Lab-grown meat was supposed to save the world. What happened?

We were promised a panacea for the climate crisis and a way to save our food system. So why is nobody firing up the chicken vats? I went to find out

On 5 August 2013, a man and a woman ate a burger. Not just any burger: a world-historic burger, made from cattle cells grown in a laboratory by Mark Post , a professor of vascular physiology at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. The burger had taken two years to produce and cost €250,000 (about £210,000 at the time), money furnished by the Google co-founder Sergey Brin. Now it was being tasted in public for the first time at Riverside Studios in London, at an event attended by 200 members of the press and livestreamed to thousands.

To make this particular burger, Post had extracted stem cells from the shoulder muscle of a living cow, then cultivated them in plastic containers filled with a nutrient-rich supplement called foetal bovine serum, which is derived from cow foetuses. The cells eventually became 20,000 strands of tissue, which in turn became a single 140g patty. Post believed that beef produced this way had the potential to dramatically reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and slow the climate crisis. Raising cattle for consumption requires massive amounts of land and water – and massive amounts of feed grown at a high environmental cost. He projected that global demand for meat would soon outstrip our ability to produce it the old-fashioned way, at which point our food systems would become unsustainable. But that didn’t have to mean a mass recalibration of our consumption habits or a global shift away from red meat. Post and his team had found another way.

Standing at a blond-wood island on an otherwise empty soundstage, Post lifted the kind of stainless-steel cloche usually found on a room service cart to reveal his creation . The raw patty sat in a petri dish on a bare plate, where it shone wetly under the studio lights. With the ITV London anchor Nina Hossain presiding, a Cornish chef named Richard McGeown pan-fried the burger in sunflower oil and butter for two volunteer tasters: Josh Schonwald, the Chicago-based author of The Taste of Tomorrow: Dispatches from the Future of Food , and Hanni Rützler, an Austrian nutrition scientist. So precious was this meat that they were given just the one burger to share between them. It was served deconstructed, alongside a sesame-seed bun, lettuce and tomato – showmanship to sell the burger a bit, give it context. The patty itself was reddish brown, flat and perfectly circular. When Schonwald and Rützler cut it, the burger did not bleed.

The two of them ate with forks and knives, passing the plate, sawing off thoughtful bites. Chewing slowly. Afterwards, they rendered their verdicts. “I would say it is somewhere on the spectrum between a Boca Burger and McDonald’s,” Schonwald told a reporter from NBC. “The absence of fat makes a big difference. It has the texture, which I was not expecting. It was like an animal-protein cake.” Rützler noted the burger’s blandness to a reporter from Science . “There is room for improvement here,” she said. At the end of the event, about €113,000 worth of burger remained uneaten. But none of this stopped Post from predicting that meat cultivated in a lab would become a consumer product within the decade.

The event – the theatrical reveal, the PR spectacle – triggered a kind of gold rush. One hundred and forty companies sprang up in six continents, trying to replicate what Post had done with beef across a range of other species: chicken, pork, fish, even quail. Investment to the tune of $3bn (£2.2bn) flooded into the sector. True believers claimed that cellular agriculture would not only fight the climate crisis and global food insecurity but also slow the spread of zoonotic disease and antibiotic resistance. A company called Upside Foods touted its plans to “set the new standard for meat” and to “make meat a force of good in the world”. A company called Vow created an enormous woolly mammoth meatball , though no one was allowed to eat it, since the DNA came from a fossil and the company didn’t know whether it was actually fit for human consumption. The thinktank RethinkX predicted that cultivated meat would decimate the US beef industry by 2030, reducing demand for the conventional variety by a whopping 70%. As the organisation wrote, “We are already on the cusp of the deepest, fastest, most consequential disruption in food and agricultural production since the first domestication of plants and animals 10,000 years ago.”

And yet, despite the frenzy, the meat itself never arrived. The challenges were numerous. There was the exorbitant upfront cost of building manufacturing facilities and the daunting amounts of energy required to run them. There was the difficulty of producing sufficient quantities of the stuff, at a price point low enough for people to buy. There was the lack of a highly skilled workforce trained to operate the new technology. There were rounds and rounds of inspections by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the US Department of Agriculture (USDA). There was even, occasionally, the unwanted appearance of rodent DNA in research samples, which happened to the companies Upside and Eat Just. After peaking in 2021, investment began to fall off. In 2023, the industry raised a measly $177m globally.

But it wasn’t only venture capitalists who had started to grow sceptical of cultivated meat. The technology soon became a target of conservatives. The state governments of Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Indiana, Montana, Nebraska and Texas moved in quick succession to legislate against cultivated meat, passing laws that banned its sale, production, or both. The Florida governor Ron DeSantis made a media event out of signing that state’s law, posing for pictures in front of a blood-stained cutting board piled high with steaks. “Take your fake lab-grown meat elsewhere,” he said. “We’re not doing that in the state of Florida.” In 2024, the industrial biotech consultant Joel Stone told the New York Times that, if he had to put odds on it, the likelihood of the industry producing even 10% of the meat supply in the foreseeable future “would be zero”. Today, cultivated meat is available for purchase at just one store in the world: Huber’s Butchery in Singapore , where customers can buy packages of lab-grown chicken shreds from a manufacturer called GOOD Meat.

These developments were inconvenient for me, a person who became obsessed with the prospect of tasting cell-grown meat just as the possibility of ever doing so seemed to recede before my eyes. I was enthralled by the story of the meat, which seemed to contain so much of what defined this era of American life: dubious techno-optimism, bombastic culture-war posturing, carnival oddities like the mammoth meatball. It presented a snarl of competing motives, a mix of altruism and cold-blooded striving for capital (nothing can ever exist just for the common good; it has to make someone a billionaire). There was also the fact that I had been a vegetarian for almost 20 years.

The last meat I ever ate was a hotdog at Shea Stadium in New York in 2007. I don’t remember how it tasted – probably like every other hotdog I had eaten before. I washed it down with an exorbitantly priced but very cold Budweiser in one of those metal bottles. I quit eating meat after that, not because the hotdog had been disgusting but because I didn’t like the sensation of the inevitable bad bite, the periodic tangle with gristle or tendon or bone. Then my abstention grew into habit, and the habit was reinforced by other concerns: the catastrophic environmental consequences of industrial meat production; the creeping doubt, as I grow older, that I’m necessarily higher in the cosmic order than a chicken or a cow. But cultivated meat raised a compelling question. If you could subtract some of the downsides – make meat less destructive, engineer away its aesthetic flaws – what reason would there be not to eat it?