By Camden Lethcoe

We consume a lot of meat. On any given day, up to 74% of North Americans consume red or processed meat. Additionally, the worldwide consumption of meat has more than quadrupled since 1961. While these statistics might not seem alarming on their face, some additional numbers make the problem a bit more clear. Animal farming accounts for anywhere between 11.1% to 19.6% of the globe’s greenhouse gas emissions and requires roughly a quarter of all farmable land in the world to sustain itself, making our high consumption of meat seem a little more grim, and the need for a solution (or at the very least, mitigation of these effects) more clear. 

Fortunately, lab-grown meat has been in development since 2001, when American businessman Jon Vein filed a patent: “Method For Producing Tissue Engineered Meat for Consumption.” The patent details the utility and viability of lab-grown meat, stating that “livestock feed accounts for approximately 70% for all the wheat, corn, and other grain produced” in the United States, and further, that “to produce one pound of beef, thousands of pounds of water are required.” There’s no doubt that the farming of livestock is a massively resource-intensive operation.

Vein filed his patent in 2001, six years before iPhones existed. Staggering technological advances since then beg the question: why is there still no lab-grown meat in grocery stores? While advancements are certainly underway and scaling costs are decreasing, no lab-grown meat product is currently available for sale in the United States. 

So how does it work?

Not to be confused with Beyond Meat or Impossible Meat—both of which are plant-based products manufactured by extracting various proteins from plant matter—synthesizing lab-grown meat involves an entirely five-step process. First, a cell sample is harvested from an animal in a non-harmful process. Second, cells are taken and placed in small, sterile environments and fed various supplements and nutrients, allowing them to multiply into the billions or trillions. Third, additional nutrients and proteins are provided to the cells. This is the stage in which the cells begin to resemble what we would typically recognize as “muscle, fat, or connective tissue cells.” Fourth, the cells are harvested. Fifth and finally, the harvested, lab-grown meat is processed. Seems like a pretty refined process. So what’s the hold-up?

Surprisingly, it’s not primarily the fault of regulatory bureaucracy. The biggest hurdles the lab-grown meat industry faces are taste, texture, and commercial scaling. For example, a major problem in the industry regards the feasibility of growing these cells in bulk while simultaneously maintaining a taste and quality akin to real meat—a task much easier to complete in the smaller-scale tests that have thus far been conducted. Scaling this new technology is understandably expensive, as are many technological advances in their infancy. Indeed, the first lab-grown burger cost more than $300,000 to produce! Current retail estimates range as high as $45 per pound of lab-grown meat (compared to a price of roughly $5 for ground beef, as of September of 2023).

Who are the players here?

You might be wondering how regulators in the United States are handling the proliferation of law-grown meat technology. You might also be wondering who is even in charge of such regulation. In the United States, those regulators would be the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). 

As to how they’re handling it? The two agencies have had a formal agreement in place since 2019, when Congress asked them to create one in order to “delineate each agency’s

responsibilities for regulating cell-cultivated meat.” The agreement largely addresses each agency’s role in the regulation of this industry, with the FDA responsible for, essentially, every inspection and test leading up to the “point of harvest” of the lab-grown meat, at which point the USDA takes over. 

According to the Congressional Research Service, there are currently “more than 150 companies worldwide… involved in the cell-cultivated meat industry, 43 of which are in the United States.” Despite this, only two companies have actually sold lab-grown meat in the United States: UPSIDE Foods, and GOOD Meat. The two companies currently sell lab-grown chicken meat at San Francisco and Washington, D.C. restaurants. While buying a lab-grown dish at one of these locations will set you back at least $70, those who have tried the meat have likened it to real chicken with the most significant difference being that the meat was more uniform in texture than real chicken, which typically has “fatty” and “chewy” elements. 

What does the future hold?

It is clear that lab-grown meat has a long way to go before it reaches the shelves of grocery stores. Encouragingly, though, what currently exists for public consumption at the D.C. and LA restaurants—in however small a scale, and however large a price—reportedly tastes like real meat. So while the future is encouraging, there is no definite answer as to the viability of this developing technology.