The Murky Campaign to Discredit Lab-Grown Meat

A new public information campaign against cultivated—or “lab-grown”—meat is being run by a group with close links to a controversial public relations firm. The group has launched TV adverts and a website purportedly to educate the public about cultivated meat, but its approach—which draws on a PR playbook previously used to discredit the plant-based meat industry—has been criticized by supporters of the cultivated meat industry who claim these campaigns are deceptive and unscientific.

The campaign was launched in 2023 by the Center for the Environment and Welfare (CEW)—a group led by executive director Jack Hubbard, who is also a partner at public relations firm Berman and Company, which has a long history of supporting nonprofits that defend the interests of the food and drink industry. Hubbard told WIRED that Berman and Company helps provide services for CEW, but he would not disclose a list of the campaign group’s funders.

“Everything we’re doing is designed to educate and inform consumers,” Hubbard says of CEW’s work. But Jessica Alamy, senior vice president of policy at the nonprofit Good Food Institute, which works to accelerate adoption of alternatives to animal protein, alleges that CEW is a source of misinformation. “I think it is attempting to stoke fear about a clear, safe choice that’s on a few restaurant menus in the United States and Singapore,” she claims.

One advert that ran on Fox News features some cultivated meat being presented at a fictional school science fair by a child, who says that the cells “grow like a tumor” and are “bath[ed] with chemicals.” CEW has also set up a website that compares the cells used to grow cultivated meat with tumor cells, drawing heavily from an article published by Bloomberg Businessweek in February 2023 that raised fears about immortalized cells. These are a type of cell prized by the cultivated meat industry because they duplicate indefinitely, making it much easier to grow large quantities of meat from small samples of cells.

An unlimited ability to grow is also a hallmark of cancer cells, although it is far from the only aspect that makes a cell cancerous. Scientists interviewed for the Bloomberg Businessweek piece stated that it was “essentially impossible” for people to get cancer from eating even cancerous animal cells. As cultivated meats made from immortalized cells have been assessed by food regulators in the US, Singapore, and Australia, these regulators have concluded that they are safe for humans to consume. (Meanwhile, the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer lists red meat as “probably carcinogenic,” and beef from cows with cancer has found its way into the food system before.)

CEW’s campaign taps into fears that people might have already about novel foods, says Chris Bryant, a research consultant who specializes in cultivated meat. One section of the microsite set up by CEW lists a number of chemicals that it says might be used in the production of cultivated meat. “If one wants people to tend to reject cultivated meat more, that framing is there to be exploited. It’s entirely predictable,” Bryant says.

Alamy said that the suggestion that ingesting immortalized cells could be linked to cancer in humans was “so ludicrous as to be laughable.” “So few people have had cultivated meat or have access to it that it feels like these things that are being raised are more fearmongering than anything else,” she says. “It feels like it’s taking advantage of consumers’ unfamiliarity with this product.”

The CEW website and ad campaign is reminiscent of a similar campaign targeting the plant-based meat industry by the Center for Consumer Freedom (CCF), another US campaign group. One advert the CCF ran during the 2020 Super Bowl featured a mock spelling bee where students struggled to spell some ingredients found in plant-based burgers. “You might need a PhD to understand what’s in synthetic meat,” ran the voiceover. Founded by Rick Berman in 1996, the CCF has a long history of campaigning against plant-based meat, animal welfare charities, and legislation to ban the sale of animal fur.

The latest campaign from CEW also criticizes the environmental credentials of cultivated meat, citing a preprint study that found that cultivated meat could have 25 times the carbon footprint of regular beef. The study was widely picked up in the press and drew criticism from the Good Food Institute for detailing unlikely production methods relying on very high levels of ingredient purification. Other studies have found that cultivated meat could have much lower carbon emissions than conventional beef, although until manufacturers scale up production, it is difficult to know exactly how emissions-intensive production might be.

Bryant says that the CEW website seems to deliberately select material that puts cultivated meat in the worst possible light. “It’s presented information to inspire more concern than is warranted,” he says.

In response to the criticisms raised in this article, Hubbard says that “CEW is simply presenting existing research, the opinion of subject matter experts, and a commonsense perspective to Americans so they can make up their own minds. Consumers stand to benefit from a robust debate.”

The future of the nascent industry is still highly uncertain, with most work in cultivated meat being carried out by privately funded startups. There has been some government support for the technology, however. In 2021 the US Department of Agriculture gave a $10 million grant to Tufts University in Boston for work on cultivated meat, and there have also been government grants in the UK, Israel, and the Netherlands.

But some lawmakers are pushing back against cultivated meat. In November 2023, the Italian parliament passed a law prohibiting the use, sale, import, and export of feed “from cell cultures or tissue derived from vertebrate animals.” In Arizona, a bill seeking to prohibit the labeling of cultivated animal cells as “meat” was introduced by state representative Quang Nguyen in January, while legislation that would limit the labeling or sales of cultivated meat have also been proposed in Florida and Texas.

Alamy says that she hopes the campaigning from CEW doesn’t stymy the opportunity for customers in the US and beyond to eventually try cultivated meat and decide for themselves whether they’ll buy it again. “This is about consumer choice and innovation. We’re really excited to see cultivated meat come to market, and hopeful that consumers, once they have an opportunity to try it, are going to find that it fits into their life and it’s delicious and affordable.”