Eating for the Future: Veganism and the Challenge of In Vitro Meat

Who hasn’t fantasized about the end of the world? There is something about the destruction of all conventions and physical and ideological structures that fascinates the human imagination. David Agranoff’s novel The Vegan Revolution… With Zombies sets out specifically to imagine what a world without the agricultural food industry would look like. In Agranoff’s imagining, the vegan revolution is brought about by a regular zombie apocalypse. A new drug has been introduced that allows the meat industry to create what in the novel becomes known as Stress Free Food. Making animals immune to suffering, this drug has the unfortunate side effect of making any human who consumes Stress Free Meat into a zombie, craving a different meat altogether: human.1 Presumably, the drug is administered not only to cows but also to all other animals in the agriculture industry, and, as such, vegans2 are the only ones not affected by the zombie virus. As a consequence, vegans of the world are now left to fend off the hordes of rampaging and hungry undead that will not be satisfied by a Big Mac.