Hey readers,

Can we end factory farming in the next few decades with meat grown from cells and not from animals?

I’d really like the answer to be “yes.” Factory farming poses one of the most horrible ethical challenges of our time. We’re torturing animals by the billions, pumping CO2 and methane into the atmosphere, and breeding potential pandemic diseases. And the operation of raising and slaughtering billions of animals for meat each year is done by a disproportionately Black and immigrant workforce paid low wages for some of the most dangerous work in America.

These problems are not a secret, and most people profess to not liking the state of things. But there has been little appetite for big changes, because the system produces meat incredibly cheaply — and people really value eating meat. And as the world gets richer, demand for meat is projected to just keep increasing.

It would be a huge deal if we could get that meat without animal cruelty and the other costs to society. But reforming factory farming at a sufficient scale to end animal and human suffering seems unlikely. And convincing everyone to stop eating meat is never going to happen. So it seems that meat alternatives — in particular, cultivated meat, as many in the industry call it — loom as especially pivotal in the effort to change how humanity eats.

Cultivated meat is animal meat produced from cell lines, rather than from animals raised and slaughtered for that purpose. The hope is that the process can produce meat that doesn’t just taste the same but actually is the same on a cellular level — and that we can transition to this form of production and away from factory farms.

But what are the prospects of that? Not soon, and maybe never, if a recent exhaustive rundown in the Counter, a food news outlet, is anything to go by.

Its depressing takeaway, which has sparked anguished conversation in some animal welfare circles, is that this “perfect fix” to the massive dilemma of factory farming won’t be able to get off the ground.

Everyone in the cultivated meat industry agrees there are tons of major technical challenges ahead, but the Counter lays out the case that the problem isn’t just something clever engineering will solve: Even at scale, and even if technically feasible, it seems too expensive to make cultivated meat products competitive with factory-farmed ones. (To be clear, forecasting technological breakthroughs isn’t easy, and while the Counter analysis is in-depth, it’s certainly not definitive.)

The discussion around the piece by people interested in making cultivated meat happen only affirms much of that gloomy conclusion: The dream of factories that can grow steaks as good as factory-farmed meat, at a comparable price point, looks very far off, if it’s achievable at all.

Setting aside how accurate that prognostication is — I happen to buy it — the question now is what this ought to mean for the fight to end animal suffering.

Making cultivated meat a deliberate policy choice

It wouldn’t be surprising if cultivated meat — if we did end up producing it at scale — will end up costing more than the animal meat grown on factory farms. The latter kind of meat is grown cheaply, but at the expense of profoundly inhumane conditions. If you’re not including negative externalities like pollution, greenhouse gases, inhumane worker conditions, and animal suffering, among others, then it stands to reason factory farming will retain a price edge.

Given that, maybe it’ll never be as cheap to produce a chicken sandwich humanely as it is to make it by cramming tens of thousands of genetically engineered chickens with debilitating skeletal problems in an ammonia-filled barn and slaughtering them for their meat.

But can we at least narrow the price gap between the two products — to at least make the ethically minded consumer think twice about their purchase? And can policy have a role in making that happen?

Think of it like this. Safe well-made cars cost more than dangerous, shoddily constructed cars, structurally sound housing costs more than structurally unsound housing, and factories that follow basic workplace safety rules cost more to run than factories that don’t. Yet rich societies like the US have instituted policies that establish thresholds for car, building, and workplace safety, even if such regulations bring costs. We’ve simply decided, as a society, that the cost is worth it.

If we as a society decided to take the same mindset to the meat we eat — and to the development and growth of cultivated meat as an option — what would that look like in terms of policy?

For starters, the country would subsidize R&D for cultivated meat, not unlike how the US injected massive resources into the development of clean energy with the Obama-era stimulus. A jolt of public investment — think of it as a “moonshot” — could give this research area real momentum.

Such a policy agenda would also push for regulations reducing carbon and methane emissions from factory farms. There’d be new regulations requiring better conditions for workers. There’d be an effort to clamp down against the overuse of antibiotics in our factory farms (among its other horrors, factory farming is also a breeding ground of disease — and possibly the next pandemic). Not least of all, there would be bans on cruel practices against animals.

Assuming such policies narrow the price gap — and yes, that’s a big assumption — would consumers go for cultivated meat? Voters in multiple states have supported better conditions for farmed animals when the issue is on the ballot, even when factory farming lobbyists vehemently warn that those reforms will raise prices. I think that there’s actually a broad coalition in America for more ethically produced food, and that people are willing to vote for it and willing to, at least to some degree, pay for it.

Currently, cultivated meat is barely commercially available, and it’s unclear how much it costs to produce. Startup estimates range from $100 per pound of beef to $16 per pound for a plant/cultivated hybrid chicken breast. Those prices are never going to significantly change the animal product market. But if production costs drop, a transition could become possible, even if prices don’t drop all the way to parity.

—Kelsey Piper, @kelseytuoc