Cellular Agriculture is About a Lot More Than Meat

When there is mention of cellular agriculture meat is the first thing of which people think, and not without reason. It seems that the earliest, largest, most publicized efforts have been in that area, and not accidentally. The high consumption of meat, its relatively great resource-intensiveness and general environmental impact, and the ethical issues it raises in regard to the treatment of animals, make the idea of being able to produce meat while relieving or eliminating the problems very attractive--with the possibility of more reliable supplies and lower prices making it more attractive still.

Yet it is far from being the case that meat, or animal products generally (similar initiatives exist in the areas of dairy, eggs, seafood, and even leather), are the sole object of such efforts. We are also seeing them in the production of plant-based foods (with word of cellular cocoa recently grabbing headlines), and even non-food items like textile fibers (such as cotton) and building materials (such as wood), in the hope of achieving similar environmental and economic advantages.
One may take the proliferation of such efforts, and their expansion into seemingly ever more areas, for a sign of confidence in the technology's progress. However, as one looks over the headlines one also notices that we hear far more about laboratory achievements and start-ups raising money than we do about actual products hitting the actual market. Indeed, after many, many years of being told that the consumer would be able to try "clean meat" for themselves not in some limited-scale special event in some faraway place but by buying it off the shelf at their local grocery store "before the end of this year" all that anyone looking for a burger or chicken nuggets or anything else made the conventional way still finds on offer are plant-based concoctions being sold (for now, at least) for rather more than "the real thing." Meanwhile the press, reflecting its longstanding prejudices (especially where anything that might alleviate environmental stress is concerned), gives the Malthusian-Luddite brigade ample platform space from which to sneer at the possibility and denounce the idea even if it were feasible--and with them, those vegans determined that carnivores desirous of "meat without guilt" shall have no escape from an all plant-based diet, forever.

I cannot say whether those trying to make cellular agriculture happen, or the naysayers, will prove right about the chances of clean meat becoming available to the consumer any time soon. I have simply seen too many technologies that looked promising, and even worked in the lab, fail to prove practical as a consumer good, and there is no doubt that we have already seen hopes raised and quashed here so many times in that way that has so often preceded interest in some concept fizzling out for a long while that I am put in mind of the self-driving car hype of recent years. Still, there is also no denying that those pursuing cellular agriculture have made enormous strides in reaching this point (the price of a burger made from cultured beef has fallen from $330,000 to $10 in a decade's time), while the good the technology can potentially do for a world in which it should never be forgotten that, contrary to what some seem to think, the problem of the vast majority of those living on the planet is that they have not too much but too little, is far too great to be dismissed.