The Fake-Meat Future

I am not what you would call an animal-rights guy. I eat meat pretty much every day, and I grew up hunting deer in Wisconsin. I find the idea that we humans are obligated not to gobble up the tasty critters around us a little bizarre.

And yet I doubt I’ll be eating much meat a few decades from now.

Earlier this month, Singapore reached a milestone: It approved lab-grown chicken meat from the company Eat Just for sale. The idea of lab-grown meat is that it’s the same substance as the real stuff, just grown from stem cells in a bioreactor rather than pumped full of weird chemicals and slaughtered on a farm. Dozens of companies are working on their own varieties.

There are two reasons someone would want to eat such a thing. One, obviously, is to get the taste and nutrition of meat without killing a living thing. Even someone like me can see the appeal of that: Animal-rights concerns won’t stop me from eating meat when nothing else comes close, but it’s not as if I see no value at all in reducing the suffering of other sentient beings. I will always remember the first time I shot a deer as a teenager, at pretty short range with a shotgun, and saw it writhe in pain until I got close enough to finish it off.

The other reason is cost, or at least it probably will be at some point in the future. In 2013, the first lab-grown beef patty cost $280,000 to make; that’s now down to maybe $10 and likely to fall further, and the quality is improving as well. Eat Just plans to put its “clean” meat on the menu at the price of a “premium” chicken dish — it’s starting out in a single restaurant and expanding into other restaurants and retail from there — and it aims to keep reducing the price, hopefully to the point that it’s cheaper than regular chicken sometime after 2025. If that happens, consumers will have to pay a premium not for the sci-fi lab-grown option, but to make sure there’s an actual animal carcass on the other side of each breast and thigh.

Will some have misgivings about meat that’s made in a reactor, instead of in a factory farm, like nature intended? Sure, but if the runaway success of genetically modified crops is any indication, these misgivings won’t withstand the onslaught of economic efficiency for very long. Surveys already indicate that a large percentage of Americans, perhaps a majority (depending how the question is phrased), are willing to at least give cultured meat a chance. If and when lab meat provides the same taste and nutrition at a lower price, this stuff is going to sell, and it’s not just going to sell to vegetarian hippies; it’s going to sell at the expense of real meat.

Let’s look at the road ahead, under the assumption that the folks behind these products can continue to improve them and make them more affordable. There’s been chatter about lab-based meats’ being ready to be sold in stores as early as 2022.

The first hurdle is regulatory. It will be some time before U.S. regulators follow Singapore’s lead and start signing off on products, because they haven’t even figured out the process yet — two different bureaucracies, the Food and Drug Administration and the Department of Agriculture, are working together. But talks are already underway, and in the big scheme of things, this shouldn’t delay progress for too long. If anything, it gives companies a bit more time to get their prices under control and to improve their products’ taste.

There will also be pushback from the established meat industry. It’s a powerful interest group, soaking up pork through Congress’s “farm bills” and waging war on imitation-meat competitors. Lately, it’s been trying to ban terms such as “veggie burger” on the grounds that the meat-related word (“burger”) confuses consumers even when it’s paired with the qualifier (“veggie”) — some state laws in this area apply to cultured meats in addition to all that plant garbage. The feds are weighing how to regulate these labels, too. There is nothing wrong with making sure that consumers know which meats are cultured vs. slaughtered, but the labeling war and other legal hijinks could become quite a headache as the old industry seeks to put its upstart competitors at a disadvantage.

After all, if it lives up to the hype, lab-grown meat will be much more of a threat to real meat than “veggie burgers” ever could be. Over the longer term, it could grab massive amounts of market share from family and factory farms alike, simply by offering a similar product at a lower price.

At the Washington Examiner, Dan Hannan is already looking forward to eliminating the 15 percent of greenhouse-gas emissions that come from livestock and “rewilding” land that’s currently used for farming. Everyone who makes a living from meat or the crops used to feed farm animals will be at risk. The political fallout from such a shift could be huge, given the political sympathy that farmers have long enjoyed.

On the other side of the debate, animal-rights activists may eventually be able to set their sights higher, not because their arguments will improve but simply because they’ll be asking less: As normal meat declines in market share, banning normal meat affects fewer and fewer people, and the folks calling for such a ban have a much easier case to make.

The next time I do my grocery shopping, I’ll be putting lots of meat in the cart and not feeling bad about it. But when Eat Just or one of its competitors can give me good, affordable meat that wasn’t hacked off a dead animal who lived a miserable life, I’ll give it a shot. Little half-hearted decisions like that, multiplied many times over, can add up to the end of an era.