Cultivated meat production faces roadblocks

Before his state passed a ban on lab-grown meat earlier this year, Alabama rancher Greg Anderson’s worries about the product didn’t focus on how it would affect his industry. “The greatest threat is probably the rush to market of a product with a process that I don’t think has been fully vetted yet,” Anderson explained.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture approved the first sale for lab-grown meat in 2023, but at least two Republican states share Anderson’s belief that Americans shouldn’t be too ready to throw cultivated beef and chicken on the grill. Florida banned the product on May 1, and Anderson’s home state of Alabama followed suit days later.

Cultivated meat has been in the public eye for over a decade. In 2013, Dutch scientist Mark Post showcased his $330,000 cultivated hamburger on live television. “The fundamental techniques behind tissue culture have been part of the research community for decades,” said Jim Dickson, a professor of animal science at Iowa State University.

Cultivated meat is a form of tissue culture, and like other tissue culture byproducts, it begins with cells from an original organism, in this case a cow or chicken. Stored in bioreactors, the cells are fed a cocktail of amino acids and vitamins. It takes about 2-8 weeks for the cells to differentiate into muscle and fat.

Packaging tissue-grown meat from a lab for consumers began in 2015 when Upside Foods (formerly Memphis Meats), the first cultivated meat company, launched in California. Today, according to the Good Food Institute, some 150 companies on 6 continents are working on bringing cultivated beef, chicken, and fish to supermarkets and restaurants.

In 2023, Good Meat and Upside Foods received the USDA’s approval to sell lab-grown chicken at two high-end restaurants: China Chilcano in Washington, D.C., and San Francisco’s Bar Crenn. Bar Crenn offered one-ounce portions to 16 diners monthly. But neither restaurant added lab-grown chicken as a permanent menu fixture, and both have since stopped offering it.

According to Upside’s website, cultivated meat may cut greenhouse gas emitted by farm animals like chickens and cows by 90 percent. The Good Food Institute also reports that reducing animal slaughter could be a more efficient use of farmland, cutting down land used for grazing cattle by up to 4,000 percent.

Healthwise, cultivated meat could eliminate antibiotics from meat products. Still, according to Dickson, it’s hard to compare the nutritional value of burgers made from a full-grown cow to those from a test tube. “Theoretically, those two products should be very close to each other,” said Dickson. “But again, we don’t really know, because there’s not a production version of that product out right now.”

At the moment, American consumers can’t purchase lab-grown meat at grocery stores, but there’s plenty of money behind the effort to commercialize it. An industry report from the Good Food Institute reports that the global industry has acquired $3.1 billion in funding so far.

While cultivated meat isn’t technically an imitation in the same vein as plant-based Impossible Burgers or Quorn sausage, test-tube meat still doesn’t involve killing an animal. And that might incentivize some consumers to buy it, provided that they’re willing to pay extra. A study published in the Journal of Agriculture and Food Research in 2022 found that, if produced on a large scale, cell-cultured hamburger meat would cost about $28 per pound.

The product may be gaining popularity across the pond. In July, Britain’s Food Standards Agency approved Meatly, a company that produces lab-grown meat for pet food, to sell to the country’s supermarkets. Britain doesn’t have a similar product available for human consumption but it could be on the way. In August, the National Alternative Protein Innovation Centre launched with the help of $50 million in funding, and over a third of that comes from the government. Thus far, Britain has invested some $122 million in researching alternative proteins like lab-grown meat.

The U.K. imports over one-third of the beef it consumes, while the U.S. imports about 12 percent and produces about 20 percent of the world’s beef. Some critics of lab-grown meat consider it a threat to American farmers. “We stand with agriculture, we stand with the cattle ranchers … because we understand it’s important for the backbone of the state,” said Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis before signing the bill outlawing cultivated meat in the state. On Aug. 12, Upside Foods sued the state of Florida, calling such a ban unconstitutional.

The United States produced 105 billion pounds of beef in 2022 alone, and the cultivated meat industry is years away from coming close to that production rate. Dickson, the Iowa State professor, thinks that consumers ought to have the opportunity to purchase lab-grown meat. “Let the market decide,” he argued.

Rancher Anderson describes himself as a “free market guy,” but he believes statewide bans will prevent an untested product from harming consumers. Banning the meat, according to Anderson, will give states time to decide what lab-grown meat is and how to label it. Sixteen states have already passed laws to prohibit lab-grown meat being marketed as “meat.”

Even once the meat is labeled properly, Anderson thinks he’ll still prefer a marbled, Angus ribeye. “I like the natural products from the things that God put in front of us to be good stewards of and raise and use them for their intended purpose,” he said.

Anderson doesn’t feel that lab-grown meat poses any real threat to traditional agriculture. “I don’t think it’s meat. … No more than almond milk is milk,” he said. “And I think eventually consumers are going to come to that conclusion on their own.”