Cultured meat is not the same thing as a plant-based protein.
When you look at the future of meat, there are two trends to discuss: First, incredible strides are being made in products that look like meat but are made entirely from plant products. You might have heard a few brand names being bandied about, such as Beyond Meat or the Impossible Burger. They look like meat, they taste like meat (or so advocates say), but they’re made entirely from vegetable products such as soy, potatoes, and wheat protein.
However, there’s a second industry that’s developing meat products that are actual meat—but no animals were killed in the process. Instead, the meat is made by taking a muscle sample from an animal under anesthesia, pulling out the stem cells, and allowing them to grow and multiply to create new muscle tissue. One company, Mosa Meat, claims it can produce enough meat in a laboratory to make 80,000 quarter-pounders with just one tissue sample.
Cell-based meat is now regulated by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)—kind of.
It can take a while for the government to catch up to industry, and this is no exception. It was just in March that the FDA and USDA announced that they had established a framework for overseeing the production of lab-grown meat. The companies behind cultured meat basically asked, “What took you so long?” and noted that the U.S. industry needs to be responsibly regulated if it’s going to remain competitive with overseas markets. There’s still a long way to go in making the big decisions, such as how the products can legally be labeled. (Are they meat? Or are they cell-based meat? These are questions to answer.)
The cost has been the most significant obstacle to mass-producing lab-grown meat.
The first “slaughter-free burger” introduced in 2013 cost more than $300,000—not exactly in the average American’s grocery budget. Thankfully, production costs have dramatically decreased since then, with a burger made from the same methods costing just $11, or $37 a pound. The man in charge, Mark Post of Maastricht University in the Netherlands, says that it’s still not feasible to make the less-expensive cell-based burgers commercially viable. There’s another company, however. Future Meat Technologies (backed by food giant Tyson) projects that it can cut the cost of lab-grown meat to between $2.30 and $4.50 a pound by 2020.
The public is still skeptical of cultured meat.
If you grow it, will they come? Consumers haven’t truly shown that they would prefer a lab-grown meat option. A study published in Appetite in June 2018 found that when given a choice between traditional beef burgers, plant-based burgers, and cultured meat burgers, 65 percent would choose the beef, 21 percent would choose the plant, and just 11 percent would choose the cultured meat. That leaves a serious question for manufacturers to answer: Will the demand grow to a point where the supply is warranted?
