ABSTRACT. This talk explores how new technological developments in making meat inform the old philosophical problem of realism. We do so by focusing not on the idea of ‘reality’, but on ‘achieving realness’, demonstrated in practices of ballroom culture and drag. Our starting observation is that, in some ways, new meats are becoming realer than real meat. Technoscientific work achieves meat realness, the functionalities, mouthfeel, taste, odour, and so on, of meat materials, in a targeted, controlled, and consistent manner. We analyse this as a process of realing meat, which is always already its surrealing: the achievement of meat realness builds on ideas of the real, but goes beyond them to -in the spirit of the surrealists- approximate a new desired or dreamed of reality, a realness, where meat becomes disconnected from animal bodies, achieving its ‘meaty’ attributes in new material forms. This surreality can be part of a critical revisionary programme challenging both food identity binaries and the necessity of killing animals for meat.

Please find here the full program of the Spring 2025 online colloquia series