24-05-2025
The pros and cons of lab-grown meat
The miniature mouthfuls in front of me looked like any other small plates at an upmarket restaurant. First, a smoked chicken salad with raisins, pickles and celery on top of a brioche, followed by slices of grilled, glazed chicken breast on a bed of pomme purée, beetroot rings and cauliflower.
Each were flavoursome and utterly delectable, perhaps unsurprisingly as they had been dished up especially for me by a chef who once worked for Noma, the Copenhagen gastronomic mecca feted as one of the world's finest restaurants.
Yet the experience came with a certain curiosity, and perhaps even a little apprehension, for the chicken was unlike any I had sampled before. Instead of originating from a poultry farm, it had come from cells which had been grown in a giant stainless steel drum called a bioreactor. It was my first experience of tasting lab-grown meat.
When I mentioned this to my friends and family, reactions ranged from intrigue to outright disgust. The concept of your future Sunday roast being grown in a bioreactor doesn't appeal to everyone, but successive UK governments have made it clear that this technology isn't going away. Since 2020, the UK has invested more than £75 million of public funding into research projects for various alternative protein sources, including lab-grown meat, to find new ways of meeting the protein needs – the demand for meat is expected to double in the next 25 years – of our growing population.
To better understand this vision of the future and what it might mean for our health, I had paid a visit to Good Meat, a Californian startup and one of the world's largest purveyors of lab-grown or cultivated meat (the preferred term used by startups, investors and regulators) in the summer of 2023 to try the 'food' myself.
But it all begs the question: when lab-grown meat become more widely available, should we really be consuming our food in this way? And, perhaps most importantly, will it have a positive or a negative effect on our health?
So what are the health pros and cons of lab-grown food?
The pros
1. It is very similar to the real thing
Sampling Good Meat's small plates taught me two things. Firstly, both the taste, smell and appearance of lab-grown meat are almost indistinguishable to the meat we're accustomed to, which shouldn't really be a surprise as unlike veggie burgers and Quorn, it's constructed from genuine animal cells. And it's also only going to get even more realistic. New reports from the University of Tokyo reveal that Japanese scientists have figured out a way of 'growing' chicken nuggets, by generating much larger fillets of lab-grown chicken, several centimetres thick. This has been achieved by using a new technology which mimics blood vessels, enabling chicken cells to be grown in layers of muscle tissue, resulting in a more typical texture.
2. Fewer disease risks
The emergence of lab-grown foods could potentially protect us from various harmful contaminants. Another Californian startup, BlueNalu, is producing cultivated seafood and Lauran Madden, the company's chief technology officer, says that producing seafood by culturing and growing cells in production facilities, rather than catching it at sea, can prevent consumers from ingesting chemicals like mercury which can accumulate in fatty fish such as tuna.
Likewise, while conventional factory farms force animals to live in close proximity to each other in cramped spaces, facilitating the spread of bacterial and viral pathogens, cultivated meat may protect us from some of these dangerous diseases as it's produced in sterile facilities.
Jeremy Hux, an executive at Upside Foods, a start-up looking to commercialise cultivated shredded chicken made from a combination of chicken cells and plant proteins, points to the latest outbreak of bird flu in the US, which has been spreading in poultry farms. Hux also highlights how factory farms rely on the heavy use of antibiotics to try to mitigate the spread of bacterial infections, but this has only led to a burgeoning crisis of antibiotic-resistant superbugs.
3. There is less chance of food poisoning
Independent researchers agree that lab-grown foods have the potential to play a role in protecting us from these threats. 'First and foremost, we won't run the risk of food poisoning because cultivated meat, fish or seafood is produced in a clean environment with minimal risk of contamination,' says Eirini Theodosiou, a cellular agriculture researcher at Aston University, who carries out independent research on cultivated meat. 'They're made in an antibiotic-free environment, and there's tight quality control over the end product so you can ensure that things like microplastics don't end up in our bodies.'
4. It could have a higher and healthier nutritional value
Because lab-grown meat or fish is created in such a controlled environment, there's also the tantalising possibility of being able to deliberately engineer these foods so that they have heightened nutritional value, or fewer compounds like the nitrates present in processed meat, which have been linked to a heightened risk of chronic illnesses.
'One of the advantages of cultivated meat is the fact that you can feed the chicken or cow cells growing in the bioreactor with certain nutrients that lead to a nutritional profile which is healthier than conventional meat,' says Ramiro Alberio, a developmental biology professor at the University of Nottingham.
Theodosiou suggests that a lab-grown steak could contain extra vitamins, omega-3 fatty acids and fibre, through combining meat cells which provide the flavour and texture of steak with additional plant proteins. There is yet to be any independent data demonstrating this, but the possibility has been widely discussed in the past few years.
'In the future, it may even be possible to grow beef with the same fatty acid profile as salmon,' suggests Hux.
The cons
1. It could be yet another ultra-processed food
There is a risk that lab-grown meat could end up becoming another range of ultra-processed foods, similar to the many plant-based meat alternatives which have emerged in the past decade, with dubious nutritional value.
Tim Benton, a professor and food systems expert at the University of Leeds, fears that this eventuality is likely. Because of the current expense of producing lab-grown meat, there are indications that startups are already producing products which are predominantly plant proteins, blended with a tiny proportion of meat cells. For example, a company called Meatly recently launched a new line of dog food containing lab-grown meat, but a closer inspection revealed that its cultivated chicken meat comprised just four per cent of the product.
Benton is concerned that cultivated meat startups will end up generating products more akin to burgers and ready meals, with lab-grown animal cells mixed in with less healthy filler ingredients, because of the need to compete on a price basis with conventional meat.
'In theory, [these] alternative meats could be engineered to have different nutritional properties that potentially could have health benefits,' he says. 'But my gut feeling is that this is less likely than highly processed foods with negative health consequences, because this is where the volume market is likely to drive the field.'
2. There could still be contamination
While there might be no zoonotic disease risk – where an infectious disease like bird flu has jumped from an animal to humans – Tuck Seng Wong, a professor of nonmanufacturing at the University of Sheffield, explains that with any product made through growing and cultivating living cells, there is always a certain risk of food poisoning through contamination.
Prof Wong explains that because animal cells grow much slower compared with bacteria and viruses, it would be possible for lab-grown meat to become contaminated with a pathogen if food safety standards were to slip.
'If the manufacturers weren't careful enough or taking care of the hygiene, bacterial contamination can happen,' he says.
However at the same time, Prof Wong points out that this is unlikely to occur as both manufacturers of lab-grown meat and regulators are both well aware of this particular risk. 'I think that the chances of the public being exposed to contamination in this manner is low, because all products will be subject to very rigorous food safety and hygiene standards,' he adds.
3. It is likely to be very expensive and hard to get hold of
As you might note from the photos, the portions I sampled were bite-sized, which reflects the vast expense of generating animal protein or fish in a bioreactor. Because of this, the majority of the first lab-grown products to be sold in the UK are likely to be premium ones such as high-end steak or tuna, and available only in select locations such as high-end restaurants and sushi venues.
4. The possibility of unknown long-term risks to our health
In 2023, Bloomberg Businessweek published a feature with the provocative title: 'Lab-grown meat has a bigger problem than the lab.'
It called into question the fact that a number of companies producing cultivated meat are doing so using so-called immortalised cells, which means they have been modified to proliferate indefinitely, unlike normal cells which cease to divide after a while.
However, most people have never consumed immortalised cells, and while they have a long history in medical research, they are technically precancerous.
This doesn't mean that consuming lab-grown meat will give you cancer. In fact, independent cancer researchers have insisted that it would be impossible for immortalised animal cells to cause cancer, because they aren't human, and so are not capable of replicating inside the human body.
But at the same time, no one can be certain that consuming immortalised cells on a long-term basis is completely safe. 'I think that it's relatively unlikely [that there would be a risk],' says Benton. 'There's no indication that will be a high-risk concern.'
Instead, the more realistic question is whether lab-grown meat startups will ever be able to produce it in the quantities required for supermarkets to offer lab-grown and conventional meat side by side.
In the decades to come, this may ultimately become a reality. But with many UK consumers still sceptical of this prospect, researchers admit that it may take a while to overcome our inherent aversion to strange, new foods and what benefits they will really have for our health.
