How Eco-Friendly Is Cultivated Meat?

With the United States on the cusp of cultivated meat commercialization, debate surrounds its potential impact on progress toward net zero food production.

Cultivated meat is on its way to a major tipping point: the culmination of decades of development and the beginning of a vast potential market. Venture capitalists, governments, and tech moguls have poured billions of dollars into more than 100 startups whose collective goal is to replicate animal flesh in laboratories and bioreactors and give it the characteristics—and prices—of natural meat. Advocates believe they’ll also reduce the impact of animal agriculture on Earth’s climate.

But will cultivated meat actually follow a successful trail like other seminal technologies, such as personal computers, which democratized digital productivity and communication, and electric vehicles, whose inevitability has arrived thanks to cultural pressures and government mandates more so than the readiness of the technology?

Or will cultivated (aka cell-cultured or cell-based) meat be held back perpetually by the major challenges it still faces in triumphing over the consumption experience, production costs, carbon footprint, and economic and social roles of actual meat—teasing revolutionary possibilities but coming up short of initial promises much like its predecessor, plant-based meat?

“There is excitement for it,” says Elizabeth Gutschenritter, managing director of alternative protein for global agriculture giant Cargill, which has invested in cultivated meat pioneers. “Some consumers will want to be on the cutting edge of food technology. But we need to make sure it can live beyond the novelty of what cultivated meat can offer today.”

Some believe cultivated analogues could succeed in proving even better than natural meat. “The consumer wants to see evolution,” says Leticia Gonçalves, president of global foods for ADM, another major ag player that is backing some cultivated meat startups. “Not just mimicking of animal meat. Not just plant-based burgers that are the same as they can get with animal meat. They want better nutrition and health benefits. It’s about introducing a new food experience, maybe like a ‘good health’ burger.”

Projections of global market size for cultivated meat include McKinsey’s $25 billion by 2032. But like many cutting-edge business propositions these days, at this point, cultivated meat is largely a bet on unrelenting societal pressures for environmental mitigation.