By Owen Yingling and Patricia Patnode
On June 22nd, the USDA announced they would allow two American companies, UPSIDE and Good Eats, to sell lab grown meat in the United States. Before this announcement, the only place in the world where lab grown meat was commercially available was a single restaurant in Singapore that sourced its products from Good Eats. Now it will soon be available in two upscale restaurants in San Francisco and Washington DC, although neither company has offered specific timelines for when their products will enter the US market. While it’s still not actually available in the US, the USDA announcement adds a sense of urgency to the concerns surrounding cultivated meat, particularly its safety for human consumption and the potential environmental impacts of widespread adoption.
How does it work?
Lab grown meat is produced using animal cell lines that are cultured in large vatlike metal containers called bioreactors. The cells are immersed in a growth medium – a mixture of chemicals designed to facilitate cell division and also compounds like growth factors and recombinant proteins that cause the animal cells to grow and differentiate into different tissues. The resulting meat cells created in this process are harvested and turned into various products like filets, chicken breasts, and ground beef. On a cellular level lab grown meat is identical to traditional meat but no animals need to be raised and slaughtered to produce it.
Photo by José Ignacio Pompé on Unsplash
Objection 1: Growing meat in labs is too risky
While this may not be entirely untrue, current industrial livestock production is not free from risk – over the last one hundred years, millions of people have died from zoonotic diseases – diseases that jump from animals to human populations – many of which crossed the species barrier through livestock. Numerous flu outbreaks: the 1957 Asian flu, the 1968 Hong Kong flu, and of course the 2009 swine flu pandemic have been linked to factory farming. The development of industrial scale poultry farming in Asia alone led to over 117 events where genetic material from highly pathogenic viruses made its way into locally circulating influenza strains. The risks of diseases jumping over to humans through livestock or gaining pathogenic material as they move between cramped and weakened animals is not just a regional risk – Covid-19 has shown us that the spread of pathogens, even today, can quickly transform into global health threats and kill tens of millions of people.
Industrial meat production is also one of the primary vectors of prion diseases, the only known diseases with 100% fatality rates, even with treatment. An outbreak of one of these prion diseases,Variant Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease, in the 1990s, led to the deaths of almost 200 people in the UK and the slaughter of over four million cows to halt the outbreak.
While cultivated meat production also faces contamination issues, the production process eliminates many of the factors that make pathogenic contamination such a concern in the conventional meat industry. There, the risk of infection and potential zoonotic events increases with scale: the more animals you have, the higher risk that one of them has a disease and the harder it becomes to detect/monitor your animals to prevent spreading. The risks are fundamentally lower with cultivated meat: infective agents can really only make their way into the product from the animals sourced to get the cell lines – it is far easier to check the cell lines for pathogens – and indeed companies do test for viral infections – than tens of thousands of individual animals. And unlike with livestock, using the same cell lines to grow more meat doesn’t directly increase the risk of contamination at all, since the risk of contamination really only exists at the source.
Conventional meat production also offers an abundance of pathways for diseases to escape and potentially cross over into humans: whether by infecting poorly protected workers, shoddy containment procedures, or even hiding in the meat itself. Cultivated meat production facilities are more akin to laboratories than farms – all of the cells are handled carefully and intentionally to avoid any human-caused contamination – there is little risk that a disease could cross over from meat cells to human workers or escape the facility in any way. And while it is also true that there are some contamination risks in cultivated meat that are not present with conventional meat production: the risk of contaminated growth factors or cryoprotectants used in cell line storage ending up in the final product – as a whole, the production process is robustly protected against the nightmare scenarios of zoonosis and mass contamination that the meat industry has numbed the world to with its recklessness.
Objection 2: Cultivated meat uses too much energy to produce and it’s harmful to the environment.
While many argue that replacing conventional meat with cultivated meat will reduce climate emissions and help the environment, others suggest that producing cultivated meat will actually cause more emissions than the emissions from producing traditional meat. A recent UC Davis study suggested that cultivated meat production could have a 25 times higher carbon footprint than cultivated meat. A fundamental caveat, however, is that the study is based on what production of various chemicals required for cultivated meat looks like right now, not what they will look like in 5-10 years after pharmaceutical companies indubitably find ways to scale up production for these products because of increased demand, which will almost certainly lower energy demand and carbon footprint per unit.
The study above has another problem – a very large chunk of the energy demand they predict comes from their assumption that many pharmaceutical products will need to be purified to remove contaminants called endotoxins before they can be used for cultivated meat. But in an open letter to the study’s authors, several scientists working on cultivated meat suggested that the endotoxin removal requirements would not be necessary due to higher levels of tolerance in the cell lines used to produce cultivated meat and cautioned against pessimistic forecasts regarding the future of the industry.
Another recent study is much more optimistic: it suggests that while cultivated meat production requires more energy than raising livestock, it could quickly – because of worldwide growth in renewable energy usage – have a significantly lower carbon footprint than livestock.The study also suggests that even with estimates based on current energy mixtures, cultivated meat will have lower emissions than most beef production.
Greenhouse gas emissions also should not be the only metric for measuring environmental impact. Humans currently use more land for livestock than any other activity, so replacing traditional meat production with cultivated meat means massive amounts of land could be utilized for more productive purposes. It would also mean less water usage, especially here in the US where almost one third of our water is used for crops grown to feed cattle and the whole industry can consume 72 trillion gallons every year. Overall then, in terms of both resource usage and carbon emissions, cultivated meat either is or could soon be more environmentally friendly than traditional meat
Objection 3: Cultivated meat is less nutritious than traditional meat.
Recent studies and some analysis by cultivated meat companies suggest that the nutritional profiles of cultivated meat products can differ significantly from the meat they seek to imitate. The above table is just one example of these differences — they extend to calories, vitamins, and protein. A distinctly different nutritional profile from normal meat is a double edged sword — some of the variance, like the level of cholesterol in the samples above, are clear wins for traditional meat, yet other differences, like calories and the amounts of certain vitamins and minerals are the opposite.
Obviously the question is of how companies can minimize the nutritional drawbacks of cultivated meat and increase the benefits relative to eating actual meat. Research is already underway regarding techniques like adjusting the fat composition in the growth medium or simply adding nutrients post-culture. While nutritional content is certainly a barrier that cultivated meat companies need to overcome, they have a market incentive to maximize the similarities between the flavor, appearance, and nutritional value of their products and traditional meat, so it’s unlikely that these companies, whose success is very much contingent on consumer trust, would release products that have markedly different nutritional values that consumers would need to be concerned about.
Objection 4: Consuming lab grown meat could have unknown health complications
It would be wrong to suggest that there is no possibility of unknown health complications caused by cultivated meat — but the short term evidence shows nothing out of the ordinary. While cultivated meat is not for purchase in the US, it has been served at various promotional events and has been available commercially in Singapore for the last year, yet no adverse effects have been reported. This does not rule out long term issues of course, but right now the evidence firmly suggests that cultivated meat is safe to consume.
It’s also worth considering what might actually cause health issues: people who attack cultivated meat often focus on the meat cells themselves, often by vaguely suggestingthat something involving the cells and their artificial growth makes them unfit for consumption. This is not surprising — the process, a mass of cells slowly growing inside a metal container, does not seem all that appetizing or healthy. But when evaluating the safety of cultivated meat, vibes are hardly the best approach. Ironically the cells are probably the most studied and evaluated part of the process. Scientists have had decades of experience growing animal cells and seeing if they exhibit differences from normal cells. If there are health risks we don’t know about, they will probably come from something seemingly mundane: perhaps we discover an allergenic scaffolding molecule or a carcinogenic crypto protectant. Almost certainly the real risks will not come from the part of the process that triggers all of our reptile brains into thinking “this is dangerous and scary,” because that is the area whose safety companies have rationally spent the most time and resources looking into.
Objection 5: Lab grown meat will hurt the agricultural industry
Farmers and ranchers are small business owners. Although ranchers often work from four wheelers and horses instead of gray cubicles, they are still operating businesses.
Lab grown meat will not be competitively priced for quite some time because of the cost reasons mentioned above (energy, training requirements, production space) and also because, in the short-term, there will be consumers who are not interested whatsoever in lab-grown meat. This long time horizon of adjustment and consumer introduction to lab-grown alternatives will allow producers to adjust their herd sizes to match market demand, or perhaps diversify their land use to other agricultural products.
There is nothing inherently good about market stagnation in agriculture, humans have always adjusted to the preferences of consumers and environmental shifts. Ethanol corn didn’t exist 100 years ago and there were more limited uses for soybeans whereas today farmers in the state of Iowa almost exclusively farm those two crops. Farmers are, and always have been, adaptive.
In Europe, many farmers feel like they are under attack from their government. Forced land sales and herd culls for environmental reasons have eliminated many family farms.
Lab grown meat may save ranchers by supplementing the market demand for meat products, enabling us to better shoulder the environmental cost of traditional meat.
Objection 6: It is too expensive for normal Americans to buy
It is somewhat expensive, for now. However, America is the birthplace of many inventions that seemed too-expensive, too crazy, or completely unnecessary – at least at first. Now, we all use our smartphones, eat our genetically engineered food, sit under our fluorescent lights, and (at least in Arizona) order computer driven cars to pick us up from the airport.
Things become cheaper as we get better at producing them.
American innovation and invention dominates and continually improves the world, lab grown meat will certainly be a footnote in our nation’s history of innovative accomplishments.
Owen Yingling is a Mercatus intern and student at The University of Chicago (Class of 2027)
Patricia Patnode is a Program Manager at the Mercatus Center
