Chase Purdy on the Future of Meat

Could you tell us a little bit about your current project and why you chose it?

My project explores the brainpower, money, politics, and cultural implications of lab-grown, cell-cultured meats. There’s an edible space race happening right now in which a handful of food technology startups around the globe are pushing to bring these new foods to market. The lofty goal of these companies is to replace the monolithic animal agriculture system, which has been pegged for being inhumane and a big-time contributor to global greenhouse gas emissions. Whether they find success is yet to be determined, but if the popularity of plant-based alternative meat products such as Beyond Meat and the Impossible Foods burger are any indication, there’s a good chance consumers are curious about eating real, slaughter-free meats. I started writing about this topic because I was intrigued by the science and also the people involved. Behind the lab coats and millions of investor dollars is an evolving vegan movement, which is using the powers of entrepreneurship and capitalism to achieve their goals. It was too fascinating a story to ignore.

There are strong, and varied, opinions about what can be called “meat,” particularly as it relates to the science and process of producing cell-cultured meat. Can you shed more light on this debate?

I think there are a couple of things to keep in mind when thinking about this debate. The first thing is that cell-cultured meats are very new, so there’s going to be a natural conversation around what to call this stuff, which uses a process that bucks thousands of years of animal husbandry practices. That debate is healthy and important. Then there is the political debate, which is driven less by genuine wonder and/or curiosity, and more by the animal agriculture industry feeling threatened. This debate is currently being taken to statehouses across the U.S., where agricultural lobbying groups are trying to get bills passed that limit what cell-cultured meat companies can call their products. This strategy isn’t new, and if history is any indication, it likely won’t be successful. If consumers are interested in cell-cultured meat, they’ll try it and buy it no matter what the animal agriculture industry wants to call it.

If the cell-cultured meat companies are successful in replicating meat to a point where there is a negligible difference between natural and cell-cultured, what difficulties do you foresee in getting society to embrace it, and what do you think will be the most significant drivers that will push Americans to move towards embracing it?

It will likely boil down to cost. If cell-cultured meat looks, tastes, cooks, and feels the same as conventionally-produced meat, I think consumers will be interested just because of the environmental and animal welfare benefits. But they have to be able to afford it, and there’s still a lot of work to do on the production side of cell-cultured meat to drive down the cost producing it at scale.

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