Sign In or Create an Account.

By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy

Lifestyle

Why Lab-Grown Meat Could Be Cooked Under Trump

Trump’s first administration supported it. But now there’s a new crowd coming into town.

Donald Trump in meat.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

The first Trump administration helped advance the dream of cultivated meat grown from animal cells. The second Trump administration might try to kill the dream.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who could control the fate of cultivated meat in America as President-elect Trump’s nominee for health secretary, has suggested that it’s an unsafe and unnatural corporate science experiment designed to enrich techno-billionaires. Vice President-elect JD Vance has called cultivated meat “disgusting,” Donald Trump, Jr. has proposed banning it, and Governor Ron DeSantis, Trump’s rumored backup choice for Pentagon secretary, has already banned it in Florida.

The timing is brutal for a potentially climate-friendly new industrythat had hoped to start competing with conventional meat in 2025. Cultivated meat executives are tryingto project optimism about the next four years, pointing out that President Trump’s aides created a constructive regulatory framework for their products during his first term. Republicans who support innovation, competition, and economic nationalism, they argue, ought to support high-tech manufacturing startups in the U.S. Trump ally Elon Musk’s own startup, SpaceX, has flown cultivated meat into space, while his brother Kimbal, an investor in the cultivated meat venture Upside Foods, once cooked its slaughter-free chicken on stage at a CNN event.

Still, the industry is clearly nervous. Trumpworld is divided on food issues between “Make America Healthy Again” techno-skeptics like Kennedy and conventional Republicans aligned with traditional livestock industries, but there’s opposition to cultivated meat on both sides of that divide. Cultivated meat executives met with their regulators from the Food and Drug Administration and U.S. Department of Agriculture last month at Tufts University,and while several attendees told me the discussion focused on how to get safe cultivated products to market, everyone in the room knew that roadmight get blocked on January 20.

San Francisco-based Mission Barns is waiting for FDA approval to blend its cultivated pork fat into plant-based meatballs and bacon; it already has photos on its website of the boxes it intends to sell in supermarkets. But its leaders are keenly aware that Kennedy may soon oversee the FDA — and that he’s expressed the same kind of doubts about “lab-grown meat” that he’s expressed about food dyes, genetically modified grain, and heavily processed foods in general.

“The election really shouldn’t affect our safety review. We know these folks care about protecting the American economy and ensuring American self-sufficiency,” Bianca Lê, the head of external affairs for Mission Barns, told me. “Obviously, though, anything can happen.”

One source close to Kennedy told me he probably wouldn’t propose banning what he calls “lab-grown meat,” but he’s likely to create regulatory hurdles that could keep startups like Mission Barns in perpetual limbo. When I asked if that meant making applicants for FDA approval jump through a million hoops, the Kennedy ally replied: “Maybe half a million.”

Growing meat from animal cells without killing animals was just a science-fiction fantasy until 2013, when the Dutch scientist Mark Post unveiled a burger patty he grew in his lab from bovine cells. That single burger cost $330,000 to produce, but investors poured more than $3 billion into hundreds of cultivated meat and seafood ventures over the next decade. Since then, they’ve brought down their costs per poundby about 99.99%.

Culturing cells into meat is still not as cheap as growing meat inside animals, but the startups are only making tiny quantities, and they’re confident they can approach price parity with animal products once they can scale up their production. The Israeli firm Believer Meats is building America’s first commercial-scale cultivated meat plant in North Carolina, and several other startups are planning to build U.S. factories once they receive regulatory approval.

But that’s been a slow process.

Trump’sfirst-term FDA head, Scott Gottlieb, and Agriculture Secretary, Sonny Perdue, worked with cultivated meat startups as well as conventional meat interests to create a joint regulatory process that almost everyone liked. In 2023, the Biden administration gave the Bay Area startups Upside (with investors including Cargill and Tyson as well as Kimbal Musk and Bill Gates) and Good Meat (the cultivated spin-off of the plant-based egg company Eat Just)the go-ahead to sell cultivated chicken filets.

But both companies envisioned the filets as proof-of-concept marketing plays to demonstrate that slaughter-free animal meat was real, not mass-market products they could take to commercial scale. Both sold their chicken to a limited number of diners in just one restaurant, and both ended the promotions this year.

So cultivated meat is currently unavailable in America. It’s illegal in Florida and Alabama, which both enacted bans in May. That leaves more than two dozen companies, including Upside and Good Meat, waiting for FDA approval for less expensive products they can take to market. Upside hopesto sell a product mixing cultivated chicken shreds with plant proteins at a price point competitive with organic chicken. Startups like Blue Nalu, which is cultivating bluefin tuna toro in San Diego, and Wildtype, which is cultivating salmon nigiri in San Francisco, believe they’ll be able to compete with high-end seafoodas soon as they can get the federal go-ahead and build commercial factories.

The industry’s party line is that its products are safe, it’s been cooperative with regulators, and it has no reason to expect political meddling by the new political appointees.

“I don’t see the Trump administration doing bold nanny-state policy that interferes with consumer freedom,” Suzi Gerber, a nutrition scientist who leads the Association for Meat, Poultry and Seafood Innovation, an industry trade group, told me. “I think they’re going to end up on the side of American businesses and innovators, supporting the American dream.”

Globally, the strongest arguments for cultivated meat have usually emphasized the downsides of animal agriculture. Livestock operations use about a third of the land on Earth, driving much of the world’s deforestation, and cattle are a leading source of planet-warming methane. Cultivated meat would avoid those problems — as well as concerns about the mistreatment of animals and slaughterhouse workers, the overuse of antibiotics, and the fouling of rivers and lakes with manure.

But Trump doesn’t seem concerned about any of those problems, and even tech icon Musk, who used to talk a lot about climate change when his main focus was Tesla’s electric cars, falsely claimed on Joe Rogan’s podcast that the idea that animal agriculture contributes to global warming is “hot bullshit.” So the alternative protein sector, like the clean energy sector, is learning to speak the MAGA language of economic nationalism, arguing that if the U.S. regulatory process bogs down, nations like Singapore, Israel, and China will dominate the future of literal factory farming.

“The first Trump administration was very clear that it wanted this kind of innovation to stay in this country,” Upside founder and CEO Uma Valeti told me. “This isn’t about getting rid of animal meat. It’s about creating the next great American industry.”

The second Trump administration seems more likely to pick on any industry associated with the kind of climate concerns aired by Democrats. It doesn’t help that cultivated meat is also considered a threat by cattlemen and other livestock interests who reliably support Republicans. And then, of course, there’s RFK.

“I can’t remember ever seeing this level of uncertainty,” Eric Schulze, a molecular biologist and former FDA regulator who consults for several cultivated meat startups, told me. “The new team will have to decide if it supports typical Republican values of free enterprise and entrepreneurship, or if they want to create an over-regulatory environment that would be a first for the FDA under conservative leadership. The honest answer is we don’t know.”

The Biden administration isn’t rushing to approve applications before leaving office, and there’s not much the companies can do except wait. After the frenzy of interest and venture funding around cultivated meat several years ago, some once-promising startups have shut down, including New Age Eats and Sci-Fi Foods.

Wildtype raised more than $120 million during the initial burst, and it’s got a nice story to tell about producing nutritious salmon without pesticides, antibiotics, or microplastics in the U.S., instead of depleting wild salmon stocks or relying on environmentally damaging fish farms overseas. CEO Justin Kolbeck is confident that once it reaches commercial scale, growing fish filets from cells in a brewery will be more efficient and cheaper than feeding fish that have to swim, poop, and grow guts, tails, and bones that people don’t eat. But he’s got 85 employees, and he’s burning through his cash.

“How long can we wait? Not forever, that’s for sure,” Kolbeck told me. “But we try not to get too spun up about stuff we can’t control. Startups have a million ways to die, and regulatory delays are just one of them.”

You’re out of free articles.

Subscribe today to experience Heatmap’s expert analysis 
of climate change, clean energy, and sustainability.
To continue reading
Create a free account or sign in to unlock more free articles.
or
Please enter an email address
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Climate

AM Briefing: How Clean Energy Fared in Q1

On earnings, a DOJ memo, and flying cars

How Clean Energy Fared in Q1
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Current conditions: Yosemite could get 9 inches of snow between now and Sunday Temperatures will rise to as high as 104 degrees Fahrenheit in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, as Central and Southeast Asia continue to bake in a heatwave Hail, tornadoes, and severe thunderstorms will pummel the U.S. Heartland into early next week.

THE TOP FIVE

1. Tariffs, uncertainty were the themes of the week in clean energy Q1 calls

It was a busy week of earnings calls for the clean energy sector, which, as a whole, saw investment dip by nearly $8 billion in the first three months of the year. Tariffs — especially as they impact the battery supply chain — as well as changes to federal policy under the new administration and electricity demand were the major themes of the week, my colleague Matthew Zeitlin wrote.

Keep reading...Show less
Yellow
Sparks

The First Sign the U.S. Oil and Gas Sector Is Pulling Back

Three weeks after “Liberation Day,” Matador Resources says it’s adjusting its ambitions for the year.

Money and an oil rig.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

America’s oil and gas industry is beginning to pull back on investments in the face of tariffs and immense oil price instability — or at least one oil and gas company is.

While oil and gas executives have been grousing about low prices and inconsistent policy to any reporter (or Federal Reserve Bank) who will listen, there’s been little actual data about how the industry is thinking about what investments to make or not make. That changed on Wednesday when the shale driller Matador Resources reported its first quarter earnings. The company said that it would drop one rig from its fleet of nine, cutting $100 million of capital costs.

Keep reading...Show less
Yellow
Climate Tech

Rise and Grind Through the Apocalypse

At San Francisco Climate Week, everything is normal — until it very much isn’t.

San Francisco.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

San Francisco Climate Week started off on Monday with an existential bang. Addressing an invite-only crowd at the Exploratorium, a science museum on the city’s waterfront, former vice president and long-time climate advocate Al Gore put the significance and threat of this political moment — and what it means for the climate — in the most extreme terms possible. That is to say, he compared the current administration under President Trump to Nazi Germany.

“I understand very well why it is wrong to compare Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich to any other movement. It was uniquely evil,” Gore conceded before going on: “But there are important lessons from the history of that emergent evil.” Just as German philosophers in the aftermath of World War II found that the Nazis “attacked the very heart of the distinction between true and false,” Gore said, so too is Trump’s administration “trying to create their own preferred version of reality,” in which we can keep burning fossil fuels forever. With his voice rising and gestures increasing in vigor, Gore ended his speech on a crescendo. “We have to protect our future. And if you doubt for one moment, ever, that we as human beings have that capacity to muster sufficient political will to solve this crisis, just remember that political will is itself a renewable resource.”

Keep reading...Show less
Green