By clipping life’s natural cellular process and looping it at the outset, we can create the flesh without creating the creature, growing animal tissues directly from animal cell cultures. This is the allure of cultivated meat: the finest nigiri, most flavorful steak, and juiciest chicken thighs, without the factory farming, ecological burdens, or risk of toxins and parasites that come with traditional meat sources. The real flesh, of real animals, complete with all of the requisite sensory pleasures and nutritional benefits, but without the life and death of an animal. While progress has been made, early cell-cultured meat products are nowhere near “fully animal” — extensive plant-based scaffolding and other supplementary structural ingredients are still necessary. The litany of technical, capital-related, consumer preference, and regulatory issues standing between the cultivated meat industry and the large-scale sci-fi future it prophesies seems almost existential. Can this once-burgeoning sector find a way to survive? I did some digging and talked to long-time industry leaders to find out.

Even before the technology has had a chance to mature, cultivated meat bans have begun sweeping across the United States and compounding the industry’s already monumental headwinds. Florida, Alabama, and now Mississippi have all passed legislation prohibiting the production or sale of cultivated meats, with states like Nebraska, Georgia, Michigan, and Arizona currently considering their own bans. (Pirate Wires previously covered the Florida ban, which was instituted last year.) Is the reflexive, viscerally suspicious reaction to “lab-grown” food, an overly broad moniker seen as pejorative by the industry, based in some sort of intuitive human wisdom? Or are these bans premature, leveraging misplaced public skepticism in a way that is detrimental to societal progress, driven by the Ludditic fuel of culture wars and entrenched agricultural interests? New innovations, after all, can often seem uncomfortable (or even dangerous) at first brush.

To understand the downstream changes in political attitudes and funding landscapes, it is helpful to first understand the underlying mechanics of cell-cultured meat. The process begins with immortalized cells — stem cells which, through cultivation, engineering, or spontaneous mutation, are able to replicate in a stable and repeatable way forever (theoretically). With one harmless sample taken from the animal of choice, a cell line can be created that serves as the progenitor of all future cells. Hypothetically, at scale, one original “founder” cow could be the source of millions of pounds of beef. This basic concept has been proven out by a number of companies whose ongoing research and development operations rely on a years-old, one-time sample of a single animal. Wildtype, a cultivated salmon company, used “a small extraction of cells from a juvenile Pacific salmon several years ago” to create its initial cell line, and the company “no longer need[s] to harvest any more wild or farmed fish for production.”

These cells are propagated in something called a bioreactor — right now, in the context of cultivated meat, these are basically giant metal tanks that resemble something you might see at a brewery. In fact, companies like Believer Meats and Wildtype used modified beer fermentation tanks to develop their initial bioreactors, and the latter actually built out its pilot production infrastructure in a former San Francisco brewery. (While bioreactors are widely used in pharmaceutical applications like vaccine and drug production, unmodified models are too expensive and feature-heavy for cultivated meat companies that desperately need to improve their unit economics.) The animal cells are “fed” using a liquid nutrient base whose composition varies but is typically a mixture of glucose, amino acids, salts, and vitamins. Historically, and ironically, fetal bovine serum (FBS) was a key growth medium for cultivated meat cells. The need to slaughter pregnant cows and collect blood from their fetuses, however, was extremely bad PR for companies looking to tout an ethical approach to meat, leading most of the major players to develop FBS-free workarounds in recent years.

But wait, aren’t these initial “immortalized” cells technically precancerous, and shouldn’t we want to avoid the consumption of anything that is in any way associated with cancer? First, while immortalized cells share some traits with precancerous and cancerous cells, like the bypassing of certain cell-cycle checkpoints and the ability to divide indefinitely, they are neither genetically unstable nor tumorigenic (able to invade tissues or form tumors), critical hallmarks of cancerous cells. Second, these bioreactor-contained cell cohorts are closely monitored for unexpected behaviors or mutations, and undesirable growth (or lack thereof) is easily identified. These are inherently not fast-and-loose operations. The introduction of even a single bacterium into the bioreactor, let alone horrific mutations in the animal cells themselves, will destroy the composition of a cohort. These animal cells have no surrounding immune system, are growing outside of their typical environment, and (unlike plant cells) do not have cell walls, all of which make them extremely delicate and prone to disruption.

This delicacy, no pun intended, leads directly into one of the core problems that has stumped the industry. In order to avoid any sort of bacterial contamination, the slightest inkling of which would derail the entire process, intensive sterile measures have to be taken. Cultivated meat bioreactors currently use high-pressure steam cleaning in order to achieve 100% sterility and eliminate all unwanted organisms. This technique requires that the reactor tanks be made of thick, high-grade steel in order to withstand the pressure, material which is very expensive and ruins the economics of scaling these operations. Biosphere, a biomanufacturing startup that exited stealth earlier this year, is working on novel UV-sterilization technology for bioreactors that would remove these burdensome materials requirements (and therefore potentially solve one of the significant scaling problems for the cultivated meat industry).

Even when the cells proliferate successfully within a sterilized bioreactor, however, another major challenge arises. If left unstructured, they form into a “slurry,” basically a paste-like consistency whose thickness varies based on the density of cells. Beyond the fact that this in no way resembles what the consumer imagines when they think of a cut of meat, there is a procedural Catch-22. High cell density is important for the constitution of meat, but high-density slurries are difficult to keep alive. And even if kept alive at high densities, cultivated cells do not naturally organize into the muscle fibers and fats and tendons that are characteristic of, say, a steak or salmon fillet. The underlying biological difficulty of directing the “life paths” of stem cells, and providing them with precise architectural definition, remains a big problem.

These structural development hurdles are currently addressed with techniques like microcarriers and scaffolds, both of which have nontrivial drawbacks. Animal cells typically grow and differentiate while adhered to some sort of surface — in vitro, this means bone and other supportive tissues. Microcarriers can either be edible or non-edible, the latter requiring an additional removal process, and often result (in both cases) in cell growth that is too low-density. Scaffolds, on the other hand, are typically designed to be edible, but present a challenge similar to that of their microcarrier counterparts: the final cultivated meat product ends up consisting largely of non-animal cell content. GOOD Meat’s latest cultivated chicken product, for example, is only 3% animal cells. The rest? Plant-based. At those levels, what’s the point? Joshua March, the co-founder and CEO of SCiFi Foods, a now-shuttered cultivated beef company, told me that plant scaffolding “caps the inclusion rate [of animal cells in the end product] at 50%,” though he noted the practical maximum is typically something more like 10 to 20%. Though it is unclear exactly what techniques each industry operator is leveraging to create their products, the fact remains that there are foundational elements of this process which need to be figured out.

March expressed to me that while he still has a “strong conviction” about cultivated meat as a way to meaningfully contribute to the food supply and make a dent in factory farming, he expects at least a 10-year timeline to start approaching a meaningful level of scale. Josh Tetrick, CEO of Eat Just, whose subsidiary GOOD Meat is one of three entities to have received FDA approval for cultivated meat products, implied in an interview from February of 2024 that the journey might be even longer, nervously speaking about the future of cultivated meat in “decades.”

Venture capital firms, understandably, are not lining up to pump money into an industry that is, at minimum, a decade away from meaningful scale. Especially not with artificial intelligence vacuuming up all of the available funding. In a February 2024 piece, The New York Times detailed the rise and fall of the VC-funding hype cycle that helped lead the cultivated meat industry to its current state. They reported that “between 2016 and 2022, investors poured almost $3 billion into cultivated meat” companies. When well-funded companies largely failed to create viable products and scale their production lines, the technical and practical challenges delineated above became apparent to investors and industry players alike. To make matters even more difficult, if companies creating meat-replacement products want to win at scale, they have to compete with traditional foods which are both largely commoditized and heavily subsidized by governments (to the tune of billions of dollars per annum). Just on the matter of price point alone, it’s a daunting obstacle.

Compounding the technical and practical challenge was a concurrently unfolding cultural story that exacerbated both operational and regulatory struggles. Cultivated meat has suffered collateral damage from an ongoing culture war that was reignited by the explosion of plant-based meat simulacra. Sentiments around cultivated meat are inextricably tied to these same complex and evolving views around “processed” foods and the backlash from the sanctimoniously moralizing nature of environmental activism. Beyond Meat’s 2019 IPO, after which the company’s stock price 8x’d within three months (from $25 to $235), was emblematic of the fervor. Consumer curiosity and COVID, which impacted traditional meat prices via supply chain issues and thereby reduced relative cost deltas, helped turbocharge the initial splash. These years were also characterized by widespread climate doomerism, constant high-horse lecturing from arrogantly certain “climate scientist” experts about our imminent demise, and the peak of Greta-Thunberg-type activism (she was named Time’s “Person of the Year” in late 2019).

Then, when the zeitgeist began to flip, the backlash spread to plant-based meat. People started to increasingly see these products as “fake,” over-processed, and therefore perniciously unhealthy. With the recent emergence of MAHA amidst the culturally ascendant right wing, this viewpoint is only gaining prominence. Large chunks of average people became unconvinced about the supposedly pressing need to stop eating meat immediately in order to avoid permanent global catastrophe. Perception of the messaging from plant-based companies that had garnered them such widespread attention soured into a sense of being condescended to for profit motives. And, as it turns out, the synthetic product was simply not better than the thing it was attempting to imitate. Markets became less optimistic about the prospect of plant-based meats taking significant revenue share away from traditional meats — as of this writing, Beyond Meat’s stock is sitting at $3.08 per share. Tattooed Chef, which went public in 2020 with a $1.7 billion market cap and posted $213 million of revenue in 2021, filed for Chapter 11 before the end of 2023. Bloomberg reported in June of 2023 that Impossible Foods’ employees had seen the value of their private shares decrease by 89% from $14.64 in 2021 to just $1.67.

This brings us back to the present day, and to the cultivated meat bans beginning to sweep the country. The cultural proxy war element of the siege on cultivated meats is, if not a key player itself, at least being used to run interference on behalf of more amorphous forces of entrenched corporate lobbying. Part of what makes these bans puzzling at first glance is the fact that cultivated meat, as we have established, still has a long way to go before it becomes anything more than a boogeyman in the minds of wary ranchers, scheming politicians, and Big Food execs. If this is all somewhere beyond the horizon, why is the space being heavily targeted by American politicians today? Is there really any sort of “safety” imperative here to justify preemptive regulatory blocks?

Florida, Alabama, and Mississippi’s bans, complete with criminalization measures like fines and jail time, were pushed alongside citations of everything from vague consumer safety concerns to Governor Ron DeSantis’ culture-war-drenched rhetoric about “global elites” meddling with our food system. There were, unsurprisingly, no real specifics to rebut about the potential dangers of cultivated meat as a concept. Surely the Florida bill had nothing to do with heavy lobbying by the Florida Cattlemen’s Association and other farm groups, just as Nebraska Governor Jim Pillen’s ardent push for a ban in his state is incidental to the fact that he is the owner of a major pork enterprise. Mississippi’s Agricultural Commissioner Andy Gipson, who led the ban efforts there, is very coincidentally the owner and manager of a cattle operation and a member of the Mississippi Cattlemen’s Association, in addition to receiving donations from various PACs and agricultural corporations who might benefit from the outlawing of a potentially disruptive technology.

The jaded and rather obvious tale about the influence of entrenched interests works in complement with the ongoing cultural narrative described earlier. The bans are happening now, ostensibly, in part because the industry has stalled and has a path to the future riddled with difficult obstacles. From a political standpoint, this is a potential win-win situation — you, as a proponent of the ban, appear to be taking vegans and “global elites” off of their pedestals, can position yourself as a protector of natural decency and public safety, are able to please powerful interests in the agricultural sector, and are only impacting a tiny industry whose prospects all lie more in the future than the present. No big headlines about layoffs, no major economic disturbance, no problem. Notable, however, are the failed bans in Wyoming and South Dakota. Some politicians and cattle ranchers in these states, on prototypical American principles of laissez faire and skepticism of government overreach, actually went against the wishes of lobby-backed, political-points-seeking ban proponents. Concerns in both states about potential violations of interstate commerce rules were also raised (the same thing that the Institute for Justice is currently suing Florida for).

While politicians and bureaucrats have failed to do so in any meaningful way, it does seem important to ask the question: what, really, is the benefit of having a successful cultivated meat industry, and what are the potential negatives that we should be wary of? On the positive side, there is a demand that needs to be met. Global meat production has quintupled over the past 60 years, and demand growth remains steady, with industry CAGR projections sitting at around 10%. Meanwhile, cattle herds in the United States, and globally in places like Brazil, New Zealand, and China, have been steadily declining. Salmon prices have been rising much faster than inflation due to both increasing global demand — up 122% between 2013 and 2023 — and supply constraints related to ecological destruction caused by overfishing and limitations in traditional aquaculture production.

The cultivated meat industry, even in its wildest dreams, does not intend to replace any of these markets. They’re simply too large. Justin Kolbeck and Aryé Elfenbein, the co-founders of cultivated salmon company Wildtype, affirmed this vision when I spoke to them: global salmon production is over 4 billion pounds per annum. The intention is to, over time, become a meaningful complementary source of meat in order to mitigate resource concerns and help meet increased demand. And yes, there are major potential environmental benefits both in terms of resuscitating salmon populations and reducing carbon footprints. Atlantic Salmon are already hitting endangered status, and bottom-trawling fishing alone is estimated to emit nearly 400 million metric tons of CO2 (more than a third of the entire aviation industry’s emissions).

With Trump back in office and the cultural right attaining relative dominance, movements like MAHA and the push for increased national self-sufficiency are percolating into the consciousness of the mainstream. On the surface, MAHA might seem antithetical to the future proposed by cultivated meat companies: returning to the diets of our Paleolithic ancestors and eschewing the canon of pinhead “food scientists” sounds entirely incompatible with “growing the flesh of a cow in a giant metal bioreactor.” (And tolerance on the right for listening to diatribes about the reduction of carbon footprints has significantly waned). But one could argue that the globalism-tinged entanglement of disease-ridden, antibiotic-soaked, cruelty-riddled, and Big-Food-driven meat production that we have today doesn’t feel much closer. If we can get beyond the bad conceptual aftertaste of animal meat that, while fully “mammalian” or “piscine,” was not stripped from a carcass, some of the values begin to line up: No contaminants, no toxins, no antibiotics, customizable macro content, more affordable protein sources (that aren’t bugs or vegan), and the potential for end-to-end “Made in America” production processes.

And while the United States produces the majority of its own meat, continuing trends of declining beef exports and increasing imports highlight tightening cattle supply and a growing reliance on international partners to meet rising consumer demands. The U.S. salmon market, in contrast to beef and pork, relies heavily on imported supply — 80% of American seafood consumption is imported, with the salmon-specific number at least mirroring this figure. And even salmon that we catch in Alaska often goes through China for processing prior to hitting American restaurants and grocery stores, since labor costs for de-boning and packaging are so much lower there. Isn’t becoming more self-sufficient, even if it requires something weird like cell-cultivated meat, a really good thing that is en vogue?

On the other hand, the potential downsides of a future dominated by cultivated meat are somewhat difficult to pin down, given the nascent stage of the industry. This does not necessarily mean that they don’t exist, just that they may be somewhat unpredictable — which oddly gives a tone of accidental precision to the wide-ranging ramblings of innovation-hostile politicians. If cultivated meat were to solve its production and scaling issues, and become more cost-effective than meat that is produced in the traditional manner, what would that actually mean? Infrastructure might shift to capitalize on this development, leading to decreasing supplies of the “real stuff.” When the price gap becomes large enough, perpetuating a feedback loop of increasingly limited access, there is a potential future in which protein sources are characterized by a massive class divide. Buying real meat, from the body of a real animal, could become some kind of luxury good not affordable for low-income members of our society to purchase on a frequent basis. A world where the ability to eat something real, something natural, is now behind a perverted, abstract paywall.

While it seems highly unlikely at this point that cultivated meat will ever reach the scale required to create this sort of scenario, the path of innovation is often exponential and unpredictable when it works. And it is naively rose-tinted to acknowledge the utopian aspects without considering and giving credence to what appears to be a widespread natural human intuition about the “realness” of food, the idea that a short pipeline between the earth’s bounty and your body is a powerful heuristic for physical health. Even beyond the BMIs and macros and cholesterol of it all, there is the philosophy and psychology of what food — an essential part of natural human existence since the dawn of man — means to us as humans. When I eat nigiri, what is it that I really want? Do I want a particular taste, a particular strain of dopamine shot, a particular cultural ambience? Isn’t it more than this? Don’t I want to know that the fish I’m chewing has lived a life in the ocean, that it has pierced through topline waves and ripped through deep blue seas with an incredible, if animalistic, majesty? Factory farming, the practicalities of aquaculture, and abhorrent treatments aside, is it really so cruel and sadistic to want to be eating the real animal? Not just in taste and nutrients and texture and sensory experience, but spiritually to be participating in the ancient practice of being a human, exercising God-given dominion over the animals of the Earth?

The cultivated meat industry, if it is able to push beyond the obstacles keeping it stagnant, has the potential to alleviate pressure on global food systems, reduce environmental damage, reinvent how we think about animals, and prompt us to answer questions about what “real” food actually is. Regardless of whether or not growing cell slurries and salmon fillets in massive bioreactors is something that society will choose long-term as a dominant source of food production, innovation should be given a fighting chance — not prematurely banned outright. Humanity’s role within the physical world is constantly evolving, and our attitudes around food are probably changing more now than they ever have in the history of our 300,000-year existence. Let attempts to answer those questions live and die on their own merits, in the savage jungles of the free market, limited primarily by what the laws of physics permit. Maybe, one day, we’ll look back on slaughtering cows as barbarism while we bite into unprecedentedly juicy beef burgers.

— G. B. Rango