Lab-grown meat: framing behavioural changes toward sustainable dietary habits

Vegetarianism, veganism and the reduction of meat consumption in general have been growing and even well-established trends for a few decades now, starting with the ecological turn that took place in many western societies beginning from the late 20th century (e.g. Hanganu-Bresch & Kondrlik 2021). As a consequence, meat alternatives, as a way of reducing the carbon footprint of mass farming, have also been on western and, increasingly, on developing countries’ markets for long, and are a consolidated feature in the 2020s. ‘Alternative’ meat, on the other hand, intended as actual meat grown from existing meat cells, is a relatively recent and debated introduction (Van Loo, Caputo, Lusk 2020). This paper proposal aims to 1) review how lab-grown meat is discursively presented in the news media, and 2) check for specific framing strategies that may be employed in constructing a sustainable view of this product, vs – for instance – a non-sustainable perspective. In order to do so, a small corpus was retrieved using the Factiva database, containing news articles in English from both British and US broadsheet newspapers. The collection has undergone qualitative analysis, assisted quantitatively by corpus analysis software, in which analytical tools pertaining to framing and argumentation theory, as well as critical discourse studies, were employed (Goffman 1974; Bednarek & Caple 2014; van Eemeren & Greebe 2004). The research is expected to shed light on the debate over the contribution (if any) of cultivated meat to the environmentalist cause. Supporters and detractors of its eco-friendly role indeed approach the issue differently, using different arguments, strategies and framing the debate differently. The focus on news sources is considered relevant in order to emphasize the news values involved in the debate (Bednarek & Caple 2014). References Bednarek, M., & Caple, H. (2014). Why do news values matter? Towards a new methodological framework for analysing news discourse in Critical Discourse Analysis and beyond. Discourse & Society, 25(2), 135–158. https://doi.org/10.1177/0957926513516041 Goffman, E. (1974). Frame analysis: An essay on the organization of experience. Harper & Row. Hanganu-Bresch, C., & Kondrlik, K. E. (Eds.). (2021). Veg(Etari)an arguments in culture, history, and practice: The V word. Palgrave Macmillan. Van Eemeren, F. H. van, & Grootendorst, R. (2004). A systematic theory of argumentation: The pragma-dialectical approach. Cambridge University Press. Van Loo, E. J., Caputo, V., & Lusk, J. L. (2020). Consumer preferences for farm-raised meat, lab-grown meat, and plant-based meat alternatives: Does information or brand matter? Food Policy, 95, 101931. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foodpol.2020.101931