It's official: Lab-grown meat may be coming to a restaurant near you. In June, USDA gave two lab-grown meat companies the green light to begin production and sales, kicking off a flurry of public interest and gaining the attention of prominent investors like Bill Gates and Ashton Kutcher. The federal approval marks a milestone for an industry claiming to be scalable, sustainable, and healthy. Certainly, growing meat from cell cultures is interesting, technologically speaking. But consumers shouldn't swallow the hype from lab-grown meat advocates who claim it will save the planet.
What, exactly, is lab-grown meat–which its purveyors would rather you call “cell-cultured” meat? It’s different from the meat imitations that have popped up at grocery stores and restaurants over the past few years. Those products are highly processed plant protein combined with various additives to mimic the taste and texture of real meat.
Lab-grown meat is an attempt to grow animal cells into meat–without livestock. Lab-grown meat is made by harvesting cells from live animals and then “feeding” the cells with the nutrients in a bioreactor–a sterilized metal vat in a factory.
While it’s approved for sale, lab-grown meat is going to be difficult to find because it is incredibly expensive to produce. The first “cultivated” burger cost a staggering $325,000, and the only cultivated meat commercially available is served in minuscule portions in Singapore.
In a 2021 economic analysis, a chemical engineer calculated that, even accounting for technological improvements, the lowest price for laboratory meat would be between $17 and $23 per pound of meat product. Compare that with the much lower price of natural meat, just below $5 per pound.
Even companies such as Good Meat–one of the two to receive the USDA’s approval–admit it will take many years before their products become cost-competitive with traditional meat.
But whenever it’s widely available–if ever–these companies promise that lab-grown meat will save the world. Good Meat’s own website claims lab-grown meat will reverse the trend of “eating our way to our own extinction.”
They hope you’ll swallow their claims whole. But digging deeper reveals these assertions don’t have much meat on the bones.
First, lab-grown meat is less sustainable than natural meat. While factories that grow meat in vats require less land than grazing cattle, they require huge amounts of electricity to operate, which in turn produce carbon emissions.
According to one study, researchers found that scaling up the lab-grown meat industry could emit up to 25 times more emissions than the global meat industry. Another review of lab-grown meat found it may produce a larger share of carbon dioxide, which lingers in the atmosphere longer than methane from cow burps.
As a UC Davis professor notes, “If companies are having to purify growth media to pharmaceutical levels, it uses more resources, which then increases global warming potential.”
There are also questions about whether lab-grown meat is really the same as natural meat, as lab-grown meat companies claim it is.
There’s actually one key difference. Most cells don’t replicate forever. This means lab-grown meat companies would have to constantly take “fresh” samples from livestock to grow cell-cultured meat.
But scientists developed so-called “immortalized” cell lines that can replicate forever, which are used by lab-grown meat companies to keep a supply of cells available. There’s just one issue: Endless cell replication is the defining feature of cancer. It grows and grows.
Essentially, lab-grown meat could be seen as the equivalent of eating a tumor. A benign tumor, to be clear–lab-grown meat is unlikely to cause cancer in people, according to experts.
But there are also no long-term studies that we can rely on to prove that. “The best way is to give it to people and then ask them 20 years later or 30 years later, ‘Has any of you gotten cancer at a higher-than-normal rate?’ But that’s not a practical experiment,” one biologist told Bloomberg.
Not all lab-grown meat manufacturers use immortalized cell lines, but consumers may not know which is which. And not many consumers want to be a guinea pig.
Four years ago, Beyond Meat went public on Wall Street to much fanfare. The company made all kinds of claims about saving the planet and being healthier. But consumer curiosity soon fell off, especially as it became clear that the supposedly healthier “plant-based” meat was full of additives and sodium.
In the last year alone, the plant-based meat industry declined rapidly in sales and dismissed thousands of employees. It has failed to reach even 1 percent of the global meat market.
It turns out that Bitcoin would have been a better investment than Beyond Meat, whose stock is down 80% from its 2019 launch. Lab-grown meat appears primed to have the same trajectory.
Jack Hubbard is the Executive Director of the Center for the Environment and Welfare.