Lab-grown, or cultured, meat is being heralded as an ethical, climate-saving alternative to traditional meat. But what if it isn’t safe, and what if its carbon footprint exceeds that of grass-fed animals? Read on and find out what the science is now showing us.
It’s no longer science fiction, it’s here: the US government approved lab-grown meat for sale in the US last November. While we might still be some years away from these products entering our supermarkets, now’s the right time to take a critical look at them before we decide to dine on them in a restaurant – or feed them to our growing children. We also need to understand more about whether or not we should believe the claims being shouted from Big Food Tech’s rooftops telling us over and over again: lab-grown meat is a more ethical choice and far better for the environment than raising animals for slaughter. While the lab-grown meat sales pitch might sound like the heralding of a new era where we can eat healthy, clean, animal protein-based food without having to kill animals, all while saving the environment, it’s our assessment that most of the claims being made are illusory.
The FDA and the USDA share responsibility for regulating lab-grown meat products. In 2022, the FDA completed voluntary reviews of lab-grown meat from UPSIDE Food and Good Meat, concluding that the products were safe to eat. The USDA, which must routinely inspect all commercially-sold meat and poultry, just recently issued grants of inspection to these companies, clearing the way for these products to be sold to consumers. Initially, lab-grown meat will only be launched in two high-end restaurants. It is not expected to be in supermarkets anytime soon because it is very far from being cost competitive with real meat (more on this below).
Growing meat from stem cells
Lab-grown meat (also referred to as cultured, cultivated, or cell-based meat) is developed from animal stem cells. Different companies use different techniques, but generally animal stem cells are added to massive bioreactors along with a broth-like mixture of amino acids, fatty acids, sugars, salts, and vitamins to help the cells grow. The cells proliferate quickly in the calibrated environment of these tanks—called cultivators—creating sheets of poultry cells that are then removed from the tanks and formed into cutlets, sausages, and other foods.
As much as the food industry doesn’t want you to know this, the process of creating lab-grown meat relies on ‘genetic engineering’ or GE. While the NIH’s National Human Genome Research Institute wants us to restrict the GE term to “laboratory-based technologies [that] alter the DNA makeup of an organism,” we believe it should be just as applicable to gene-editing techniques that involve the deliberate alteration of the genetic makeup of pluripotent cells like stem cells.
Nature-aligned health at risk
Threats to natural health continue to grow. On the one hand our fundamental freedoms and long-standing principles of medical ethics are being deeply eroded. On the other hand, Big Pharma, the products of which have dominated healthcare for the last 80 years, has now aligned itself with the biotech industry.
This means Pharma’s model is now moving away from using biochemistry to block or interfere with physiological or metabolic pathways, to one where it’s modifying our genes or their expression in ways that nature does not. But that's not all.
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