OpinionGuest Essay

Credit...Flavio Carvalho

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By Joe Fassler

Mr. Fassler is a journalist covering food and environmental issues who has reported on the lab-grown-meat industry for six years.

It is a gleaming vision of a world just beyond the present: a world in which meat is abundant and affordable with almost no cost to the environment. Animal slaughter is forgotten. Global warming is restrained. At the heart of the vision is a high-tech factory housing steel tanks as tall as apartment buildings and conveyor belts rolling out fully formed steaks, millions of pounds a day — enough, astonishingly, to feed an entire nation.

Meat without killing is the central promise of what’s come to be known as cultivated meat. This isn’t a new plant-based alternative. It is, at least in theory, a few animal cells, nurtured with the right nutrients and hormones, finished with sophisticated processing techniques, and voilà: juicy burgers and seared tuna and marinated lamb chops without the side of existential worry.

It’s a vision of hedonism — but altruism, too. A way to save water, free up vast tracts of land, drastically cut planet-warming emissions, protect vulnerable species. It’s an escape hatch for humankind’s excesses. All we have to do is tie on our bibs.

Between 2016 and 2022, investors poured almost $3 billion into cultivated meat and seafood companies. Powerful venture capital and sovereign wealth funds — SoftBank, Temasek, the Qatar Investment Authority — wanted in. So did major meatpackers like Tyson, Cargill and JBS, and celebrities like Leonardo DiCaprio, Bill Gates and Richard Branson. Two of the leading companies — Eat Just and Upside Foods, both startups — reportedly achieved billion-dollar valuations. And today, a few products that include cultivated cells have been approved for sale in Singapore, the United States and Israel.

Yet despite nearly a decade of work and a great many messianic pronouncements, it is increasingly clear that a broader cultivated meat revolution was never a real prospect, and definitely not within the few years we have left to avert climate catastrophe.

Interviews with almost 60 industry investors and insiders, including many who have been employed by or been part of the leadership teams of these companies, reveal a litany of squandered resources, broken promises and unproven science. Founders, hemmed in by their own unrealistic proclamations, cut corners, such as using ingredients derived from slaughtered animals. Investors, swept up in the excitement of the moment, wrote check after check despite significant technological obstacles. Costs refused to enter the realm of plausible as launch targets came and went. All the while, nobody could achieve anything close to meaningful scale. And yet companies rushed to build expensive facilities and pushed scientists to exceed what was possible, creating the illusion of a thrilling race to market.

Now, as venture capital dries up across industries and this sector’s disappointing progress becomes more visible, the reckoning will be difficult for many to survive.

Investors will no doubt be eager to find out what went wrong. For the rest of us, a more pressing question is why anyone ever thought it could go right. Why did so many people buy into the dream that cultivated meat would save us?

The answer has to do with much more than a new kind of food. For all its terrifying urgency, climate change is an invitation — to reinvent our economies, to rethink consumption, to redraw our relationships to nature and to one another. Cultivated meat was an excuse to shirk that hard, necessary work. The idea sounded futuristic, but its appeal was all about nostalgia, a way to pretend that things will go on as they always have, that nothing really needs to change. It was magical climate thinking, a delicious delusion.

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Josh Tetrick was the chief executive of a vegan food company called Hampton Creek when he first got excited about growing meat in a laboratory. A former D1 football player who exuded a bold, appealing confidence, he was a fixture on the conference circuit, where he could be seen boasting about his high-profile investors and their desire for “extraordinary outcomes.”

Mr. Tetrick had been an animal-rights activist since high school, and he started Hampton Creek in part, he said, to save farm animals from short, brutal lives as flesh-and-blood cogs in a global supply chain. He also spoke movingly about how, by switching to vegan products, we could start reversing the greenhouse emissions, water crises and ecosystem damage caused by animal agriculture.

Getting carnivores to change their eating habits is an uphill battle. Despite the destructive impact of meat, we continue to eat huge amounts of it, behavior that Mr. Tetrick has likened to addiction. But back in law school, he read about something that piqued his interest: NASA-funded scientists had attempted to grow meat (goldfish meat, in that case) in a laboratory.

The idea didn’t gain traction until 2013, when a Dutch scientist named Mark Post announced he had brewed up the world’s first cultivated beef burger. The single patty, which was painstakingly grown strand by strand in hundreds of plastic dishes, cost more than $300,000 to develop. It wasn’t practical, but it was powerful: Soon cultivated meat startups were raising money, making bold proclamations and laying out aggressive product timelines.

The most basic part of the process — turning a few living cells into many — was not new. It’s what pharmaceutical companies had been doing for decades to make vaccines. Pumped-in oxygen and a rich soup of amino acids and sugars simulate the conditions the cells would encounter inside a body, and added hormones signal the cells to divide and multiply.

As expensive as that process is, it typically produces only “cell slurry,” a viscous mass. To turn it into something someone could eat (or sell), you’d need to mix in vegetable matter like pea and soy, for a kind of plant-animal hybrid. Or you could try something vastly more difficult: getting the animal cells to form into muscle-like tissue.

Making any of that happen affordably and at large volumes is a problem that even today no one has solved. That didn’t stop Uma Valeti, the founder and C.E.O. of the company that is today known as Upside Foods from declaring, in 2016, that humanity was at the brink of the “second domestication,” a dietary shift as momentous as the shift from hunting and gathering to crops and livestock. “We believe that in 20 years, a majority of meat sold in stores will be cultured,” he told The Wall Street Journal. “In just a few years, we expect to be selling protein-packed” — and fully cultivated........

© The New York Times