Where’s the Beef?

On August 5, 2013, a man and a woman ate a burger. Not just any burger: a world-historical burger, made from cattle cells grown in a lab by Mark Post, a professor of vascular physiology at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. The burger had taken two years to produce and cost $330,000, 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 two hundred 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 fetal bovine serum, which is derived from cow fetuses. The cells eventually became twenty thousand strands of tissue, which in turn became a single, five-ounce patty. Post believed that beef produced this way had the potential to dramatically reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and slow climate change. 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. Afterward 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, roughly $150,000 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 $3 billion flooded into the sector. True believers claimed that cellular agriculture would not only fight climate change 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 think tank RethinkX predicted that cultivated meat would decimate the U.S. beef industry by 2030, reducing demand for the conventional variety by a whopping 70 percent. As the organization 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 up-front 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 and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. There was even, occasionally, the unwanted appearance of rodent DNA in research samples, which happened to the companies Upside and Eat Just.1 After peaking in 2021, investment began to fall off. In 2023, the industry raised a measly $177 million. But it wasn’t only venture capitalists who had started to grow skeptical 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. Governor Ron DeSantis made a media event out of signing the Florida 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’s producing even 10 percent 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 twenty years. The last meat I ever ate was a hot dog at Shea Stadium in 2007. I don’t remember how it tasted—probably like every other hot dog 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 hot dog 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? This question had begun to feel moot as the potential of cultivated meat grew less and less promising. But just when it seemed as though Post’s vision would never be realized, encouraging news emerged out of a surprising place: North Carolina. In May 2024, when many of his peers were fleeing the sector, Jeff Bezos granted $30 million through his Earth Fund to establish the Bezos Center for Sustainable Protein at North Carolina State University, an initiative dedicated to developing “dietary proteins that are environmentally friendly, healthy, tasty and affordable.” The donation cemented the state’s status as a new global center of the cultivated-meat industry. The Bezos Center would join the North Carolina Biotechnology Center, an economic-development organization for the life sciences in Research Triangle Park. On the commercial side of things, Believer Meats, an Israeli company producing cultivated chicken, had recently broken ground on a 200,000-square-foot manufacturing plant in Wilson, North Carolina. The plant would be the largest cultivated-meat facility in the world—capable, the company claimed, of producing twenty-one million pounds of engineered chicken per year. Last fall, Believer received a “No Questions” letter from the FDA, indicating that the agency did not encounter safety concerns in its inspection of the company’s products.2 “We are proud to be commercializing in this state, creating high-quality manufacturing jobs and enabling us to realize our vision to lead food innovations that care for the planet,” said Believer’s then CEO, a man named (for real) Gustavo Burger, in a press release celebrating the milestone. I got in touch with the company shortly after. In a Zoom meeting with Heather Hudson, Believer’s chief product and growth officer, and Rodrigo Lavall, from sales and marketing, the two dangled the possibility of a ribbon-cutting ceremony. They could tentatively plan something and invite me down to visit. The whole thing felt a bit Wonka-ish. No one from the press had been allowed inside the factory yet. Only a few professionals in the field had even toured it. Why should I get the golden ticket? But I tried not to