Disruptive technologies and intra-value conflicts: The case of naturalness and sustainability in cellular agriculture

Synthetic biology is a highly disruptive technology that particularly affects the agriculture and food production domains. Rather than using farmed animals or crops, synthetic biology allows for ‘cellular agriculture’—the production of agricultural commodities using cell cultures and host micro-organisms. In light of the possibility that cellular agriculture can enable sustainable food production, and considering that most people strongly prefer food that they perceive as natural, this paper is guided by the following research question: how are the values of sustainability and naturalness affected by the disruption of cellular agriculture? We analyze how different stakeholders discuss these values. After demonstrating that the intra-value conflicts evident in sustainability and naturalness are based on different interpretations of these values, we create conceptual clarity in these different interpretations and show how these intra-value conflicts relate to the ongoing divide between ecomodernism and ecology with respect to the future of agriculture and food.