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.