Lab-grown meat companies like Upside Foods are pushing the narrative that lab-grown, or “cultivated,” meat offers consumers the freedom to choose guilt-free, sustainable alternatives. They have tried to position themselves as champions of consumer rights. Their petition against lab-grown meat bans in Florida and Alabama hinges on claims that “everyone should have the freedom to make their own choices about the foods they eat.”
On the surface, it’s a persuasive argument. But underneath lies a more complex reality—one that raises serious concerns about transparency, safety, and the very definition of “meat.”
Is it really about consumer choice?
Upside Foods is framing the debate over lab-grown meat as a battle for consumer choice. But this seems to be something of a decoy to distract consumers from the real issue: the safety of fake meat. The laws Upside Foods is contesting in Florida and Alabama are not attempts to limit freedom or options—they’re actually about safeguarding public health by ensuring transparency around what’s being sold.
Remember, Upside Foods, Meatable, and other lab-grown meat companies are marketing their products as equivalent to real meat, or even superior. Meatable claims to be “pioneering the new natural.” “It isn’t like meat,” the company says. “It is meat.”
Their pitch relies on the bioequivalence principle—the idea that these synthetic meats provide the same taste, texture, and nutritional value as traditional meat. But this assumption is not only deeply misleading, it’s downright incorrect, scientifically.
The myth of bioequivalence
Lab-grown meat producers operate on the simplistic notion that real meat is nothing more than a simple combination of a few key fats and proteins. To illustrate this point: one synthetic biology (synbio) company has developed additives for products like the Impossible Burger, isolating a couple of fat molecules they believe are responsible for the taste of real meat. But this reductive view ignores the complexity of natural meat.
Real meat is a product of living organisms, comprising thousands of different proteins, peptides, amino acids, nucleotides, fats, vitamins, minerals, hormones and other compounds that interact in ways we barely understand.
Even the USDA’s understanding of food composition is limited. For example, the USDA lists around a dozen compounds in raw garlic, while other scientists have cataloged over 400. If we’re using such incomplete data as our benchmark, what are we missing in lab-grown meat?
Safety: the unknowns we can’t ignore
This brings us to the issue of safety. Foods like lab-grown meat (and a host of other products) made through so-called ‘precision fermentation’ are novel foods that have never been part of our diet in all of human history. Emerging research raises concerns about the “precision” of the processes involved.
John Fagan, a scientist at the Health Research Institute (HRI), recently identified 92 previously unknown compounds in Bored Cow’s biosynthetic, genetically modified milk. These compounds, he notes, are “completely novel to our food…nutritional dark matter.” If lab-grown meat is filled with similarly unknown substances, what are the long-term health implications? We simply don’t know.
The comparison to natural foods like garlic shows how little we truly understand about the biological complexity of even the simplest foods.
If 99% of garlic’s composition remains a mystery to the USDA, how can we confidently claim that lab-grown meat—which is far more complicated—is safe and equivalent to real meat?