Despite spending over 15 years in the food industry, working in fine dining kitchens and “whole animal” butcher shops, it wasn’t until graduate school that I was introduced to food technology and the growing investment in lab-grown (now called “cell-cultured” or “cultivated”) meat, dairy or seafood. My interest was piqued: I had spent years behind a butcher counter wrapping up boneless, skinless chicken breasts and engaging in endless conversations about the environmental sustainability of pasture-raised meat and comparisons between wild versus farmed seafood. After reporting on food tech and the cultured meat industry for years, I still return to the same question: Is this really the solution to our unhealthy addiction to cheap and environmentally unsustainable food? Early in my exploration of this nascent industry, conversations about cell-cultured food always seemed to circle back to the idea of if people will actually buy and/or eat food made in test tubes (or more accurately bioreactors). But before consumers can even get to the question of consumer adoption there is the even bigger hurdle of scalability: Whether you could make enough to justify the cost to make even a little. Personally, I want to believe there is a technological solution that might save the planet from our stomachs’ desire for environmentally destructive food. Yet, with nearly $3 billion flowing into cell-cultured food tech over the years and over 150 total companies working on making “slaughter-free meat” a reality (with many now-defunct startups already six feet underground), I’m starting to have doubts. So are the well-sourced industry watchers and journalists that have followed the industry much longer than me. And as we debate if people will eat the stuff or if it is replicable en masse, there is already a well-funded campaign of rejection. States like Arizona, Texas and Florida and countries like Italy, France and Austria have begun the process of banning or even criminalizing the production and sale of a food that, in large part, does not really exist in retail yet. Why the uproar? As with most things in business, much of it comes down to the moo-lah (forgive the tired bovine pun). Even the threat of encroaching on an established and highly consolidated industry like meat production means the loss of capital. Want a more tangible example? See what has been playing out for years in the plant-based meat replacement sector. Be they nut milks or meat alternatives, a culture of outrage mirroring the current political climate has evolved, all in the service of maintaining “the way things have always been.” In the resulting communications war, the meat industry calls cultured proteins dangerous and the impending killer of the meat and dairy industry. Never you mind the fact that independent ranchers and small family-run farms have been slowly bled to death by these same multinational companies for years. For the most part, alt meat and dairy companies are happy to throw mud themselves, espousing a holier than thou approach all the while taking in exorbitant amounts of capital with often few reproducible products to show their investors. But the cash considerations aside, the circle repeats: is food tech really the climate-saving solution to our unsustainable addiction to cheap meat, or are we searching for answers on the wrong pastures? Do you believe the food tech industry’s suppositions that it can solve climate change? Let me know your thoughts on how tech might or might be help create a more sustainable food system, email me at lsouthard@bevnet.com | 
