Back Forty: The disingenuous hype around lab-grown meat has costs

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By Joe Fassler

First, video killed the radio star. Then Google killed Yahoo. The iPhone killed the BlackBerry (right after snuffing out your landline). Facebook killed Myspace, and Netflix killed Blockbuster. Amazon is hard at work finishing off brick-and-mortar retail.

The next logical stepin this Darwinian progression? Lab-grown meat substitutes are going to kill off their conventionally raised counterparts. Soon — judging from media coverage — we’re all going to be sitting around munching burgers, steaks and roasts grown from animal cells in stainless-steel bioreactors, obviating the need to raise animals for slaughter.At least one think tank has already used cultured meat’s rise to forecast the imminent demise of the livestock sector.

This narrativehas a lot of currency in certain corners of the internet, and it’s one we’re deeply conditioned to believe. Human history tends to be framed as a series of paradigm-shifting inventions — from the printing press to the steam-powered mill to the automobile — ushering in new eras with new winners and losers. Kubrick’s classic 2001: A Space Odyssey portrays this sort of techno-disruption as foundational, tracing the origin of our species to an early hominid’s discovery that a proto-bovine’s jawbone increases his power to smash things. Soon, he and his counterparts are wielding bones as weapons, dominating enemy groups that haven’t yet gotten the memo.

It’s a narrative that media analysts have generally leaned into when it comes to cultured meat — suggesting that these products will soon cause a rapid sea change in our diet, helping to reverse the extensive climatic and other environmental ravages of meat overproduction and consumption. And cultured meat companies are only too happy to play David to Big Meat’s Goliath, basking in the hype — and investment dollars — that tend to follow.

But cultured meat isn’t likely to be sold in any meaningful quantity this year, or next year, or even in the next decade. Given the existing state of the technology, there’s no reason to believe lab-grown animal protein will alter the food system at all within the short window we have to avert the worst impacts of climate change.

All this hype, then, has a cost. When we frame cultured meat as the Netflix to conventional meat’s Blockbuster, we hamper our ability to have realistic conversations about how to address the challenges we face in shifting our relationship to meat — including the need to eat less of it.

In 2021, I wrote about the scale-up economics of cultured meat. I focused on the work of some undersung experts who had determined that cultured meat cannot be produced affordably at any volume, even considering future economies of scale. And there’s not just a single obstacle to overcome, but a whole host of them, each one starker than the next. 

Consider just a few of the most significant.

Cultured meat production must take place under aseptic conditions, meaning absolutely sterile. Even a single stray bacterium can contaminate a batch, or an entire factory. That means the massive tanks that would be needed to feed millions are probably out of the question; the bigger things are, the harder they are to keep clean.

Then there’s the fact that these facilities would be unthinkably expensive. Huge buildings loaded with custom-built, stainless steel biotech equipment — most of it housed in a pharma-grade environment — don’t come cheap. It’s conceivable that a single large-scale cultured meat facility could cost a billion dollars to construct; industry-sponsored research concedes that even a $500 million price tag would be prohibitive. 

Pharma companies, which routinely culture animal cells at large volume to make medicine, can justify such costs because their products sell for huge amounts of money — sometimes thousands of dollars per ounce. But cultured meat companies insist they’ll be able to compete on price with mass-produced conventional chicken. Hardly. The high-capital costs of cell culture are fundamentally misaligned with the price pressures of commodity food.

There also are potential issues of cultural acceptance. As I recently reported for FERN and Bloomberg Businessweek, cultured meat companies don’t plan to sell meat made from “normal” animal cells, no matter what they suggest. For reasons I explain in the piece, the most common approach requires genetically modifying cells so that they become “immortalized,” meaning they no longer age and die the way muscle cells typically do. This makes them a step or two closer to cancer cells, biologically — and while these changes are perfectly safe, it’s likely to give some diners pause. This isn’t an incidental concern; the use of immortalized cells will surely have business and policy implications, too. GMOs, after all, are presently subject to strict regulations in the EU.

Rather than engage these conversations publicly, startups and their investors have been content to let the media suggest that commodity-scale cultured meat is just around the corner. I can say with confidence that that’s not true. Getting there faster will require a series of technological breakthroughs, and those don’t typically have a linear timeline. 

Food isn’t software. It’s complex, expensive and intimate. It nourishes us all, every day. It can’t scale or change with the lightning speed made possible by overworked computer engineers sleeping in the office. 

To suggest otherwise may divert resources — $2.8 billion so far, according to the Good Food Institute — from other, more time-sensitive projects, while allowing people to believe that a quick fix to our meat problem is at hand. But it also hurts the cultured meat companies themselves. So far, their approach has been to promise the moon and then slowly slide back the goalposts. That’s a risky strategy, to say the least.

Which is not to say they shouldn’t try for the moon. Breakthroughs do happen. Rather, it’s to say that venture capital — with its short attention span and expectation of a quick return — is the wrong tool for the job. This isn’t ridesharing apps vs. taxis. It’s something far more wide-reaching and profound. It’s the project of a generation, maybe several generations, if it doesn’t flame out first. 

Some of cultured meat’s strongest supporters have espoused this very argument. Last year, the authors of “Cultured Meat Needs a Mission and not a Race to Market,” published in the journal Nature, urged cultured meat to change its core model. Instead of focusing on outdoing one another with ramped-up product launches, companies should embrace something much more collegial and adaptive, they argued. (The authors included employees of New Harvest, a nonprofit taking a much more measured — if nonetheless ardent — approach focused on the need for scientific care and open-source research in the field.) They noted that we already have the historical precedent we need: the semiconductor industry, which came together in the 1970s when it became clear that the challenge was too great for any one company to solve. The only way to shape the future, the semiconductor pioneers realized, was with transparency, data sharing and collaboration. 

In a sense, the rapid boom-and-bust cycles we see right now in tech owe everything to this more moderated approach. Other people worked together for decades before Mark Zuckerberg was able to say “move fast and break things.”

Some in cultured meat will no doubt resist this approach. The transparency inherent to industry-wide roadmapping runs counter to the secretive and ultra-competitive culture of today’s Silicon Valley. But it would be the best way to succeed long-term — the obvious choice if this project is really about changing the world, and not just about raising money.