The State of Lab-Grown Meat in 2025
Good, Bad, Pointless?
My Medium friends can read this story over there as well.
2025 is a weird split-screen year for cultivated meat. You know, the kind of meat that comes out of lab.
On one side, you’ve got real regulatory progress, pilot products, and serious science.
On the other, bans, labeling fights, and brutal unit economics.
Our future of dinner is currently stuck between the lab and the legislature.
What actually happened with lab meat?
1930–1931: Early visionary predictions by Frederick Edwin Smith and Winston Churchill about growing meat in labs instead of raising whole animals.
1950s: Willem van Eelen begins pioneering tissue culture techniques aimed at producing cultured meat.
1998: Jon Vein secures the first patent for producing lab-grown meat tissue for human consumption.
2001: NASA starts experiments on cultured turkey meat; patents filed for cultured meat production.
2002: The first edible lab-grown meat sample is produced: a fish fillet from cultured goldfish cells.
2003: Harvard Medical School researchers produce a frog-stem-cell-based edible “steak.”
2008: First international conferences and a $1 million prize offered by PETA to stimulate development.
2013: First public tasting of a cultured beef hamburger patty created by Mark Post’s lab in the Netherlands.
2015: Cost of cultured hamburger drops dramatically from over $300,000 to under $12 per patty.
2016: Rise of companies like Memphis Meats and funding accelerates with new venture capital; the Good Food Institute founded to promote cellular agriculture.
2020: Singapore becomes the first country to approve cultivated chicken for sale.
2023: U.S. FDA and USDA approve Upside Foods and GOOD Meat to sell cultivated chicken; kitchen tastings begin in top restaurants in the U.S.
2024: Israel approves cultivated beef (Aleph Farms); Singapore sees the first retail product containing cultivated meat.
2024–2025: U.S. state bans occur in Florida, Alabama, and Texas; Europe awaits EFSA Novel Food approval; Italy bans production/marketing nationally.
So, the idea of lab-grown meat has been around almost 100 years. It’s been 75 since scientists got tissue culture techniques working, and 25 years since the first working sample.
It’s been long in the making. And now that it’s getting good, officials shut production down.
Why?
Where the science and scaling really are
Nobody is printing ribeye steaks at Costco.
The tough part is scale. Moving from gram-level to tons of affordable, consistent product has two gnarly issues:
Bioreactors & biology: Growing animal cells at density, without contamination, at food-grade cost, is hard. Academic and industry analyses still show costs far above commodity chicken or pork, even though they’ve fallen from the “$300k burger” era to realistic but not mass-market levels.
Inputs & media: Making animal-free growth media that’s cheap and works at scale is even tougher. Lots of progress here in 2024/25 (enzyme-made growth factors, process optimization, AI-assisted media design), but the bill of materials is still a lot to handle.
We’ve made a lot of progress here over the past 5 years. So why the sudden bans and issues now?
There are two quotes people throw at each other:
“Lab-grown meat is not natural (and therefore not healthy).”
versus
“Our way of raising animals now is also not natural: we fatten them fast, pump them with antibiotics, then eat them.”
Let’s unpack “not natural = not healthy”
“Natural” is a vibes word.
Health and safety are regulated. In the U.S., cultivated chicken went through FDA premarket review and USDA inspection.
In the EU, anything sold must pass EFSA’s Novel Food safety assessment. Israel’s approval for cultivated beef came after its Health Ministry’s review.
This is how “healthy/safe” is determined in modern food systems: by data, dossiers, and inspectors, not by whether something grew in a field or a fermenter.
Natural is not the point. Healthy and safe is.
Also, cultivated meat isn’t “fake meat.” As much as people want to call it that. It’s muscle cells from an animal, grown without the animal.
“Conventional is natural”
Industrial meat production is many things, but “natural” isn’t one of them, in my opinion.
Speed-grown animals: Modern broiler chickens reach slaughter weight in ~6 weeks. That’s decades of genetic selection plus high-energy feed and tightly managed housing. Efficient, yes. “Natural,” no. EFSA has flagged the welfare issues tied to fast-growing breeds.
Antibiotics in the mix: The EU banned antibiotic growth promoters years ago, and recent EU data shows big reductions in veterinary antimicrobial sales (about 28% down since 2018). Globally, though, projections still show overall livestock antibiotic use rising toward 2040 if nothing changes. One driver of antimicrobial resistance (AMR), which WHO calls a mounting health threat. So even “reformed” systems still wrestle with it.
Environmental footprint: Conventional meat is resource-heavy: land, water, emissions. Food systems are ~26% of global GHGs; livestock is a big slice of that. Cultivated meat could reduce land and water use dramatically if powered by clean energy at scale — but that’s an “if,” not a promise.
So no, our current system isn’t “natural.” It’s industrial. On purpose. It feeds billions.
But it comes with trade-offs we pay for elsewhere, like in land use, emissions, and antibiotic stewardship.
So… is cultivated meat “healthy”?
Two answers:
Safety: Where it’s approved, it’s because national regulators reviewed the safety data. That’s the bar. Not “naturalness.” So, it’s not dangerous or unsafe. Doesn’t mean it’s healthy, of course.
Nutrition: It’s meat. Nutrition will depend on the cut, formulation, and any added fats/binders, just like conventional meat. And as much as we don’t like, studies show over and over again that meat is not the healthiest food we can eat.
The theoretical upside of lab-grown meat is precision, though. Dialing fat profiles, lowering contaminants, avoiding pathogens tied to slaughter/processing, even removing or lowering unhealthy compounds.
The downside is that lab-meat obviously fits the criteria of ultra-processed food.
What matters next (and what doesn’t)
Matters: media cost, energy source (run on renewables or bust), bioreactor scale, and clear, fair regulations (safety-first, ideology-free). Public R&D helps. So do CDMOs to de-risk scale-up.
Doesn’t matter: “Natural vs unnatural”. Industrial chicken slaughtered at 42 days isn’t “Mother Nature,” it’s technology. Cultivated meat is technology too, just a different stack with potentially different externalities.
The bottom line
Calling cultivated meat “unnatural and therefore unhealthy” is false logic.
Most of what we consume and do nowadays is unnatural. It’s not all unhealthy.
We want evidence, not vibes.
Regulators exist to demand that. On the flip side, pretending today’s livestock system is some pastoral fairy tale is equally silly. It’s efficient, optimized, and very often medicated.
Both systems are technological. One is mature and messy; the other is new and expensive.
If cultivated meat gets cheap, clean-energy-powered, and tasty at scale, it can shave off some environmental and antibiotic-resistance pressure while killing no (or fewer) animals.
That’s worth trying.
And if it doesn’t, then at least we ran the experiment. We’ll still need better farming, fewer antibiotics, slower-growing breeds, and smarter consumption either way.
Because “natural” won’t save us. Healthy might.