$32M in Govt Grants go to Cell-Based, "Cultured" Meats

Private companies creating + selling these "meats" get >$10M

The boom-and-bust of “alternative proteins” came and went faster than a Florida land deal: sky-high valuations soon plummeting to zero. Companies such as Beyond Meat, Impossible Burgers, and Oatly Milk seemed invincible in the early 2000s. McDonald’s, for instance, in partnership with Beyond Meat, launched its “McPlant” burger in 2021 in about 600 U.S. restaurants, with the outlandish claim that “it has the iconic taste of a McDonald's burger, because it is one.” Three years later, McPlant was off the market. In 2022, Chipotle introduced its “plant-based chorizo,” followed by its plant-based “chorizo queso,” both now absent from the menu. Not even the star power of Leonardo DiCaprio was enough to save a plant-based burger chain in the UK, launched in 2019 yet abruptly shut down this month with $10.5M in losses. In general, the alternative protein market looks like this:

Consumers are turning towards real food, especially dairy, meat—and even red meat, which is an astonishing rejection of elite opinion on every front—the media, doctors, nutrition experts, public health agencies, and an abundance of vegan A-listers. These voices, in unison, have inveighed against red meat for health reasons, for climate reasons, for animal-rights reasons, and for, well, basic human dignity (See the constant, not-so-subtle mainstream media warnings that meat-eating will turn an otherwise right-minded person into a MAGA “carnibro”). Even so, Americans, led by Gen Z, are returning to beef. And these trends, according to food industry analyst Jullian Mellentin, are significant shifts, here to stay for at least the next five years.

Beef may be what’s for dinner again on the American table, but the federal government is still investing in cell-based meat. These meats differ from those by Beyond Meat and Impossible Burger which are created from plant proteins, but both are driven primarily by the belief that plant-based alternatives are better for the environment. A secondary rationale is that alternative meats would be healthier, a quixotic claim given that cell-meat, especially, is entirely novel, with an ingredient list that not even an AP Chem student could recognize.

Whether these lab-made products are safe is a first step. In 2022, the FDA approved cell-cultivated meats, while the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and European Food Safety Authority have yet to decide.

Whether cell-based meats are better for the environment also remains to be seen. The basic premise that industrial-scale bioreactors can produce foods with a smaller carbon footprint than cows-on-grass seems implausible on the face of it. Here are the two food systems for you to compare:

Some readers might object that I didn’t put in a photo of a feedlot, but all beef cattle spend 60-70% of their time on grass, so I think this picture is fair.

Because the technology of cell-based meat is still emerging, its climate-friendly promise remains hypothetical, with greenhouse-gas emission estimates all over the place, varying more than 10-fold. Further, a study by U.C. Davis authors in 2023 found that several previous “life-cycle assessments” aiming to calculate the product’s impact on emissions had been flawed, because the models did not account for factors including the mining of metals needed for bioreactor construction, the removal of endotoxins produced by “gram-negative” bacteria, and the process of “purification”—which I don’t understand but is treated in the paper as a serious issue. When “purification” is added into environmental calculations for three types of cultured meat production, you can see the high levels of resources demanded to make these products (pink bars). The blue bars are cultured meat resource needs without purification; the green bars are for beef.

If this paper is correct, the environmental impact of alt-proteins is not superior to beef.