Cellular Agriculture Beyond Anthropocentrism: Speaking of Animals in an “Animal-Free” Future

Abstract Cellular agriculture promises an animal-free future for food production by offering continuity in consumption alongside a radical reorganisation of production: familiar animal-derived foods, including meat, fish, milk would remain available, but without the slaughter, confinement, capture, and ecological burdens associated with conventional animal agriculture and fisheries. Yet despite its frequent promise of “animal-free” production, the place of animals within this emerging field remains insufficiently examined. This paper offers a critical animal-ethics analysis of three production paradigms grouped under the umbrella of cellular agriculture: cultivated meat and fish, precision fermentation, and mammary epithelial cell culture for milk production. The paper’s central claim is that the marginalisation of animals in debates on cellular agriculture is not a secondary omission, but a constitutive ethical and political problem. When these technologies are assessed primarily through sustainability, scalability, regulation, and consumer acceptance, animals risk being invoked to legitimise innovation while disappearing from its evaluation. A responsible ethics of cellular agriculture must therefore ask how these technologies reconfigure animal instrumentalization, dependence on animal bodies, and human-animal relations. Bringing animals back into the debate means more than adding one more stakeholder interest to an already crowded field: it means rethinking ethical reflection on emerging food technologies beyond anthropocentrism and strengthening the credibility of public and policy deliberation.