A new climate crisis-friendly, sustainable meat product, years in the making, may appear on some restaurant menus in the United States by the end of the year.
But it has a big drawback, detractors fear that eating it could cause cancer.
Lab-grown meat, also called “cultured” or “cultivated” meat, was determined to be safe for human consumption by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the first time in November 2022.
According to an FDA statement, on Nov. 16, 2022, the agency sent a “no questions” letter to Upside Foods—a California-based and Bill Gates-backed company that makes meat from cultured chicken cells.
The letter was in response to the company’s application for product approval of its lab-grown meat. However, the FDA had a caveat—before approval is finalized, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) must first inspect the company’s facilities.
Upside Foods founder and CEO Uma Valeti interpreted the FDA’s news in a post to Twitter, “UPSIDE has received our ‘No Questions Letter’ from the FDA. They’ve accepted our conclusion that our cultivated chicken is safe to eat, meaning UPSIDE is one step closer to being on tables everywhere.”
Upside Foods isn’t the only lab-grown food company that is seeking approval for its products, and it’s not the only company that the FDA has been watching.
“We are already engaged in discussions with multiple firms about various types of food made from cultured animal cells, including food made from seafood cells that will be overseen solely by the FDA,” the statement said.
These “multiple firms” to which the FDA refers likely includes GOOD Meat, a brand that bills itself as “real meat without tearing down a forest or taking a life,” according to GOOD Meat’s website.
The company has an application pending with the FDA, Reuters reported.
Two other companies, the Netherlands-based Mosa Meat and Israel-based Believer Meats, both had company executives who told Reuters that “they are in discussions with the agency.”
“The world is experiencing a food revolution and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is committed to supporting innovation in the food supply,” FDA Commissioner Dr. Robert M. Califf and FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition Susan T. Mayne, Ph.D., said in a joint news statement.
“We continue to encourage firms to enter into dialogue with us often and early in their product development phase,” they said.
The FDA’s news comes two years after Just Eat, Inc., parent company of GOOD Meat, became “the first and only company in the world to sell cultivated meat” to consumers in Singapore in 2020, the GOOD Meat’s website says.
How ‘Cultivated Meat’ is Grown Using ‘Immortalized’ Cells
According to Reuters, “Cultivated meat is derived from a small sample of cells collected from livestock.”
Those cells are then grown inside bioreactors, where they “are fooled into believing they are still inside an animal’s body as they are kept in a substrate made up of nutrients like amino acids, vitamins, carbohydrates, and proteins,” Wired explained.
Once grown, the product is harvested and processed into whatever form the manufacturers wish to sell.
Founder and CEO of Upside Foods Valeti explained the process of making lab-grown meat to CNN this way—it’s “similar to brewing beer, but instead of growing yeast or microbes, we grow animal cells.”
“Under the right conditions, animal cells can be grown in a petri dish,” Bloomberg further spelled out in a recent report, “or even at scale in factories full of stainless-steel drums.”
The news platform went on to explain that companies such as Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson “have cultured large volumes of cells to produce vaccines … and other biotherapeutics” for decades. “Now the idea is that we might as well eat these cells, too.”
Because normal cells from humans or livestock can’t actually “divide forever,” in order to get the cell cultures to multiply at a rate that can power a business, several companies … are quietly using what are called immortalized cells, something that most people have never eaten intentionally,” Bloomberg continued.
The process is complicated, and Bloomberg’s report explains it in some detail, but in essence, immortalized cells are genetically modified to divide forever, “defying the normal limits of growth,” which “makes them unmistakably … like cancer cells.”
The news platform quoted renowned MIT biologist Robert Weinberg, as saying, “If a cell is immortalized, that implies that it’s already completed one of the prerequisites to become a cancer cell.”
However, Bloomberg found that some “prominent cancer researchers” are quick to point out that animal-derived cells aren’t human, so the fear that people will catch cancer from cultivated meat is overblown.
“It’s essentially impossible for people who eat them to get cancer from them, or for the precancerous or cancerous cells to replicate inside people at all,” the news platform reported the experts as saying.
Despite the negative hype, lab-grown meat companies are preparing to ramp up production.
With its near approval within reach, Upside told Reuters that it currently has the capacity to “churn out 400,000 pounds of cultivated meat a year.”
That’s a drop in the bucket compared to the 106 billion pounds of conventional meat and poultry that was produced in the U.S. in 2021, according to meat industry lobbyist North American Meat Institute (NAMI), Reuters reported.
And according to the news platform, even if GOOD Meat is able to achieve its proposed plan of “build[ing] out its production in California and Singapore,” and if Israel-based Believer Meats successfully constructs its facility in North Carolina by 2024 as it hopes to, the companies will only be able to contribute 30 million and 22 million pounds of product per year, respectively.
Impact of Conventionally-Produced Livestock on Climate
According to a Lancet study, the “agricultural sector produces about a quarter of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions (GHGE), and meat production, particularly beef, is an important contributor to global GHGE.”
The United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) breaks it down specifically.
According to a FAO’s analysis, 14.5 percent of all “anthropogenic” GHGE are from livestock.
Cattle (raised for both meat and milk) are responsible for most, or 65 percent, of these total livestock emissions due to feed production and processing, animal burps, manure management, deforestation, and finally the processing and transportation of animal products.
Cattle are followed by pig meat (which accounts for 9 percent of total livestock-induced emissions), buffalo milk and meat (8 percent), and chicken meat and eggs (8 percent). The remaining 10 percent are due to miscellaneous sources, such as “other poultry species and non-edible products.”
Advocates of lab-grown meat hope an increase in production will eventually reduce the need to slaughter animals for food and help with the climate crisis, CNN reported.
“At scale, cultivated meat is projected to use substantially less water and land than conventionally-produced meat,” director of communications at Upside Foods David Kay told the news outlet in an email.
However, when it comes to lab-grown meat, not many people are enthused about it, at least not yet.
According to the North American Meat Institute (NAMI), 95 percent of Americans currently eat meat, and NAMI sees no signs that they will stop anytime soon.
The meat industry advocacy group also claims that the National Academy of Sciences found that “if everybody adopted a meatless diet,” the U.S. GHGE would only be impacted by 2.6 percent.
Furthermore, according to a 2022 study published by the Journal of Environmental Psychology, the “ick” factor of eating lab-grown meat is high.
The study found that 35 percent of meat eaters and 55 percent of vegetarians would be “too grossed out” to even try it, Reuters reported.
Wired writer Jude Whiley, a self-proclaimed vegan, has his finger on the pulse of the vegan community.
He says that though he had predicted that most of his fellow vegan friends would “embrace cultured meat” for all the reasons that he was inclined to—it’s sustainable, animal cruelty-free, and a clean protein source—he was wrong.
“Veganism is a broad church, filled with various interpretations,” Whiley wrote. “Accordingly, as lab-grown meat becomes available as a cheap, sustainable form of protein that doesn’t require animal suffering, veganism will face an identity crisis.”
He went on to say that many leaders in the community are adamantly against it, like the deputy trademark manager of the Vegan Society, the world’s oldest vegan association, who told him, “we can’t support cultivated meat as animals are still used in its production … we would not be able to register such products with the Vegan Trademark.”