America’s culture war over lab-grown meat
On one side of the debate is Bill Gates – on the other, Donald Trump’s physician. As several farming states try to ban it, is cell cultivation the future of food or a threat to the US way of life? reports.
When the first lab-grown chicken was approved for commercial sale in San Francisco on June 21 last year, it looked like the beginning of a food revolution that would transform the way America eats.
Then came the backlash. Within weeks, social media was frothing with outrage about the perils of cultivated meat. Not long after that, the backdoor lobbying by special interests started.
Nine months on, the billion-dollar industry built on “cultivated meat” – the industry’s preferred term for meat grown from the stem cells of living animals – faces a potential doomsday scenario.
Politicians across 16 US states have passed or are considering legislation that would impose fines of up to US$1 million (NZ$1.67m), and even prison time, for anyone who sells, produces or markets it.
For companies such as Upside Foods in Berkeley, California, one of only two in the US that is approved to sell lab-grown meat to humans, being dragged into the culture wars has been a disappointing setback.
“Given the pressures facing our food system, we should be innovating to develop every safe, sustainable, tasty option,” said Sean Edgett, its chief legal officer.
Although the products are still some way from reaching American supermarkets and delis, advocates say that meat and seafood cultivated from living animal cells has the potential to transform the global food system.
Producers have hailed it as an environmentally friendly way to feed the world’s growing population, which is expected to hit 9.7 billion by 2050. They say it will reduce greenhouse gas emissions and the need for land-intensive farming, as well as alleviating animal suffering.
Three hundred biotech companies around the world are working to acquire regulatory approval and commercialise products from steak to chicken fillets, lobster and canned pet food. The technology has also attracted interest from Nasa and the US Department of Defence as a way to feed astronauts and soldiers on lengthy missions with protein-rich food.
Not everyone is so enthusiastic. Labgrown meat found itself publicly dragged into America’s political morass on Memorial Day Weekend in May 2022, by one of the country’s most divisive politicians.
“The government totally wants to provide surveillance on every part of your life,” Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Republican congresswoman and vocal ally of Donald Trump, told viewers on a livestream that month. “They want to know when you’re eating.
“They want to know if you’re eating a cheeseburger, which is very bad because Bill Gates wants you to eat his fake meat, which is grown in a peach tree dish,” she said, apparently meaning petri dish.
A few months later, another Maga firebrand, Texas Congressman Ronny Jackson, ratcheted up the rhetoric. “I will NEVER eat one of those FAKE burgers made in a LAB,” the former White House physician thundered in a post on Twitter/X. “Eat too many and you'll turn into a SOCIALIST DEMOCRAT.”
Since then, the battle lines on cultivated meat products have shifted from social media to state houses, where politicians in agricultural states are seeking to outlaw or restrict its sale.
In Florida, the state legislature has passed bills to criminalise the sale, distribution and production of lab-grown meat, making it punishable by up to three months in jail. Legislation to restrict the sale of alternative meat products has also passed in varying forms in states from Alabama to Maine, Kansas to Kentucky.
At the federal level, a bipartisan group of lawmakers introduced legislation in January
that would require cell-cultivated or plant-based meat and poultry products to be labelled “imitation”.
Sparsha Saha, a Harvard University political scientist, said the backlash against cultivated meat followed a similar trajectory to the targeting of dairy alternatives such as soy or almond milk over the past decade. “Food isn’t a technology, food is something that you’re putting into your body ... it’s intimate. I am worried because I do think that there is this innate fear that people have around food.”
In 2013, the world's first lab-grown beef burger cost US$325,000 to make. Since then, the scientific advances have been so significant that the cultivated chicken dishes approved for sale in San Francisco last year were priced at US$45 for a oneounce (28g), a-la-carte tasting portion.
For the moment, there seems to be enough private equity funding to keep the industry on a path to viability. From 2016 to 2022, annual investment in companies cultivating meat and seafood tripled on average, with nearly US$3 billion in total given to more than 150 startups. Still, cultivated meats remain a long way from adding up in financial terms.
Interestingly, although cattle farmers and their lobbyists have been raising a stink, “Big Meat” has been on board with cultivated produce for some time.
Tyson Foods, the biggest meat processor in North America, was an early investor in Upside Foods. In April 2022, Cargill, another processor, contributed to a US$400 million funding round in the company. The meat and poultry giants have also ploughed money into plant-based food tech startups to complement their own in-house research and development.
Upside Foods also has behind it the financial heft of both Gates and Sir Richard Branson. “Put simply, there’s no way to produce enough meat for 9 billion people,” Gates wrote on his personal blog more than a decade ago. “Yet we can’t ask everyone to become vegetarians.”
At first glance, the stainless steel vats dotted around a former microbrewery in San Francisco’s Dogpatch neighbourhood look as though they could be fermenting the next potent Californian IPA. The faint scent of fish that lingers on some days tells of a different type of harvest.
Wildtype Foods took over the site from a beer company that went bust during the Covid-19 pandemic, and repurposed and upgraded its mixing tanks and cooling systems to produce cultivated seafood. Its scientists now grow salmon from living cells in the pristine environment that they hope will one day rival Alaskan-caught varieties for taste and texture, furnishing sashimi platters and poke bowls the world over.
In 2022, Wildtype raised US$100m in its latest round of funding from investors including Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert
Downey Jr and Jeff Bezos. It set itself a goal of producing more than 90,000kg of cultivated seafood annually, which would be free of mercury, microplastics and other contaminants. “Small businesses like Wildtype are up against a well co-ordinated effort across the United States to criminalise our products, and we can’t compete with the vast sums of lobbying dollars and efforts that supporters of the bans have deployed,” said Justin Kolbeck, its chief executive. The US imports 80% of its seafood, mostly from Asia, South America and Canada. Human rights and environmental abuses were exposed this month in India's shrimp industry, which accounts for about 40% of the shrimp consumed in the US. Global demand for seafood is expected to rise by 30% in the next five years. Kolbeck said it was critical that conventional, plant-based and cultivated seafood production worked together. “We don’t see [lab-grown meat bans] as anything more than special interest groups trying their best to stifle innovation and maintain the status quo,” he said.
Lab-grown food technology has come a long way since 2010, when in-vitro “Frankenfurters” were cooked up in a vat of chemicals by scientists at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands.
These days, the first step in creating cell-cultivated meats is extracting muscle and fat cells from a living or recently deceased animal, through a biopsy. The cells are placed in a cultivator, similar to a beer brewing tank, and nourished with proteins, sugars, pure water and fats, a diet comparable to the one a farm-reared animal would receive.
The cells are harvested about a month later. They are then shaped, cooked and sometimes 3D-printed into burgers, nuggets or some other appetising shape.
Upside Foods received the green light from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Department of Agriculture last year to sell cell-cultivated chicken.
It began selling “whole-textured” chicken filet at the Michelin-starred Bar Crenn in San Francisco in August, albeit in limited quantities – 16 portions each month. The bite-sized dishes were served on a bed of dry ice with a smoky-flavoured chilli aioli, and diners were encouraged to pick the servings up with their hands to get a sense of its texture.
About the same time, Spanish-American chef Jose Andres began offering charcoal-grilled cultivated chicken skewers made from lab-grown poultry at China Chilcano, his upscale restaurant in Washington, DC.
The trial runs in both US restaurants have since been discontinued, but Edgett said Upside was now working on chicken sausages and sandwich meat, which were undergoing regulatory review by the FDA. Once they have been deemed safe, the company plans to increase production and make them available in restaurants in the next few months.
Meanwhile, efforts to secure regulatory approval for cultivated meats are continuing at pace around the globe.
In Britain, cultivated chicken pet food made by Meatly, a London-based startup, is due to go on sale in the next few months. Ivy Farm, the country’s largest producer of cultivated meat, has teamed up with Fortnum & Mason to test its meat in the grocer’s famous scotch eggs. In January, Israel’s ministry of health issued pre-market approval for Aleph Cuts, the world’s first cultivated beef steaks.
“As with any new innovation, it will take time,” said Edgett, “which is why education is so important.”