Ed. Note: I originally conducted these interviews in 2023, but due to controversy around the subject, my editor ultimately killed the piece. With the topic back in the news, I decided to give my story a refresh and publish it here because I personally find it more interesting than ever. The joys of having one’s own Substack!
The meat came lightly grilled, slicked with a soy glaze, atop thin slices of potato. The chefs placed the dish in front of me with a flourish and watched attentively as I took my first bite. “Tastes like chicken,” I said.
That might not sound like a huge compliment, but in these circumstances, it was exactly what they were hoping to hear. Because this was no ordinary restaurant and no ordinary chicken. It was not free-range or organic, because it didn’t come from a farm — it came from a lab.
The quest to be an ethical meat consumer is not an easy one these days. Montana just became the fourth state to ban the manufacture or sale of cultivated meat, its governor citing support for the state’s ranchers. But there is growing demand for animal protein that puts humane and environmentally-friendly practices at the forefront. Poultry is the most consumed livestock commodity in the world, and in many cases farmers and chickens are subject to mistreatment. This New Yorker article from 2017 paints an unforgettable picture of the horrifying conditions at a plant in Ohio; don’t read it while you’re eating.
Some traditional purveyors are trying to do better. A report from ButcherBox, a certified B-Corporation and leading direct-to-consumer meat and seafood brand that saw explosive growth during the pandemic, found that social media is impacting consumers’ purchasing behavior. This is especially true when it comes to education around conscious consumption. Nearly a quarter of respondents in a national survey said they’d purchased food items with specific labels they learned about on social media, including “grass-fed” and “cage-free.” My favorite eggs, which come from Vital Farms, include a code to “see the girls for yourself!” online in a 360-degree video of hens in a pasture. Also a certified B-Corp, Vital Farms publishes impact reports after finding consumers “want to know where their food comes from and how it is produced.”
But GOOD Meat, which got full regulatory approval from the FDA and USDA in 2023, is banking on the idea that consumers will come around to an entirely different alternative. All the radical transparency in the world can't compete with products that simply don’t cost a life — or the environmental resources required to raise it.
“My hope is that meat that does not require the slaughter of an animal makes up the majority of production globally, in my lifetime,” said Josh Tetrick, the CEO and cofounder of GOOD Meat’s parent company, Eat Just. “An uphill climb, but a worthy one.”
Singapore, where land constraints inspired significant investment in alternative proteins long before the U.S., gave world-first regulatory approval to GOOD Meat in 2020. There you can find their chicken everywhere from butchers to restaurants to street carts. Tetrick said that most of those customers are not vegan: “They’re people who like meat but realize that there are real issues with it.”
In this case, the egg came first, or rather, JUST Egg, its plant-based substitute. “We started with this idea of, is there a better way to make an egg? And when we were thinking about what might be next, we thought a lot about the relationship people have with meat, how connected it is to our culture,” Tetrick, who is from the South, told me. “I grew up going to barbecues in Birmingham, Alabama. So I know meat speaks to your identity.”
Tetrick described himself as a “strange eater” now, being a vegan who eats cultivated meat. He doesn’t like the term “lab-grown,” which conjures images of unfamiliar substances growing in petri dishes. “You really have to walk people through it to help demystify its unfamiliar nature,” he added.
That’s how I found myself in GOOD Meat’s plant in Alameda, California, surrounded by enormous bioreactors, while scientists in white coats tinkered with test tubes. Unlike a traditional chicken plant, there were no nauseating smells or pools of blood on the floor. They may as well have been developing the next Covid booster for all I could tell.
Vítor Espírito Santo leads the cellular agriculture team. He tried to explain the process in layman’s terms, which starts with the painless extraction of cells from chicken, cows, turkey, duck and pigs. This can be done in a number of ways, from biopsies to selecting embryonic stem cells, although the company now has a well-stocked reserve they draw from.
Cells are then fed with nutrients to simulate the animal’s diet without any animal components, a broth of amino acids, lipids and vitamins that is constantly being fine-tuned. “It’s pretty much like a protein shake,” said Santo. They must be rigorous about preventing contamination; part of getting that green light from the FDA required demonstrating that what they’re producing is “free of viruses and other pathogens that are actually very common in conventional feeds.”
The sterile lab environment enables them to avoid using antibiotics. “For us, that’s a big advantage,” Santo said. “When you compare the microbiological data from our harvested chicken cells to conventional chicken, the difference is huge. For instance, no salmonella. Or even fecal matter, because with the slaughtering process, there’s a lot of cross-contamination.”
As I walked around the plant, I got an overview of how cells growing in that nutrient-rich liquid are then separated via centrifuge. The result is a pale mush of ground chicken. It's easy to make a nugget from there — creating the fibrousness of chicken breast was much trickier. The team now accomplishes that by extruding it with plant matter to mimic a texture you can pull apart with a knife and fork.
My first taste was a bite of chicken salad atop a crunchy crouton. If I hadn’t known that this was cultivated meat, I wouldn't have thought twice about it. Then came a take on chicken teriyaki, the meat flavorful and tender.
Impressing me is one thing. But will this win over vegans who gave up meat for ethical reasons? After my visit to the plant I called up my old friend Joanne Molinaro, a James Beard award-winning cookbook author, for a gut check.
As the Korean Vegan, Molinaro translates familiar dishes for a plant-based audience. She has partnered with JUST Egg on many successful recipes. “I think JUST Egg was a great introduction to people on more sustainable alternatives to the foods we grew up eating and loved,” she told me. “And meat is the obvious next step.”
However, somewhat unexpectedly for someone who was a meat-eater most of her life, Molinaro said she is not interested in the cultivated kind. “I don’t miss the taste or texture of meat. I’m very happy with the way that I eat right now.”
Eggs are a different story: “They’re so much a part of these Korean dishes that I grew up eating. But I have a bit of a more visceral reaction to something like meat. It’s just a little uncomfortable for me personally.”
Molinaro, a marathoner, avoids processed foods that have a negative impact on her health and fitness. This is a common concern among critics of cultivated meat who see it as a “Frankenfood.” But for other palates it could be a game-changer. “A lot of people might be more inclined to remove animal products from their lives when they know that the alternative is so close to the original,” she said. “Subject to scaling and cost and of course the carbon footprint, I’m very, very excited about this technology.”
There are still significant hurdles to tackle that explain why consumers can’t purchase cultivated meat in stores. After regulators spent years puzzling out how these products should be labeled and how to inspect the facilities where they’re grown, a growing number of states are now banning them entirely. There's also a question of affordability. Production levels will have to ramp up in order to bring prices down, although there’s been significant progress since the first cultivated burger cost more than $300,000 to make in 2013.
But the potential of cultivated meat to transform the global economy is huge. Molinaro believes that some of the world’s biggest problems can be addressed by reimagining our food systems. “When you start changing some of the levers of any GDP, it often starts with food. Not just Big Agriculture, but hunger in general. I think the implications might be far broader-reaching than we can even imagine."
For my part, one thing I can’t stop thinking about is GOOD Meat’s cell bank. It’s cryopreserved so that the samples will continue to be available for decades, biding their time for the controversy to die down, long after we're gone. The animals’ last laugh, perhaps; their Franken-kin outliving us all.
As a former vegan, I think this is a great alternative.
Yet another fabulous TM post! I learned so much!