involved in a campaign to counteract the growing popularity of JUST's plant-based egg products (Thielman, 2015). Through an USDA-led investigation, it was discovered that a central strategy of this campaign was to promote the ‘realness’ of chicken-laid eggs in direct contrast to alternative products (USDA, 2016). Echoes of this narrative can be found on AEB's website on a page entitled ‘REAL Eggs or Egg Replacers?’:

Accept no substitutes! Over the past few years there's been a great deal of discussion, research and application work done to replace eggs with various products. And while any number of companies are working hard to develop a product that can compete head on with this most versatile of ingredients – the fact of the matter is – when eggs are added, it simply appears on the ingredient statement as eggs. On the other hand, adding replacers increases the complexity of your ingredient statement.

The challenge set against APs here echoes the rules for good eating advocated by popular food writer Michael Pollan, amongst which he suggests that we should not eat products with more than five ingredients, nor ingredients that you cannot pronounce (Pollan, 2008). This counter-narrative accuses APs of adding complexity and even deceit to food-consumer relations, as well as raising unnecessary and/or unfounded health implications (Roberts, 2016). In the UK, the battle of real versus fake foods has manifested most recently in the discussion of ‘ultra-processed’ products (Boseley, 2018), a moniker which the latest APs have not escaped (Blythman, 2018). For many involved in slower, local and organic food movements, particularly those relating to livestock, the ultra-processed nature of APs signals the latest case of Big Food going too far in its industrialised substitution of whole, real foods (Biltekoff, 2016; Guthman, 2015), and a further step away from cultivating more localised systems of care and trust (Blythman, 2018; Boseley, 2018; Roberts, 2016).¹⁸

In part related to these battles over the qualification of real food, a third counter-narrative has struck at the heart of an unfolding ontological and regulatory conflict concerning the labelling of AP products (AFP, 2018). We term this ‘Not legally defined’. At contest here is the question of what can and should be legally classified under the labels of meat, milk and other animal-food terminology. Such disputes have worked across two characteristics of animal and animal-free products: (a) provenance, that is the raw materials and location of production; and (b) production methods, for example conventional livestock rearing, tissue engineering and so on. Livestock industry lobby groups have been amongst the most vocal in these disputes. In the US, the Cattlemen's Association (USCA) recently filed a petition calling on the Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) – an agency of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) – to sharpen the regulatory definition of meat, and to do so in such a way that directly excludes APs:

…products that are labeled as ‘meat’ should be limited to those that are derived from the tissue or flesh of an animal harvested in the traditional manner. As such, USCA requests that FSIS exclude man-made or artificially manufactured products that are not derived from animals born, raised, and harvested in the traditional manner from the definition of both beef and meat. This includes synthetic products from plant, insects, and other nonanimal components, as well as any product grown in labs from animal cells. (USCA, 2018: 2)

Similarly, emphasising the importance of conventional provenance and production methods, the National Cattlemen's Beef Association (NCBA) has called for tighter regulations on labelling products as beef, stating that ‘beef should only be applicable to products derived from actual livestock raised by farmers and ranchers’ (NCBA, 2018: 1).

Missouri has become the first US state to officially sanction these interpretations; passed in May 2018, the bill defines meat as ‘any edible portion of livestock or poultry carcass or part thereof’ (General Assembly of the State of Missouri, 2018: 17) and prohibits individuals from ‘misrepresenting a product as meat that is not derived from harvested production livestock or poultry’ (General Assembly of the State of Missouri, 2018: 24). Outside the US, France recently made headlines for passing a bill that similarly reinforces the link between conventional livestock rearing and meat-related nomenclature. The reasons given by Jean-Baptiste Moreau, a member of parliament and farmer, reflect those underpinning the US disputes: to counteract the ‘false claims’ of animal-food analogues and thereby eliminate consumer confusion; to restore the ‘true value’ of agricultural products; and to increase access to ‘healthier and more sustainable food’ (cited in Askew, 2018).

It is not only the definition of meat that has been subject to such debates: across North America and Europe, consumer protection groups and dairy industry representatives have been engaged in a long contest over the use of labels such as butter and milk to describe animal-free alternatives (BBC, 2017; Plant Based News, 2017). A civil lawsuit was also filed in 2014 by Unilever, owners of Hellman's Mayonnaise, against JUST for their use of the term ‘mayo’ to describe their plant-based products. The multinational company claimed JUST's use of the label was misleading customers and unfairly stealing market share (Kowitt, 2014). Considerable consumer backlash subsequently led Unilever to drop the lawsuit.

Such debates look set to continue as AP advocates have launched a number of counteractions, arguing that the use of animal-based terminology is the most appropriate for products such as cultured meat and milk given their biological equivalence, and that consumer deception can be sufficiently minimised through clear labelling of the alternative ingredients (AFP, 2018). Moreover, there has also been pushback from within the livestock sector against the ‘Not legally defined’ counter-narrative: in its defence of classifying meat as the product of an animal carcass, the NCBA has stated that ‘lab-grown meat’ products should be included within ‘the statutory definition of a [sic] meat food products’ (NCBA, 2018: 2). This statement challenges USCA's view (at the time of writing) that cultured meat should be disqualified from this category along with plant-based and insect products. The rationale given by NCBA is to create a level playing field within the market: ‘If producers of lab-grown or cultured meat products wish to call these products meat, they must adhere to the same stringent food safety inspection standards and comply with the same set of labelling mandates as all other traditional meat food products’ (NCBA, 2018: 3).¹⁹ Furthermore, other major players in the livestock sector have actively incorporated APs into their portfolios: Tyson Foods and Cargill are amongst the most high-profile companies to have directly invested in AP ventures, describing these products as promising market opportunities for broadening consumer choice and complementing their conventional livestock operations (Peters, 2017; Shieber, 2018).

Both the promises of AP developers and the counter-narratives of the conventional livestock sector reveal a set of contested visions over what qualifies as a better protein-food system. This narrative battleground centres on a collection of anxieties and hopes concerning the welfare of people, animals and the planet, both in the present day and in the future, as well as appeals to the pleasure and socioeconomic value associated with animal-based foods. This is another iteration of the longstanding dispute over the meaning of good food (Guthman, 2003; Johnston, 2008; Mol, 2009), and over the types of questions about food that are perceived to matter by different stakeholders (Biltekoff, 2016). These debates also touch on yet broader issues relating to the contested place of science, technology and capitalism in the ordering of postmodern societies.

Yet if we cut the narratives in a different way we can go further in discerning what exactly is being contested in these claims of goodness. Through the range of AP promises and the livestock counter-narratives we document, three distinct yet interrelated binaries emerge: ‘real vs. fake’, ‘clean vs. dirty’ and ‘tradition vs. progress’ (Figure 4). These highly politicised and emotive binaries have long characterised broader debates on food and eating (Biltekoff, 2016; Hasnain, 2018; Stanziani, 2008), striking at the heart of concerns over what food ‘is’, what it should be, and what it is becoming in the modern era under increasing industrialisation and globalisation (Goodman et al., 1987; McMichael, 2009).

What we find in these narratives, then, are attempts by the AP movement and livestock sector to position themselves as more favourable – and the other as less so – within these established binaries. In many instances, we found that notions of goodness were not exclusive to only one pole of each binary: for example being clean and dirty, and emblematic of tradition and progress, has simultaneously served to promote both AP and livestock products as the better option, albeit in different ways. The assignment of goodness to the binary of ‘real vs. fake’ food was, however, mutually exclusive – there were no instances we found where being perceived as fake food was encouraged in the framings of either AP or conventional livestock stakeholders.

Notions of the realness and cleanliness of APs were typically linked to their provenance and production methods, which in turn translated to the materiality of their end products. For cellular agriculture and plant-based APs, their realness was assured by claims that they are technically meat, milk and eggs at the molecular level (cf. Sexton, 2018), and as such offered equivalent nutritional content and sensory properties despite their origins outside animal bodies. As Mark Post described at the 2013 cultured beef-burger launch in London, ‘by our technology we are producing meat, it's just not in a cow’. For insect products, their claims of being real food have similarly focussed on their nutritional equivalence, but also call upon the broader histories of insect consumption (entomophagy) in non-Western contexts. Their realness is in part established by emphasising the longevity of entomophagy as a food practice; in doing so, insects are situated within the more familiar and romanticised framing of ‘food culture’. They are thus food for the foodie as well as for the adventurer/gym-goer seeking a ‘complete protein source’.

The cleanliness of APs has been most explicitly evoked in the recent coining of the term ‘clean meat’. According to advocates, this phraseology serves two purposes: it is considered a more accurate and appealing replacement specifically for the term ‘cultured meat’, and it is seen as ‘immediately communicat[ing] important aspects of the technology—both the environmental benefits and the decrease in food-borne pathogens and drug residues’ (Friedrich, 2016). The cleanliness of APs is thus delivered in two ways: first, through their methods of production – that is, the relocation from the ‘dirty’ environments of animal bodies and slaughterhouses to the ‘clean’ spaces of laboratories and technoscience; and second, through the materiality of their end products, from which the bad nutrients and pathogens of conventional animal foods have been removed. As such, the cleanliness of APs works across a range of promises, from increased control to healthier bodies, in addition to offering a kinder, morally clean alternative that benefits animals and the environment, as well as a solution to global hunger.

Yet in cultivating this clean image, AP developers have been careful not to present their products as too ‘good’ to eat so that the benefits are perceived by the public as a compromise in taste and enjoyment. Central to this balancing act is the work being done by AP developers to make their products viscerally indistinguishable from their conventional counterparts, and reveals the ‘dirty’ foundations of their clean-eating promise. Rather than a choice of abstinence and worthiness, APs instead offer a tasty and hedonistic way of saving the world. Making plants bleed and cells sizzle retains a degree of animalness – and arguably macho-ness – which in turn offers the pretence of defilement that is deeply associated with the consumption of animal flesh, as well as other animal-derived products (Douglas, 1966; Vialles, 1994). The blood is retained but not spilled, neither literally from animal carcasses nor metaphorically through harm done to human wellbeing and the planet. APs thus offer a seemingly perfect balance between clean/dirty eating, framed as the ultimate guilt-free guilty-pleasure that purportedly achieves the meaning of good food more fully than any previous animal-food analogue.

In the counter-narratives of the livestock industry, the claims that APs constitute real food were made entirely unacceptable on account of their provenance and production methods. Key to this framing was the different use or overall absence of animals from AP production. Fundamental to the livestock sector's appeal to the realness of their products has been the direct connection with living animal bodies – to appropriate Mark Post's quote above, their products are meat, milk and eggs very much produced in animals, and this corporeal relationship is the basis upon which realness has been asserted. Underpinning this argument is the necessity of living animal bodies having done labour (milk, eggs) and in some cases animal bodies having died (meat), the latter of which we have shown is currently upheld in regulatory definitions of meat in certain countries.

The link between animal bodies and the land, as well as the people who reared them, has also been fundamental to the livestock sector's defence of the realness of their products, as well as to notions of cleanliness and dirtiness in different ways. The importance placed on these connections is salient in the debates over the classification of meat, with groups such as the NCBA explicitly referencing ‘actual livestock raised by farmers and ranchers’ as the necessary conditions for labelling products as beef. Evoking the idealised imaginaries of bucolic livelihoods and of terroir – a concept often used by artisanal producers to capture the significance of place in the taste and quality of a foodstuff (Feagan, 2007) – has served to promote a sense of greater naturalness, wholesomeness and correctness that APs have seemingly perverted. Goodness is evoked in the direct connection between animal bodies and the ‘good dirt’ of natural landscapes, which in turn provides an evocative binary to the sterile and Frankenstein imaginaries of AP methods. This wholesome, natural dirt was credited as providing the pleasurable taste and texture of conventional livestock products, yet also evoked a sense of purity that has long been associated with romanticised visions of unspoilt landscapes (Lorimer, 2015). Embedded within these appeals to the natural is thus a distinction between the bad dirt of urbanised and techno-industrial spaces – to which APs ostensibly belong – and the good or ‘clean’ dirt of rural imaginaries. This distinction is apparent in the counter-narratives of both big and small livestock producers, regardless of whether bucolic landscapes are indeed an everyday reality of their production. With terms such as clean meat implicitly positioning conventional livestock products as dirty, the particular cleanliness promised from the wholesome natures of conventional animal agriculture thus works to (re)frame APs as clean in unnatural and untrustworthy ways.

These idealised networks of animals, people and the land have also been framed as providing a simpler system of protein production. A central part of the livestock sector's promotion of animal foods as the ‘real’ choice has been to position them as the less tampered with and thus more natural and trustworthy option compared with the highly processed natures of APs. This framing goes in direct contrast to the strategies that have previously characterised the narratives of intensive agriculture, in which industrial intervention has been justified as de-risking unruly animal natures and thereby improving quality and safety (e.g. Paxson, 2008). Instead, what we find in the livestock counter-narratives against APs, including those from Big Food giants and lobby groups, are echoes of the ‘artisanal reaction’ that has previously been used against proponents of industrial farming and food technofixes, such as GMOs (Murdoch and Miele, 2004). The accusations of placelessness and the loss of quality and transparency that have long been levelled at intensive agriculture are now being (re)directed to the AP movement, and are coming from both big and small livestock producers. This signals a potential evolution in the defendants of the ‘quality turn’ in food production (Murdoch et al., 2000), a trend we highlight for further analytical attention by food researchers.

The balance between retaining traditional values and offering a leap in technological/societal progress speaks to the third and final binary we identify in the AP and livestock narratives. For APs, connection to the ‘old’ ways of conventional livestock production was most explicitly delivered through the visceral mimicry of their end products; in doing so, the nostalgia for the taste and cultural significance of popular animal-based dishes, such as the ‘good ol’ fashioned burger’, is purposefully retained. Yet as noted earlier, the notion of disrupting the status quo is fundamental to AP imaginaries, and in the same manner as Big Tech ideologies in other sectors (Morozov, 2013; Turner, 2006), this disruption is perceived as emblematic of a new and improved paradigm for individual and societal good. This is apparent across the promises of kinder, healthier, more controlled and tastier approaches, all of which are credited directly to the AP movement's turn to the methods and innovation models of Big Tech and bioscience.

While AP narratives have appealed to hopes of change through techno-salvation, the livestock counter-narratives instead emphasised the continuance of traditional values and practices. It is a sense of tradition that underpins their appeals to realness, whereby real food is connected to the preservation of current pastoral landscapes and livelihoods, and corporeally connected with animal natures. Again, this was most explicitly communicated in the ongoing debates over the legal classifications of animal-based foods, in which the defence of conventional provenance and production methods has become bound up in the defence of preserving the true value of agricultural products and livelihoods.

Where (technological) innovation was referenced in the counter-narratives, its role was typically assigned to aiding the continuance of conventional methods. Notions of progress in the livestock counter-narratives were less a paradigm shift than improvements within the status quo, through which the rural imaginaries and conventional methods of production are purposefully maintained.

This paper offers a critical examination of the narrative landscape that has emerged with the recent AP movement. Building on recent studies that have concentrated on specific AP products (e.g. Jönsson, 2016; Mouat and Prince, 2018; Stephens and Ruivenkamp, 2016), our first aim has been to offer a broader analysis of the key promises that have worked across the movement. While acknowledging the interconnected nature of these framings, the five-fold typology is intended as a heuristic for making sense of the distinct claims that have operated in key AP promotional discourses to date. A second aim of the paper was to conduct a similar mapping exercise of the responses such claims have triggered from a variety of conventional livestock stakeholders. To our knowledge, such an analysis has yet to be conducted within AP research. Our analysis offers a further typology of three counter-narratives that have shaped these reactions. While we use the terms ‘livestock industry/sector’ as shorthand, it is important to note the heterogeneity of voices behind these counter-narratives: the responses we analysed reflected a broad range of farm size, production methods and livestock type, as well as interests that encompassed producers, industry lobbyists, policymakers and consumer groups. The analysis also revealed instances of pushback against the counter-narratives from within the livestock sector, and also cases of active support and investment in APs from major players in the industry.

In mapping this narrative landscape, we have shown how different types of goodness have been ascribed by AP and conventional livestock stakeholders to their different approaches and products. Inherent to these framings, then, has on one level been an ontological contest over the meaning of good (protein) food for all (Mol, 2009), both in contemporary and future systems of production and consumption. Yet on another level, the narratives reveal a contest over the classification of what exactly (protein) food is and should be (Sexton, 2018; Stephens, 2013; Yates-Doerr 2015a). The binaries of ‘real vs. fake’, ‘clean vs. dirty’ and ‘tradition vs. progress’ that surfaced through our analysis reflect some of the key flashpoints around which this ontological politics has so far coalesced. These tensions convey a range of hopes and fears that have long characterised food-related debates (Jackson, 2015; Scholliers, 2008). They also touch on broader issues concerning the roles of technology and capitalism in its systems of production and consumption (Goodman et al., 1987), as well as the acceptability of animal life – and specifically animal death – in providing human sustenance (Buller and Roe, 2018).

However, this ontological struggle also reveals potentially new dynamics that break from those observed in previous research on contested food framings: for example where other studies have revealed distinct divides between the framings of industrial versus more wholesome, slow and artisanal food (e.g. Biltekoff, 2016), in the counter-narratives above we note the active appropriation by Big Livestock of framings previously used against them by smaller food producers. We do not suggest such actions are indicative of a formal alliance between these traditionally opposed poles, nor that the narratives always reflect the lived realities on the ground; however, there is an interesting overlap in the values and notions of what ‘food’ is that are being operationalised against APs across different scales and production modes of incumbent livestock stakeholders. We highlight this as a potential new evolution of the artisanal reaction (Murdoch and Miele, 2004) that requires continued analysis by food researchers.

There is much scope for continued examination of the trends we highlight, as well as consideration of what has been silenced in this narrative landscape. Analysis of the latter has not been possible within the scope of this paper, but there are important questions to ask regarding, for example, the gendered politics of APs, namely their reproduction of the long-held reification of (hyper)masculinity and meat (Adams, 1990; Fiddes, 1991). The reproduction of (Western) privilege through the AP visions of feeding the world also requires further critical reflection, as does the particular role of Big Tech in shaping ideas of how a better food system can be achieved. As we have shown, narratives have played a core part of this promissory work, and it is within this narrative space that the contest over the framing and future of animal-based foods looks set to continue.