probablyasocialecologist:

Hundreds of millions of people globally lack adequate access to food, but these technologies will not address current inequalities in distribution, which result in high amounts of food waste. This emphasis on speculative technologies is steering attention away from existing, proven approaches to achieving sustainability goals that reduce power asymmetries.

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Dominant firms have less incentive to promote the vision of the founders of cellular agriculture firms and will avoid moving in directions that would undermine their core businesses. Founders of these firms frequently suggest that their products will solve ecological problems and eliminate animal suffering associated with conventional meat production. An agribusiness firm representative, however, explained to academic researchers that investments in the industry were both for growth and ‘defensive’ purposes. Fully replacing industrial livestock and aquaculture production is therefore unlikely, and cellular meat and fish will instead remain expensive niches. A small minority of consumers with ethical objections to conventional animal foods may be willing to pay more for cellular versions, but most consumers will not, even if they have sufficient incomes—especially if they are sceptical of the new technologies behind these products.

Investments in cellular agriculture are focused on business models that implement strong barriers to entry to potential competitors, such as through patents, trade secrets and enacting regulatory barriers, and that promise a high rate of return. This will lead to industries that are geographically centralized and controlled by a very small number of decision-makers, and result in greater vulnerability to disruption. This brittleness was illustrated by outbreaks of COVID-19 in workers in a substantial number of meat processing facilities worldwide, and plant shutdowns affecting as much as a quarter of pork processing in the United States. Other examples of food system shocks include a loss of nearly one-quarter of the world’s pigs due to African swine fever in 2018 and 2019, disruptions from the blockage of the Suez Canal by the ship Ever Given in 2021, and the global impacts of the conflict in Ukraine in 2022.

Cellular agriculture will probably continue to rely on feedstocks from conventional supply chains, such as derivatives of soya, maize, potatoes and wheat. Eat Just, for instance, recently entered into a joint development agreement with the grain/oilseed processor ADM for a growth medium for cellular meat. If these products actually do expand beyond a small niche, demand for monocultural crop production will also rise. The sustainability impacts of these chemical- and fossil-intensive production systems include resource depletion, pollution, land degradation and loss of biodiversity. The social impacts include taxpayer subsidies to lower the costs of production for these feedstocks in some nations (for example, the United States and Brazil) and negative effects on rural communities, due to industrialization, farm consolidation and a declining number of farmers. Unless current technical challenges are overcome, cellular meat will also rely on products of conventional meat processing firms, such as blood serum taken from foetal calves in dairy slaughterhouses.

Products arising from the cellular agriculture industry will continue to promote centre-of-plate dietary patterns. It will not shift eating behaviours towards more diverse and less processed foods, but instead encourage the substitution of conventional meat and fish products, particularly when cellular versions are widely available and/or less expensive. In many markets, even as sales of plant-based meat substitutes increase, meat consumption is not declining. This is an illustration of the ‘displacement paradox’, which results in little suppression of demand for the initial product when a substitute product is available, and is especially likely when the political economic context remains unchanged. One potential outcome, for example, is that cellular agricultural products will be sold as highly processed products (for example, burgers, sausages and nuggets), but not as more technically complex and more expensive full cuts of meat, which would instead continue to be produced primarily by concentrated animal feeding operations.

Cellular meat and fish do not challenge the inequities in global food systems, which produce enough to feed everyone in the world but fail to deliver food where it is most needed. The number of malnourished people has increased in recent years, and an estimated 720 million to 811 million people globally faced hunger in 2020. At the same time, substantial amounts of food are wasted—often deliberately when the practice leads to higher profits. This has not prevented proponents of cellular agriculture from advancing ‘feed the world’ narratives to justify their products as a technological fix, despite doing little to address poverty, social exclusion or other drivers of inequalities of food access.