In 2013, a Dutch scientist unveiled the world’s first laboratory-created hamburger. Since then, the idea of producing meat, not from live animals but from carefully cultured tissues, has spread like wildfire through the media. Meanwhile, cultured meat researchers race against population growth and climate change in an effort to make sustainable protein. Meat Planet explores the quest to generate meat in the lab—a substance sometimes called “cultured meat”—and asks what it means to imagine that this is the future of food.
Neither an advocate nor a critic of cultured meat, Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft spent five years researching the phenomenon. In Meat Planet, he reveals how debates about lab-grown meat reach beyond debates about food, examining the links between appetite, growth, and capitalism. Could satiating the growing appetite for meat actually lead to our undoing? Are we simply using one technology to undo the damage caused by another? Like all problems in our food system, the meat problem is not merely a problem of production. It is intrinsically social and political, and it demands that we examine questions of justice and desirable modes of living in a shared and finite world. Benjamin Wurgaft tells a story that could utterly transform the way we think of animals, the way we relate to farmland, the way we use water, and the way we think about population and our fragile ecosystem’s capacity to sustain life. He argues that even if cultured meat does not “succeed,” it functions—much like science fiction—as a crucial mirror that we can hold up to our contemporary fleshy dysfunctions.

Meat Planet: Artificial Flesh and the Future of Food (Volume 69) (California Studies in Food and Culture)

Cookbooks, Food & Wine

Wurgaft, Benjamin Aldes

Cooking Education & Reference

University of California Press

In 2013, a Dutch scientist unveiled the world's first laboratory-created hamburger. Since then,&nbsp;the idea of producing meat, not from live animals but from carefully cultured tissues, has spread like wildfire through the media. Meanwhile,&nbsp;cultured meat researchers race against population growth and climate change in an effort to make sustainable protein.&nbsp;Meat Planet explores the quest to generate meat in the lab--a substance sometimes called "cultured meat"--and asks what it means to imagine that this is the future of food. Neither an advocate nor a critic of cultured meat, Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft spent&nbsp;five years researching the phenomenon. In&nbsp;Meat Planet, he&nbsp;reveals how debates about lab-grown meat reach beyond debates about food, examining the links between appetite, growth, and capitalism. Could satiating the growing appetite for meat actually lead to our undoing? Are we simply using one technology to undo the damage caused by another? Like all problems in our food system, the meat problem is not merely a problem of production. It is intrinsically social and political, and it demands that we examine questions of justice and desirable modes of living in a shared and finite world. Benjamin Wurgaft tells a story that could utterly transform the way we think of animals, the way we relate to farmland, the way we use water, and the way we think about population and our fragile ecosystem's capacity to sustain life. He argues that even if cultured meat does not "succeed," it functions--much like science fiction--as a crucial mirror that we can hold up to our contemporary fleshy dysfunctions. <div>&nbsp;</div>

Meat Planet: Artificial Flesh and the Future of Food (California Studies in Food and Culture) (Volume 69)

What we learn when an anthropologist and a historian talk about food.\nFrom the origins of agriculture to contemporary debates over culinary authenticity, Ways of Eating introduces readers to world food history and food anthropology. Through engaging stories and historical deep dives, Benjamin A. Wurgaft and Merry I. White offer new ways to understand food in relation to its natural and cultural histories and the social rules that shape our meals.\nWurgaft and White use vivid storytelling to bring food practices to life, weaving stories of Panamanian coffee growers, medieval women beer makers, and Japanese knife forgers. From the Venetian spice trade to the Columbian Exchange, from Roman garum to Vietnamese nớc chấm, Ways of Eating provides an absorbing account of world food history and anthropology. Migration, politics, and the dynamics of group identity all shape what we eat, and we can learn to trace these social forces from the plate to the kitchen, the factory, and the field.

Ways of Eating: Exploring Food through History and Culture (Volume 81) (California Studies in Food and Culture)

History

White, Merry

World

Long before we began to speak of "public intellectuals," the ideas of "the public" and "the intellectual" raised consternation among many European philosophers and political theorists. Thinking in Public examines the ambivalence these linked ideas provoked in the generation of European Jewish thinkers born around 1900. By comparing the lives and works of Hannah Arendt, Emmanuel Levinas, and Leo Strauss, who grew up in the wake of the Dreyfus Affair and studied with the philosopher—and sometime National Socialist—Martin Heidegger, Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft offers a strikingly new perspective on the relationship between philosophers and politics.Rather than celebrate or condemn the figure of the intellectual, Wurgaft argues that the stories we tell about intellectuals and their publics are useful barometers of our political hopes and fears. What ideas about philosophy itself, and about the public's capacity for reasoned discussion, are contained in these stories? And what work do we think philosophers and other thinkers can and should accomplish in the world beyond the classroom? The differences between Arendt, Levinas, and Strauss were great, but Wurgaft shows that all three came to believe that the question of the social role of the philosopher was the question of their century. The figure of the intellectual was not an ideal to be emulated but rather a provocation inviting these three thinkers to ask whether truth and politics could ever be harmonized, whether philosophy was a fundamentally worldly or unworldly practice.

Thinking in Public: Strauss, Levinas, Arendt (Intellectual History of the Modern Age)

Europe

University of Pennsylvania Press

Long before we began to speak of "public intellectuals," the ideas of "the public" and "the intellectual" raised consternation among many European philosophers and political theorists. Thinking in Public examines the ambivalence these linked ideas provoked in the generation of European Jewish thinkers born around 1900. By comparing the lives and works of Hannah Arendt, Emmanuel Levinas, and Leo Strauss, who grew up in the wake of the Dreyfus Affair and studied with the philosopher—and sometime National Socialist—Martin Heidegger, Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft offers a strikingly new perspective on the relationship between philosophers and politics.
Rather than celebrate or condemn the figure of the intellectual, Wurgaft argues that the stories we tell about intellectuals and their publics are useful barometers of our political hopes and fears. What ideas about philosophy itself, and about the public's capacity for reasoned discussion, are contained in these stories? And what work do we think philosophers and other thinkers can and should accomplish in the world beyond the classroom? The differences between Arendt, Levinas, and Strauss were great, but Wurgaft shows that all three came to believe that the question of the social role of the philosopher was the question of their century. The figure of the intellectual was not an ideal to be emulated but rather a provocation inviting these three thinkers to ask whether truth and politics could ever be harmonized, whether philosophy was a fundamentally worldly or unworldly practice.

Jews at Williams: Inclusion, Exclusion, and Class at a New England Liberal Arts College

This book examines the historical presence of Jews at Williams College, a small, selective liberal arts college in New England where Jews were uncommon until well after World War II. By examining changing patterns in American higher education, the exclusionary practices of college fraternities, and the changing face of Jewish America, this book asks why so few Jews once went to Williams and explores the college’s struggles with diversity. Jews at Williams will appeal to readers interested in the history of higher education, the history of Jewish life in the United States, the history of American Judaism, the history of fraternities, and of course the history of Williams College itself.

Americas

Williams College

Williams College Museum of Art

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Wurgaft, Benjamin Aldes. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Wurgaft, Benjamin Aldes

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Wurgaft, Benjamin Aldes. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Meat Planet: Artificial Flesh and the Future of Food (Volume 69) (California Studies in Food and Culture)

Meat Planet: Artificial Flesh and the Future of Food (California Studies in Food and Culture) (Volume 69)

Ways of Eating: Exploring Food through History and Culture (Volume 81) (California Studies in Food and Culture)

Thinking in Public: Strauss, Levinas, Arendt (Intellectual History of the Modern Age)

Thinking in Public: Strauss, Levinas, Arendt (Intellectual History of the Modern Age)

Jews at Williams: Inclusion, Exclusion, and Class at a New England Liberal Arts College

Jews at Williams: Inclusion, Exclusion, and Class at a New England Liberal Arts College