What Is Cultivated Meat? Growing Muscle Without the Animal

The process runs through several stages, each of which is a substantial engineering problem:

• •Obtaining a cell line, usually from a biopsy, and selecting cells capable of dividing many times, since ordinary muscle cells stop after a limited number of divisions
• •Growth medium, a liquid supplying sugars, amino acids, vitamins, salts and the growth factors that instruct cells to divide, which is the dominant cost and was historically supplied by fetal bovine serum, obtained from slaughtered pregnant cows, which the industry has worked hard to replace for reasons of both cost and coherence
• •Proliferation in a bioreactor, a stirred and controlled vessel keeping temperature, oxygen, pH and nutrients within narrow ranges while removing waste products that accumulate and inhibit growth
• •Differentiation, switching the cells from dividing into becoming muscle or fat, which is triggered by changing the medium
• •Scaffolding for structured products, since a steak requires cells arranged in three dimensions with a means of delivering nutrients into the interior, which unstructured mince does not
• •Harvest and formulation, combining the cultured material with binders, fats and flavourings into a finished product

The first burger cost a reported sum in the hundreds of thousands and costs have fallen by orders of magnitude since, and the remaining gap to commodity meat is still large. The medium accounts for most of it, since pharmaceutical-grade inputs are priced for making medicines in kilograms rather than food in tonnes, and the growth factors in particular are proteins that were extremely expensive until produced by fermentation at scale. Bioreactor capacity is the second constraint: the world's existing pharmaceutical bioreactor capacity is small relative to meat consumption, and building enough would be a construction programme of considerable size. Contamination is a permanent risk, since animal cells grow slowly and bacteria grow fast, so sterility must be absolute, which drives both capital and operating cost. And cells produce waste and consume oxygen in ways that make very large vessels harder rather than simply bigger, a scaling problem the biotechnology industry knows well. Independent analyses disagree substantially about whether these costs can fall far enough, and that disagreement is the central open question.

The claimed benefit is reduced land use, greenhouse gas emissions, water consumption and antibiotic use relative to conventional meat, particularly beef, which is by a wide margin the most resource-intensive food. Life cycle assessments give a wide range of answers because the process does not yet operate at commercial scale and the results depend heavily on assumptions, above all about the energy source. The honest summary is that cultivated meat would use far less land in any scenario, that it requires substantially more energy per unit of product than conventional meat, and that whether it reduces emissions therefore depends on whether that energy is clean. Some analyses find it worse than chicken and better than beef. It would also remove antibiotic use in production, which matters for resistance, and remove slaughter, which is the ethical argument and is independent of the environmental one. Plant-based alternatives currently achieve larger environmental gains at far lower cost, which is a relevant comparison rather than a competing one.

Singapore granted the first regulatory approval in 2020, the United States followed for two companies in 2023, and Israel has approved a product, while the European Union process has not yet resulted in an approval and several jurisdictions including Italy and some American states have legislated to prohibit sale outright. The naming question is contested, with meat industry groups arguing that terms like meat should be restricted to slaughtered animals, and several laws now restricting labelling. Consumer acceptance research finds substantial variation between countries and strong effects from how the product is described, with terms suggesting laboratories performing worse than those suggesting cultivation. Religious authorities have begun considering whether such products can be certified kosher or halal, with answers depending partly on the source of the original cells. The realistic near-term position is that products exist, are approved in a handful of places, are made in very small quantities and remain expensive, and whether that changes is a question about manufacturing economics.

Cultivated meat grows animal cells in a bioreactor and then triggers them to become muscle and fat, avoiding slaughter entirely. The dominant cost is the growth medium, originally dependent on fetal bovine serum and now being replaced, followed by the scarcity of bioreactor capacity and the need for absolute sterility. It uses far less land than conventional meat and more energy, so its emissions benefit depends on the electricity supply. Singapore approved it first in 2020 and several places have banned it.