As cultivated meat begins to enter grocery stores, governments should promote the field’s development in line with broad public goals of sustainability and accessibility.
In a world first, cultivated meat became available on a grocery shelf in May, at a butcher’s shop in Singapore. The product, from Eat Just (Alameda, Calif.), contains only 3% cultured chicken cells combined with plant-derived ingredients, but the event is a milestone for the cultivated meat industry. After investments of $3.1 billion in 174 cultivated meat and seafood startups since 2013, the sector is poised for commercialization if the technology can be scaled. Enthusiasm for producing meat from animal cells instead of animals is driven by diverse concerns about the harms of meat-eating to the environment, animals and human health. Whether cultivated meat will mitigate these harms is an open question. Much depends on continued R&D progress — and on consumers’ dietary choices — but governments should act to shape its future according to public interests in sustainable agriculture and food security.
Worldwide meat consumption in 2022 totaled ~82 billion chickens, ducks, pigs, sheep, goats, turkeys and cows. The toll of meat-eating at this scale is profound. For the environment, it means massive greenhouse gas emissions, land degradation, water use, deforestation, biodiversity loss, soil erosion, and waterway and air pollution; for animals, the suffering of industrial farms and slaughterhouses; for human health, unsafe working conditions, pollution, meat-safety problems, the spread of antibiotic-resistant bacteria from misuse of antibiotics, and exposure to zoonotic diseases with pandemic potential.
The inconvenient conclusion, in study after study, is that intensive animal agriculture is unsustainable in a world facing a population of 10 billion and a ~73% increase in meat demand by 2050. For starters, there is not enough land, as livestock already occupies ~36% of earth’s habitable land. Animal-based food contributes ~57% of the greenhouse gas emissions from the global food system, which amounts to ~20% of total anthropogenic emissions — twice that of plant-based food1. Meat therefore presents an enormous opportunity for climate. One analysis found that a transition to plant-based diets could reduce emissions ~56% by 2050 (ref. 2). Another showed that phasing out livestock, combined with ecosystem restoration on land formerly used for grazing and feed crops, would provide half the emissions reductions needed to stay below a 2 ˚C temperature rise3.
The strategy of cultivated meat stems from the recognition that peoples’ ancient habit of eating animals is not going away anytime soon. Unlike plant-based meat substitutes, fashioned from soy, pea and other plant proteins, cultivated meat is grown from animal cells in sterile bioreactors. The aim is “real meat”, with the same muscle and fat, flavors and textures as chicken, beef or pork, and with the same — or even improved — nutritional qualities.
The first cultivated burger was made in 2013 and announced to great fanfare by tissue engineer Mark Post at a televised news conference. The slim clump of cow muscle cells, stained red with beet juice, cost $325,000 and took months to create. Since then, costs have plunged more than 1,000-fold, and production times are down to weeks, much faster than those for livestock or chickens. But outside the retail launch in Singapore and a handful of restaurants, cultivated meat is not yet available to consumers. Costs are still too high, and the quantities being manufactured too small. Upside Foods (Berkeley, Calif.) and Eat Just, the two companies with US marketing approval, report success in 2,000- to 3,500-liter bioreactors — not large enough for wide commercialization.
Scaling up supply in the future depends on finding solutions to scientific and engineering challenges. R&D work is focused on improving cost, yield and taste and meeting regulatory requirements. All parts of the process are being explored: starting animal cell types (muscle stem cells, fat stem cells, fibroblasts, embryonic stem cells and others); cell expansion and differentiation protocols; media compositions and sources; bioreactor design; and methods for turning cells into meat-like foods. Reducing the high cost of media should be possible by replacing pharma-grade with food-grade components, reusing media, or engineering cells to enhance their growth and lower growth factor use. Optimizing bioreactor performance through computational modeling may boost yields and assist scale-up to larger tanks. Sculpting of whole cuts, like steak, rather than simpler minced or shredded meat, may be aided by advanced tissue-engineering techniques. If cultivated meat is to become more than a niche market, it must eventually offer the full sensory experience of meat, with its complex flavor profiles and fat marbling. In the short term, though, many startups are proceeding stepwise to less ambitious products, such as blended, low-meat foods.
Since large manufacturing plants do not exist, environmental benefits can only be estimated. Cultivated meat involves more processing than plant-based food, but with efficient production systems and renewable energy, emissions may be ~40-fold lower compared with those of beef. A conservative analysis that assumed renewable energy and sustainable feedstocks found a carbon footprint ~12-fold lower for beef, ~2-fold lower for pork, and about the same for chicken, with corresponding land-use reductions of about 10-fold, 3-fold and 2-fold4.
In the best-case future, cultivated meat will contribute meaningfully to emissions reductions and food security, help end the cruelty of industrial meat farms, and free up land devoted to livestock for biodiversity restoration, carbon sequestration, small farmers and agroecological farming. Governments should use their powers to stimulate these changes. Sustainable feedstocks for cultivated meat facilities require transformations of agricultural systems. Investment in shared R&D through public–private partnerships can advance and de-risk the technology for private investors. US and European Union law can supersede the bans recently passed in Florida and Alabama, which even large meat packing and ranching groups oppose, and in Italy. An emphasis on transparency and open-source knowledge can build consumer confidence and support wide accessibility of technologies and products. With better coordination between public and private efforts, cultivated meat will both do well and do good.
