Don’t Be Fooled: Lab-Grown Meat Is a Disaster in the Making By via Children’s Health Defense
Fake meats aren’t about your health or a healthy environment — they’re a tool to phase out farmers and ranchers and replace them with an ultra-processed food product that can be controlled by patents.
Lab-grown, or cultured, meat is being promoted as the wave of the future — the “green, sustainable” way to have your meat and eat it too. No animal suffering, no greenhouse gas emissions — just meat-like protein that will taste exactly like the burgers and steaks you’re used to. Sound too good to be true?
Underneath the greenwashed façade, lab-grown meat has been hyped beyond reality and its promises are slated to fall flat. Fake meats are not about your health or the environment’s — they’re a tool to phase out farmers and ranchers and replace them with an ultraprocessed food product that can be controlled by patents.
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Not only is ultraprocessed lab-grown meat not a healthy choice for humans, but its production is plagued with environmental and contamination concerns that are likely to thwart the industry before it ever gets off the ground.
Ironically, the real wave of the future won’t be found via technology but through the return to regenerative farming practices that have been time-tested and valued for ages.
GFI promises fake meat by 2030
In February 2021, the Good Food Institute (GFI), a nonprofit group behind the alternative protein industry, released a techno-economic analysis of cultivated meat, which was prepared by consulting firm CE Delft. In it, they developed a model to reduce the current costs of cultured meat production down to a point that would make it economically feasible in full-scale plants by 2030, a model they said is “feasible.”
But as Joe Fassler, The Counter’s deputy editor, wrote in an in-depth exposé about the actual science behind lab-grown meat, this would mean lowering “the production price from over $10,000 per pound today to about $2.50 per pound over the next nine years — an astonishing 4,000-fold reduction.”
GFI’s report makes it seem as if cultured meat will be readily available on grocery shelves within the next decade, and it’s this type of propaganda they need if they’re going to continue to attract public and private funding.
Proponents are calling on the U.S. government to invest billions in fake meat products, but if they fail — as science suggests they may — it’s taxpayers who suffer.
In The Counter report, Fassler spoke with Paul Wood, a former pharmaceutical industry executive, who was so outraged by GFI’s TEA report, which “did little to justify increased public investment,” that he hired Huw Hughes, a former Pfizer colleague and private consultant who’s worked on multiple sites to culture cells at scale, to analyze GFI’s analysis. According to Fassler:
“Hughes concluded that GFI’s report projected unrealistic cost decreases, and left key aspects of the production process undefined, while significantly underestimating the expense and complexity of constructing a suitable facility.”
In his review, Hughes wrote that “a finished product fit for consumption is not defined, and so estimating a cost for an acceptable consumer product is challenging.” Still, he estimated that the cost for 1 kilogram (kg) (35.27 ounces) of cell culture product for human consumption would cost in excess of $8,500 to $3,600 per kg. “By comparison,” he wrote, “the wholesale price of trimmed chicken meat in the U.S. is $3.11.”
Cultured meat plagued by technical challenges
While GFI is pushing for more investments to bring cultured meat to the market, another TEA, this one conducted by chemical engineer David Humbird for Open Philanthropy, found that cultured meat may remain too expensive to ever come to market, and claimed that extreme technical challenges would likely prove insurmountable. Fassler wrote:
“Though Humbird lays out his case with an unprecedented level of technical detail, his argument can be boiled down simply: The cost of cultivation facilities will always be too burdensome, and the cost of growth media will always be too high, for the economics of cultured meat to make sense. It’s a stark finding, one that’s unusually unequivocal for a scientific document — and it should have made waves in the alternative protein sphere.”
One important distinction is that GFI assumes that the cultured meat facilities of the future will be food-grade, as opposed to pharmaceutical-grade — the latter of which would increase costs even further.
