Cultivated Meat: A Wakeup Call for Optimists

Why I expect the product to fail, even if all the technological problems are solved

When I hear people talk about cultivated meat (i.e. lab-grown meat) and how it will replace traditional animal agriculture, I find it depressingly reminiscent of the techno-optimists of the 1980s and ‘90s speculating about how genetic modification will solve all our food problems. The optimism of the time was understandable: in 1994 the first GMO product was introduced to supermarkets, and the benefits of the technology promised incredible rewards. GMOs were predicted to bring about the end of world hunger, all while requiring less water, pesticides, and land.

Today, thirty years later, in the EU GM foods are so regulated that they are effectively banned¹, while in the Americas the situation is better, but limited to commodities which are only used as precursor products, such as soybeans used for vegetable oil, and corn used for corn syrup, with over 90% of these crops being GMO in the US. The rest of the world is similar, with countries either effectively banning it or relegating the technology to a small fraction of its potential uses. As far as I can tell, there are effectively no consumer-facing GMO plants (e.g. fruit, veg, wheat flour) with significant market share anywhere in the world².

The failure of GMOs is not a story of technology overpromising what it can achieve, but of the gap between what technology can deliver and what people will accept: a mistake the cultivated meat industry seems poised to repeat.

Why did GMOs fail to be widely adopted?

The problem that GMO foods faced weren’t technological or safety ones (they have been proven safe and effective numerous times), but an image problem among consumers. The scientific consensus is that these foods are just as healthy as conventional food, and yet 57% of the American public think they are unsafe, along with 75% of Europeans. The gap between what experts think of GMOs and what the public thinks is the largest that the Pew Research Center could find among all policy questions surveyed. We will examine a few causes of why GMOs developed such a negative perception among the public, what this tells us about the likelihood of cultivated meat succeeding, and what the cultivated meat companies should be doing to improve their chances.

A Bad First Impression

The company Monsanto took the lead in the GMO race and became the face of the technology. Monsanto had a bad reputation for (among other things) being one of the companies which developed Agent Orange (a herbicide used heavily by the US military in the Vietnam war which resulted in health problems for an estimated 1 million people). Along with its pre-existing bad reputation, Monsanto used aggressive litigation practices against farmers allegedly breaking the terms of their GMO seed contracts, which resulted in tarnishing the technology of GMOs as a whole.

To make things even worse, the initial GMOs to hit the market made a terrible first impression. The first wave of GMO varieties sold by Monsanto were designed to be resistant to RoundUp, a proprietary herbicide the company owned. The idea was that RoundUp could be sprayed over the entire field, and it would kill everything except the GMO crop, and the herbicide would be sold with the GMO seeds as a package. While a savvy business move by Monsanto, it was easy for environmental groups to (somewhat justifiably) criticise as a monopolistic way of ensuring dependence on a herbicide. And this was not only clear in hindsight, as Monsanto's competitors considered a similar move but decided it was too likely to be a PR disaster, with one of the executives at a competitor being quoted as saying "That's an ethical problem, we'll never be able to sell that." (pg 95). Once the wave of opposition hit Monsanto it was so powerful that it almost destroyed the company.

The fundamental problem was that these GMOs were designed for farmers, not consumers. The GMO companies had underestimated how much the public would care about this technology. While these varieties were tremendously popular with American farmers, with faster adoption than any agricultural technology in the nation’s history (pg 93), consumers saw no benefit, only the troubling image of crops engineered to sell more chemicals. Ironically, Monsanto had a much more consumer-friendly product in development. A year after the approval of the controversial RoundUp-resistant crop varieties, Monsanto released "Bt" corn; a variety which incorporated a natural insect toxin that was harmless to humans, meaning that this variety no longer needed to be sprayed with pesticides, a much more appealing feature for consumers. But by this point the damage had been done, and many people already associated GMOs as a way for companies to sell more of their own herbicides. The journalist Mark Lynas speculated that "Had Bt corn been Monsanto’s initial product launch instead of Roundup Ready soy, things might have been very different for GMOs. Genetic engineering could have been associated in the public mind from the outset with the reduction of chemical pesticides and might therefore have faced less widespread opposition. Some environmental groups might even have cautiously supported GMOs... Bt crops might even have been adopted by organic farmers as a more efficient way to deliver a biopesticide that they had already been relying on for many years." (pg 98)

Unpopular Corporate Concentration

GMOs, like medicines, require a lot of expensive R&D and regulatory testing to develop and commercialise, and so they have to rely on patents and aggressive litigation to ensure that these costs can be recouped. This increasing corporatisation of the food industry under GMOs was unpopular among some consumers, and a big reason for why GMOs became vilified. As most of the GM companies were located in the US, some citizens in other countries felt that importing patented US crops was ceding too much control to the Americans to stomach.

The launch of GMOs around the turn of the 21st century coincided with the peak of the anti-globalisation movement, and so GM foods arrived at an especially unwelcome time. Grassroots environmentalist movements were surprisingly effective at shamelessly pushing back against GMOs. Greenpeace went so far to fund a scientist whose research reliably produced the anti-GMO results they wanted to see, regardless of the methodological problems his work was known for. ActionAid (another large international NGO) spread GMO misinformation by radio in Uganda, with the message “GMOs cause cancer and infertility”. In 2002, after a pressure campaign from Greenpeace, Zambia blocked all imports of GMO food aid, despite the growing risk of famine in the country, which Greenpeace described as "a triumph of national sovereignty”.

Cultivated Meat IS GMO

This piece is about drawing an analogy between cultivated meat and GMOs, but in fact this isn’t just an analogy, as about half of the companies working on cultivated meat use genetic modification of the cultivated cells! So not only is cultivated meat an unsettling new technology, it also uses a technology which consumers famously hate. Genetically modified plants are one thing, but I expect genetically modified meat to freak consumers out even more. And even though there are some cultivated meat companies not using genetic modification, it is safe to expect that if any cultivated meat is genetically modified, then the public will probably associate all cultivated meat with GMOs.

There’s good reason to think that genetically modified meat will be rejected by consumers, as it has happened once before. In 2017 the first GMO farmed animal meat was brought in limited quantities in the US and Canadian markets, a variety of salmon which was genetically engineered to grow twice as fast as regular salmon. AquaBounty, the company behind it, had been created in the early 1990s and then “spent almost 25 years in regulatory limbo”. AquaBounty was only selling the fish meat for a few years before they ceased operations in 2024, due to the fact that many supermarkets and restaurants were declining to stock the product.

What timeline are we in?

Although it’s obviously too early to have much confidence, my impression is that the current trajectory of cultivated meat is closer to the GMO-timeline than the widespread-adoption-timeline. Even though cultivated meat is only in its very infancy of commercialisation (it’s only available as a proof-of-concept in a few restaurants), Italy has put a national ban on the sale of cultivated meat, along with 7 US states. I worry these bans are a preview to what will become a well-worn pattern.

In these cases, the farming associations lobbied for the ban, with their allied politicians pushing spurious health concerns. All of the 8 regions that have banned cultivated meat were controlled by a right-wing majority government, and so it’s clear that cultivated meat is becoming polarised across political lines (this is especially interesting, as the political parties which opposed GMOs most at launch were leftist Green parties). The rhetoric has become increasingly detached from reality, as can be seen in Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis’ comments when instituting the ban: “Florida is fighting back against the global elite’s plan to force the world to eat meat grown in a petri dish or bugs to achieve their authoritarian goals”. Although the political divide is not completely clean, for example Democrat senator John Fetterman wrote that he supported the bans on cultivated meat and he “would never serve that slop to my kids, I stand with our American ranchers and farmers.” RFK Jr (the US Secretary of Health) has also made negative comments about cultivated meat before taking office. The fact that cultivated meat is becoming a culture war issue before making it onto supermarket shelves doesn’t bode well.

What can be done to prevent cultivated meat from becoming irrelevant?

Expect incredible opposition

Cultivated meat would be a corporatising force far beyond what GMOs were. For GMOs, it involved farmers replacing the kind of seeds they bought and planted, while for cultivated meat it is about replacing the entire animal farming industry. Because of this difference, we should expect extraordinary resistance from breeders, farmers, veterinarians, feed producers, and meat processors, whose careers depend on the status quo. In theory it doesn’t take all that much to start working in animal agriculture today, just enough money to buy some land and some animals, then raise them and sell them to a meat processing company³. In the age of cultivated meat on the other hand, starting a cultivated meat company requires a few hundred million dollars, and more than a decade of R&D. I expect consumers will find the shift from hundreds of thousands of farms across the US to just a few cultivated meat behemoths controlling the entire industry unacceptable. Rural agricultural states wield huge amounts of political power in many countries, and the total disruption of the meat industry would be immensely unpopular there. The success of cultivated meat would be an extinction-level event for the meat industry, and we should expect resistance proportional to the threat.

Be ready to tell a clear story about the benefits.

The advantages of the first GMOs to be commercialised were about herbicide-resistance, and the fact that this would make farming more efficient, thus increasing food production. However, having slightly cheaper crops and produce in the 90s and 2000s just wasn’t that great a benefit for rich countries, so it was a fairly low-cost decision for the public there to reject GMOs⁴.

For a new unsettling technology in food to succeed, there needs to be a clear and compelling answer to the consumer asking “but what’s in it for me?”. I expect that answers to this question which rely on climate change, animal welfare, or humanitarian causes will not be compelling enough to most consumers to overcome their ick factor. However, if cultivated meat becomes a far more appealing proposition than regular meat (e.g. by being much cheaper, healthier, or more interesting), then maybe people will be reluctant to turn their backs on it. Or perhaps as climate change progresses, this factor will become a stronger pull for people, maybe more so if governments introduce some kind of carbon tax on meat. However, the pandemic reminded us that governments pushing technology which some people find unsettling can have mixed results.

There’s also a clear asymmetry to the consumers, if you buy the new kind of meat then you run the risk of getting sick, or shunned by your family and friends for being unclean and weird. While if you stick with the normal meat then you are only missing out on some vague notion of fighting climate change or animal cruelty.

A proactive PR Effort

I expect a proactive public relations campaign would be necessary to educate consumers on the benefits of cultivated meat and not only respond to the hit pieces as they come. This might come in the form of some sort of generic advertising campaign, where the cultivated meat companies arrange to split the costs to advertise the product category as a whole (although the prisoner’s-dilemma nature of this agreement makes things difficult). These PR campaigns should not only focus on the rational questions of health and the benefits of the technology, but also target people’s emotional reactions, and tell a positive story about cultivated meat.

In the field of moral psychology, a theory called social intuitionism models people not as reaching moral judgments by carefully reasoning through the facts, but instead by experiencing an immediate, intuitive reaction and then constructing justifications afterward to support that initial feeling. When people's intuitive revulsion is triggered by an issue even when there are no rational arguments against it, they adopt weak or inconsistent arguments. When this happens, it's usually ineffective to present them with evidence against the arguments they landed on, as those arguments are not the true cause of their position. The developer of social intuitionism, Jonathan Haidt, thinks it is more effective to trigger other intuitions which push people in the other direction.

While there are some rational arguments against GMOs, most of the arguments anti-GMO groups use are irrational. I expect it will be the same for cultivated meat, and while we wait for the technology to develop, non-profit orgs could be building up a wealth of public knowledge to be utilised by the companies in effectively marketing their products. While there is some initial research in this area, it is still very neglected.

First impressions matter

As the history of GMOs tells us, the first products created from a new technology are critical in determining how the public thinks of it. Currently the biggest cultivated meat companies are focusing on standard products, for instance, it seems like the two companies with the most funding are Upside Foods and GOOD Meat, both of which are working on chicken. While this is the most mainstream approach, I wonder whether it is a mistake. While chicken is becoming the most consumed meat in the world, it is also one of the cheapest and most commoditised.

There are numerous different approaches that are being taken. For instance, perhaps the best approach is to frame it as a premium product which has common animal welfare concerns, e.g. producing foie gras like French cultivated meat company Gourmey (among others). Or maybe the best way is by introducing it as a novelty food, such as by creating cultivated meat from long-extinct animals such as woolly mammoths the way Australian company Vow did as a publicity stunt. An interesting approach is pet food such as the dog food being worked on by British cultivated meat company Meatly. The advantages are lower regulatory standards and presumably easier consumer acceptance, and so producing a premium pet food might allow a company to scale their output to a size which would help bring it to people. But the obvious risk is that it may associate cultivated meat with dog food.

We can only hope these companies are acting extremely cautiously and transparently, as it would only take one big scandal to set the field back decades; it’s not hard to imagine a “Chernobyl for cultivated meat”. However, as the cultivated meat industry is made up of two dozen or so independent private companies, if one of them were acting in a way which was seen as likely to tarnish the industry then I would guess the other companies would only be able to have a limited influence over them. As this paper points out though, it is unlikely that today’s cultivated meat startups will be the ones producing at scale. More plausibly, large established food multinationals will acquire them and ultimately bring the products to market - multinational companies with long histories and Wikipedia pages featuring extensive “Controversies” sections, think Nestle, Tyson, or Cargill.

Labeling

The GMO companies spent a lot of effort lobbying governments to not require GMO labelling on food. After years of court battles and lobbying, most countries made labelling for GMOs mandatory, with the US, Canada, and Argentina being the three biggest exceptions. The fact that GMO companies pushed so hard to not require labelling gave many people the sense that they had something to hide, which contributed to their negative perception.

It seems incredibly likely to me that almost all governments will require cultivated meat to be labelled to distinguish it from regular meat, so I would posit that it would be a waste of resources for the cultivated meat industry to lobby against the requirement of labelling. Plant-based meat and dairy alternatives have taken up a tiny share of the animal-product market in the EU (hard to find a solid number, but I think below 5%), and yet the EU still pushes strong packaging regulations. There have been numerous attempts to make it illegal for plant based meat products to use animal-meat terms such as sausage, burger, or schnitzel (the next proposed amendment to EU agricultural law will be voted on in a few weeks from now and, if passed, would result in the product term “veggie burger” becoming illegal in the EU). Since 2017 it has been illegal for plant-based milk to use the word “milk”, which is why most products in the region use terms like “Oat Drink”. Since the EU has invested this much energy in regulating the labelling of the plant-based products, it seems undeniable to me that cultivated meat will have very strict mandatory labelling.

Not only do I think it would be pointless to fight mandatory labelling, I think it wouldn’t even be a desirable outcome for cultivated meat adoption. The backlash to the absence of labelling can be seen in the launch of the GMO salmon meat in 2017 in Canada. There was much speculation about where exactly the salmon was being sold, with activist groups tracking down which supermarkets were stocking it so they could campaign against them, and many supermarkets announced they would not stock the product to allay consumers' concerns. While I think it would be counterproductive for the cultivated meat industry to fight mandatory labelling, I think they should be ready to push for specifics about the required labelling. E.g. what should the mandatory term should be, (cultivated meat, lab-grown meat, clean meat, cultured meat, etc).

Be ready to discuss concerns about unnaturalness

Many of the criticisms of GMOs invoke the idea that natural things are good, and GMOs are the opposite of that, and we shouldn’t be “playing God” with nature. I expect how appealing a new technology looks matters tremendously, as that is the first impression people will have of it when exposed to it in news footage and on social media.

For reference, this is what GMO soybean farming looks like:

Source

And this is what cultivated chicken production looks like:

Source

Before GMOs were released, if someone asked you which of these two technologies is more likely to be accepted by the public, which would you guess?

1. Plants which have had 1 or 2 genes swapped out, but are otherwise identical and are farmed in the same way as other plants, by a farmer, in a tractor, on a farm.

2. Meat which has been produced in a facility resembling a pharmaceutical plant, in massive stainless steel vats, with no animals or farmers in sight, by hooded people in cleanroom suits.

To me, it's clear that cultivated meat will appear more unnatural and offputting to consumers than GMOs, a fact which might be enough to doom the technology from the outset. PR campaigns could remind consumers that many foods we are comfortable with are produced in facilities which look similarly high-tech, e.g. the production of Yoghurt, breakfast cereals, chocolate, beer, wine, etc, but this will clearly be an uphill battle.

It’s possible that another good approach would be to show that the reality of animal farming is far more horrifying and unnatural than people think. I’m not sure how effective that would be in practice, as animal advocates have been pushing in this direction for some time, and yet the combination of humane-washing from the meat industry, along with the fact that consumers are incentivised to turn a blind eye, means that there is little effect.

Limitations of the comparison

One disanology between the comparison I’ve been drawing is that there was concern that GMOs would escape the farms and start growing in the wild, potentially becoming an invasive species. Of course this would not be a concern for cultivated meat, as it requires growth media in a vat to survive. Also, I may be too quick to describe the launch of GMOs as a failure, as it’s possible that in a few decades from now GMOs will become widely accepted, perhaps driven by generational change. This wouldn’t be the first time a hugely impactful food technology had a very slow adoption. Milk pasteurisation was initially unpopular, with concerns about taste and nutrition slowing its adoption, despite its incredible efficacy of reducing infant mortality. It was first commercialised in 1882, and it took another 6 decades before the majority of milk in Britain was pasteurised. If GMOs do eventually succeed, then the warning should still concern the animal welfare movement as it could mean cultivated meat will have an extremely slow adoption rate, resulting in factory farming persisting for decades longer than it had to.

Conclusion

We techno-optimists underrate important emotional consumer dynamics, and I worry that the neglect of these issues will prove to be the downfall of cultivated meat. I think that due to the rapid adoption of plant based milks in the 2010s, the alt-protein movement became overconfident and we began to think that ending factory farming was simply a matter of producing good enough alternatives, and people would gladly switch. Plant based meat had a lot of funding and interest in the 2010s, and this seemed to be going well until the crash of 2022. It is a common trap to think that a good product will win out among consumers, especially dangerous in a sector as personal and emotionally salient as food. When consumers buy food, they are not just buying calories, flavour, and nutrients, but also a feeling of nostalgia for their grandmother's cooking, a sense of being close to nature, and a belief that they are wholesomely sustaining their body and mind. If alternative proteins continue focusing on the specifics of the former and neglect the latter, then they are likely to be relegated to the fringes the same way GMO foods have.

I would guess that if all of the technological problems of cultivated meat are solved and it's as good as conventional meat on price, taste, and convenience, then there's maybe a 1 in 3 chance of it being widely adopted in the first 30 years after commercialisation. I expect the somewhat-realistic best case scenario for cultivated meat is that it achieves a similar level of adoption to vaccines. So roughly 75% of people opt for it, but it’s still fairly politicised and there’s a vocal minority who disavow it. In this world where it does succeed, I expect it would take many decades to penetrate the market to this extent. My guess is that there’s maybe a 10% chance of this happening in the first 30 years after commercialisation. I think the most likely outcome is that cultivated meat will be shunned by consumers as unnatural frankenstein lab tissue early on, and never reach the scale that would be required to bring the price down to a level low enough to make it a compelling option for most consumers. Ultimately, for me the most damning thing for cultivated meat is the immense amount of money and effort that will go into discrediting this technology, coupled with how easy it will be to smear.

However, whether a technology is accepted or rejected seems very path dependent, and so I expect these odds could be improved if the field of animal welfare took the prospect of consumer rejection seriously, and adapted their strategy accordingly. For instance, I am surprised by the small number of orgs working on research and strategy in this field. As I still think cultivated meat has a chance of making a huge impact on factory farming, I am not suggesting that the field is overhyped, but I am saying that it seems like there is not enough work going into understanding the best strategies for public acceptance. I think that the success of the technology is very contingent on the specifics of the situation, and unless a lot of things go right, the default outcome is failure.

1. While not completely banned, there is only one GM food crop that is approved in the EU (a variety of maize), and due to the labelling requirements and negative public perception, the farming of this variety is extremely limited, with Spain being the only country with significant GMO farming where 20% of the maize grown there is this GM variety. As GM animal feed doesn’t necessitate GM labelling on the animal products, EU countries import roughly 30 million tons of GM animal feed from the Americas.

2. Some small regional exceptions are Bangladeshi aubergines, Hawaiian papayas, and non-browning apples. These plants are limited to localised geographies.

3. In reality the meat industry is already very concentrated by the small number of big players who control the animal breeds, and meat processing facilities. Although the public mostly have the more romantic picture of small independent farmers described here.

4. What is more surprising is that developing countries rejected the tech in a similar way. Norman Borlaug, the father of the Green Revolution did not expect this in 2000 when he wrote: "The affluent nations can afford to adopt elitist positions and pay more for food produced by the so called natural methods; the 1 billion chronically poor and hungry people of this world cannot.”

It seems like the reasons developing countries also rejected the technology is 1. Pressure and disinformation from environmentalist groups 2. Growing GMO crops would make exporting all crops more expensive due to contamination regulations.