The Problem With Eating Lab-Grown Meat

Why we aren’t eating lab-grown meat (yet)

Photo by freddie marriage on Unsplash

Lab-grown meat, sometimes called cultured meat, clean meat or slaughter-free meat, is meat that is produced in vitro cell culture of animal cells. While it is not the same as the plant-based substitutes produced by start-ups like Beyond Meat or Impossible Foods, lab-grown meat lays claim to many of the same ethical and environmental merits.

Lab-grown meat is intended not as a complete alternative to eating animals, but as a method of severely reducing the number of animals that need to be force-fed and slaughtered for our consumption. By taking a sample of cells from just a few animals, technicians can produce vast quantities of meat in cultured vats.

Because lab-grown meat is meat, it should theoretically share the same taste and texture as conventional meat, if formulated correctly. The only difference is the process by which the quantity of meat ‘expands’. In farms, of course, this process takes the form of large-scale feeding programmes and methods to promote productive reproduction. In labs, however, this process is replaced with carefully selected cultures, designed to maximise the multiplying of cell tissues.

This mirrors tissue engineering techniques that have been used in regenerative medicine for decades. Applying these…