Cultivated conflict

Around the world each day, some 900,000 cows, 1.4 million goats, 1.7 million sheep, 3.8 million pigs, and 202 million chickens are slaughtered for food. Most Americans eat about 100 pounds of broiler chicken a year—and that number keeps climbing annually. A lot of people really like to eat meat.

But what if they could do that without killing animals? A number of start-ups are now working to produce lab-grown meat. In June 2023, U.S. health authorities for the first time approved lab-grown chicken produced by two companies based in California. Although no grocery stores in the U.S. are yet selling it, lab-grown meat is no longer science fiction. Restaurants around the world have even served it—including culinary destinations like China Chilcano in Washington, D.C., Bar Crenn in San Francisco, and Restaurant 1880 in Singapore.

Now, though, U.S. lawmakers are trying to ban it: Last month, Nebraska became the sixth American state—after Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Montana, and Indiana—to restrict its production and sale. “As the first farmer-governor in more than 100 years, I know how important it is that we take steps to preserve our way of life,” says Nebraska’s Governor Jim Pillen. In Europe, meanwhile, Italy has already banned it, while legislators in France have proposed following suit.

Why all this opposition?

Hanna Tuomisto is a professor of agricultural science at the University of Helsinki. Tuomisto says politicians tend to frame their resistance to lab-grown meat—or as she says, cultivated meat—as protection for farmers. And there may be some sincerity to that; it’s possible that some politicians do see cultivated meat as a strong challenge to traditional livestock farming because, unlike plant-based, cultivated tastes just like ordinary meat—even if most ordinary-meat production is actually run by and benefits large, multinational corporations, not independent farmers. But there may also be a lot of symbolic, cultural politics behind it—in what are, after all, relatively small markets within the U.S.

Either way, Tuomisto says, the emerging cultivated-meat industry faces a more fundamental problem across markets: It’s very expensive. In fact, it’s still so costly to produce that there’s no way to scale up a business for it—so until researchers can solve some daunting technical puzzles,  meat from cultivation won’t be able to compete with meat from slaughtering on price. Which means it’ll probably take years in all events before cultivated meat arrives in grocery stores. The politicians banning it now seem to believe in the potential of the new product. The irony is that many farmers seem to, too, saying they’re not opposed to cultivated meat—and in fact, often see it as another new technological innovation that might end up supporting their businesses ...

Gustav Jönsson: What exactly is lab-grown meat?