Could We All Be Buying Lab-Grown Meat Soon?

Editor’s note: In June 2023, the USDA approved the sale of lab-grown meat to the public. Currently, two Califonia companies, Upside Foods and Good Meat, are cleared to sell their chicken products which are made from animal cells.

In November 2022, the FDA made a surprise announcement: it had no further questions about the safety of a lab-grown chicken product from Upside Foods, one of the largest startups attempting to produce marketable lab-grown meat. This de facto approval of the product surprised most industry analysts, who expected the regulatory battle over lab-grown meats to be much more drawn out. While the approval didn’t put the product directly on shelves, it brought a previously abstract possibility — that people could buy real meat without killing an animal — much closer to reality.

Sustainability claims are also hard to evaluate at this point, though easy to understand in theory. Because cell cultures aren’t a living, breathing, moving animal, they can (at least theoretically) be much more efficient at converting nutrients into edible protein. A living cow only gains about one kilo of body weight for every six or seven pounds of food it eats, and this doesn’t account for the fact that much of that body weight isn’t edible. In comparison, lab cultures are able to turn four pounds of feed into one pound of beef muscle cell , all of which is edible. For animals that are more efficient at turning feed into food, like chicken and fish, these gains would be smaller, but still significant.

With the nutrient inputs for cultured cells almost universally coming from grain and soy products, the system is still dependent on industrial crop production and all of its attendant problems, heavy chemical use that contributes to water pollution and climate change being foremost among them. So while it’s not a complete divestment from the problems of the current meat industry, it would still use dramatically fewer of these inputs than livestock do. There are also still a number of unanswered questions around energy and water usage, though early studies indicate cultivated meats would outperform conventional meat in both categories. Ultimately, cultivated meats would be a clear cut improvement over conventional meat, though this is once again contingent on their ability to replace them.

Lab Meats Still Face Significant Hurdles

Unfortunately for the industry, translating the huge leaps they’ve made in product viability into product affordability isn’t so clear cut.  There’s a big difference between producing a prototype of a product and producing it for actual sale. Scientists developing lab meats are working in pristine conditions, using pharmaceutical-grade inputs and stringent anti-contamination procedures. Those ingredients and practices don’t move cheaply or easily to a production floor.

Scaling animal production is fundamentally different from scaling up a cell culture: Animals might be bad at converting their food into meat, resulting in a big foodprint, but they do grow themselves. Lab-grown cell cultures need man-made infrastructure to grow inside of, and the amount of it required to produce a significant amount of food is staggering, dramatically outstripping the number of bioreactors used by the medical and pharmaceutical industries today. Because cell cultures don’t have the immune system that would protect them within the body of an animal, they’re especially vulnerable to bacterial and viral contamination, which biosecurity experts say is nearly inevitable at scale.

Those cells also aren’t organized in a way we’d recognize as meat, which takes even more infrastructure, development and labor.  With the costs of making the cells at a commercially viable volume so high, the cost of the products that use them as building blocks would be prohibitive for most consumers for the foreseeable future.

Per the industry’s analysis, this is a temporary setback: the Good Food Institute, a nonprofit that promotes plant-based and cell-cultured foods, commissioned an analysis that suggested cultivated meat products could be price-competitive as early as 2030. But other experts, as quoted by journalist Joe Fassler in 2021, say that even outside of that sanguine prediction, whether or not cultivated meats can achieve cost parity — or ever be produced at a mass-market scale at all — is still deeply uncertain.

Then there’s the image problem: obviously, the people working on these products prefer not to call them lab meats, which conjure up conspiratorial fears of mad scientists and soylent green. But regardless of what you call them (with “cultured meat” and “cultivated meat” the industry-preferred terms) these meats are especially vulnerable to those fears. As one recent analysis pointed out, the cell lines used to develop these products are usually immortalized (mutated in a way that allows them to divide indefinitely rather than die off), a quality they share with cancer cells. And while scientists agree this doesn’t present any risk of cancer or other harms to eaters, the probability that the meat industry will label them “tumor burgers” seems inevitable.

As with the newest generation of bleedingly (literally) realistic plant-based meat alternatives, there’s a question about who cultured meats are for. While there certainly are vegetarians who miss the taste of bacon, many simply aren’t interested in eating meat, so real meat, even cruelty-free, is even less appealing than the Beyond Burgers that haven’t made their way into the diets of many vegetarians. Once again, it seems that the target customer is the conscientious omnivore, who is drawn to cultured meat because of animal welfare, environmental or social concerns.

But the existence of this class of consumer in the first place points to the battle facing cultivated meat producers. The conscientious omnivore is, by definition, aware of the issues with meat production and still buying it anyway. And given that conventional meat still dramatically outsells more expensive meat produced to some kind of higher ethical or environmental standard (pasture-raised, grassfed, humanely produced, etc.), we know that price ultimately dictates most people’s purchases, regardless of their ideas about animal welfare and the environment. Therefore, any product that actually intends to compete with conventional meat in the marketplace enough to disrupt it is going to have to come very close to it in price, which may still be years away.

Top photo by David/Adobe Stock.