Editor’s Desk: Lab-based meats’ P.R problem

By Samuel Fromartz

In FERN’s latest story,  “Lab-grown meat has a P.R. problem,” produced with Bloomberg Businessweek, reporter Joe Fassler brings to light a little-known fact about cell-based meat, an industry that has attracted backers like Bill Gates and $1.2 billion in venture capital, and is viewed by some as the ideal replacement for meat from animals. 

While the industry insists that its product is “meat,” “that’s 99.9 percent true,” Fassler writes. “The big honking asterisk is that normal meat cells don’t just keep dividing forever. To get the cell cultures to grow at rates big enough to power a business, several companies, including the Big Three, are quietly using what are called immortalized cells, something most people have never eaten intentionally. Immortalized cells are a staple of medical research, but they are, technically speaking, pre-cancerous and can be, in some cases, fully cancerous.”

A diner might pause at any whisper of a cancer association to the protein on their plate, but Fassler insists that scientists — and the FDA — see no health problem with consuming immortalized cells. 

“Because the cells aren’t human,” Fassler explains, “it’s essentially impossible for people who eat them to get cancer from them, or for the pre-cancerous or cancerous cells to replicate inside people at all. You’d be better off worrying about the nitrates (linked with cancer) or fecal matter (a source of deadly infections) found in farm-raised meat. And cow tumors sometimes wind up in store-bought ground chuck, too. Of course, the facts might not matter much if ranchers or other players in the traditional meat industry felt threatened enough to declare a public relations war. It’s all too easy to imagine misleading Fox News chyrons about chicken tumors and cancer burgers.”

So far many industry players have apparently thought that the best way to avoid this problem is to ignore it, falling back on the identical-to-meat mantra. Other companies, clearly worried about potential blowback, are eschewing immortalized cells altogether, although coming up with an alternative is tricky. 

This is a terrific story, one that questions commonly held assumptions by very wealthy backers of an infant industry. The only thing I’m wondering about now is how the industry responds.