Transcript for
Is cultivated "meat" unnatural? Is meat today natural?
Matthew
Across the world, demand for meat continues to rise. We typically agree that a real urgency is needed to address the extraordinary scale of animal production today, and its associated environmental and social impacts. But we don’t always agree on where to put our energy and resources. Should we encourage shifts towards more plant-forward diets, make livestock systems more efficient, make animal farming more compassionate, OR should we try to satisfy this craving for meat, but do so without the environmental and ethical baggage.
I’m talking here about “cultivating meat” in labs. This involves taking cells from the animals’ bodies, growing them in bioreactors, and creating a product so similar to meat, it shares the animal’s DNA. There’s some big questions about whether it’s even technically possible to commercially scale this type of production, but that’s not what his episode is about. Instead, I’m asking a more personal question - if you had a piece of cultivated meat on a plate in front of you, would you eat it?
As we continue to explore how natural our food and farms should be, we now ask: Is cultivated meat seen by consumers as natural or unnatural? And does that even matter?
Welcome to the nature season of Feed, a food systems podcast presented by TABLE . I’m Matthew Kessler. And if you’re not a new listener, you’ll recognize this as a topic that we explored in depth last year with the Meat the four Futures series. If you enjoyed that, I imagine you’re going to like the fresh take you’ll hear in this episode, which is from a philosopher on the unnaturalness of cultivated meat.
Cor
So my name is Cor van der Weele and I'm calling from the Netherlands. I live in Oosterbeek, a village near Arnhem. And I'm a retired professor of philosophy at Wageningen University, which is close by.
Matthew
Cor van der Weele has had a front seat to see how these debates have evolved over time. From a meeting in Sweden in 2011 when the technology was called in vitro meat, to when the Dutch scientist Mark Post developed the first lab-grown burger, to the ongoing focus groups she conducted to better understand consumers’ hopes and fears for a ‘cultivated meat’ future.
Matthew
We're going to talk today about a potentially groundbreaking transition in food, a shift from eating meat from slaughtered animals to meat cultivated from animal cells in labs. And even though this is getting more attention lately, it's not exactly a new idea. Maybe a good place to start is.around the release of the book diet for a small planet, by Francis Moore Lappé. Can you talk a little about what this book was and what its impact was?
Cor
Yeah, it was a book that argued for a diet which was more friendly to the planet and more friendly to feeding the planet. She argued fiercely that we are eating far too much meat. She added to that there is in fact, and there has been for 1000s of years a perfect alternative, namely, pulses.
Matthew
Pulses are edible parts of legume plants- so beans, lentils chickpeas. This book ‘Diet for a small planet’ came out in 1971. It was a bestseller that even included vegetarian recipes as a way to make it easier for people to change their diets. Cor really enjoyed this part of the book, but it wasn’t only the recipes that she connected to.
Cor
Linking that to myself. I come from an arable farm where my family grew wheat and barley and peas and potatoes, etc. And I've always been convinced or feeling that I've always been seeing plants as the most basic kind of food. So to me, this book by Francis Moore Lappe, was, well, it was immediately completely convincing, I thought this was clearly what we should do. And I did not realize at all that the book was in fact far too unconventional and revolutionary at that time. And it went against important trends, which was to increase meat consumption all over the world. So it had started in the West to this increase after the Second World War. And now this was spreading all over the world. As soon as countries got a little bit richer, their meat consumption grew.
Matthew
This call, now 50 years ago, to eat less meat, and replace it with pulses, didn’t exactly pan out. Since then our population has doubled and, as a global average, we eat twice as much meat per person. This means we’re producing and eating four times as much meat than we did half a century ago..
Cor
So in the decades that followed, despite all the protests, especially against factory farming, meat consumption only continued to grow, and pulses declined ever further. And this was a worldwide phenomenon. So people simply love meat and plant-based protein sources that was also a growing conviction among researchers, simply didn't resemble meat enough to be a real success.
Matthew
So now we fast forward to the early 2000s, where Cor first came across a 2003 art installation called Disembodied Cuisine.
Cor
When I heard about cultured meat around 2007, through the work of an artist, a bio artist. I immediately became interested because this was an alternative which promised to be meat. So I thought, “Ah, this might finally help.” It promised to be real meat because it would be made, it was not available yet, but it would be made from animal cells. So the end product ideally could not be distinguished from real meat.
Matthew
Cor describes the 2003 project that Bioartist Oron Catts presented in L’Art Biotech museum in France.
Cor
This artist Oron Catts had skilled himself in laboratory practices and was able to grow cells a little bit. So he took some cells from a frog and was able to keep them alive and even let them grow a bit, and then made quite a performance of that.
Matthew
This was the first I’ve heard of this project, so of course I had to look up the exhibition, and I found a photo of it. In it you see the setting of a white tablecloth dinner. 3 chairs on each side. A bottle of wine on the table, alongside some glasses, plates, silverware. And at the head of the table, is a small aquarium. This is where the frog lived, and was present during the dinner. And on the diner’s plates were little frog steaks, cultivated from the cells of the same frog that they were sitting next to.
Did I mention that the dinner table is also behind a quarantined room, with yellow tape wrapped around the outside?
The artist was really doubling down on the unnatural, potentially dangerous, bio-hazard feeling of this whole experience.
Cor
So I thought this is a wonderful idea. And from then on, I have been actively interested in the protein transition. Because for me, cultured meat was not a goal in itself. But a potential trigger for that transition.
Matthew
I find the experiment where the artist was culturing frog cells really interesting, because it really confronts people both with the fact that an animal is being eaten and then, which is not something we have when we just have a piece of flesh on our plate, something maybe that doesn't even look anything resembling the animal. And also that there's a possibility of eating meat, while the animal is not harmed in the process, which seems like quite a revolutionary idea.
So the focus of our season is on naturalness in food. And I'm going to ask you about whether cultivated meat from animal cells is natural. But first, you're a philosopher. How do you think about natural and naturalness?
Cor
Well, a great source of clear thinking for me about this issue is philosopher John Stuart Mill. He wrote in 1874, an essay on nature. And the starting point was that back then, naturalness, like now, had very positive connotations. What is natural is good. That was the main feeling. And at the same time, it was also clear that it had very different meanings, and sometimes confused meanings. So what Mill did, he gave an overview of all the historical uses of the word. And he concludes that with a distinction in which nature either means everything, including mankind, so everything under the sun, so to say. Or it refers to things as they would be without human intervention. And when you have the first sense of the word, so everything is natural, then living a natural life is a senseless norm. Because it's not possible not to live a natural life.
And in the second sense that we should not intervene in nature. Then he says, it is both irrational and deeply immoral. It is irrational, he says, and I think you could also say, impossible, because everything we do, alters the spontaneous course of nature. And it's immoral in his view, because it would then for example be bad to intervene in any disease. He says that the forces of nature are not always beneficial. And that it's up to us to cooperate with the beneficial forces and to amend the course of nature for the sake of justice and goodness. So it's up to us how we want to work with nature. And I think these words are still powerful.
Matthew
That's interesting, that natural, then if it means everything, then it's essentially meaningless, or it becomes a really normative concept. The word itself is very, very ambiguous in general.
Cor
Yeah it is. It still is. Yeah. And apparently has always been.
Matthew
I want to say, for the record, meat alternatives are not new. There's a recipe for a mock lamb dish that goes back to China over 1000 years ago. Many companies have been creating alternative meat products for the last 40 years. And in the last five to 10 years, there's been a lot more research and development and certainly media coverage on cultivated meat. And just like these meat alternatives aren't new, attitudes to these products are also changing over time. So you've been following that and tracking that with various focus groups. But I want to ask, going back a decade or so, how have philosophers and ethicists been thinking about this question about whether meat alternatives are natural?
Cor
So as you mentioned, meat alternatives come in different kinds. And at least some technology is always involved. Like, by the way it is in meat itself. There's a lot of technology involved in producing meat from animals. Perhaps you could say the least technological of all is perhaps pulses. But even here, there's a lot of agricultural technology in improving the seeds, in sowing and harvesting and distributing.
Cooking is, of course, simple, but it's still a technology. So well, I mentioned technology, because technology is often closely associated with something being unnatural. Although it's not, of course, not precisely the same.
Let's concentrate on cultured meat, where suddenly more frontline technology is being used than in most other meat alternatives. Frontline technology about understanding and controlling cell growth and scaling that up eventually. It is still uncertain, by the way, whether it really can become a technological and commercial success. But my view has been and still is that it's at least worth trying.
So okay, naturalness. Then, in 2008, there appeared a paper written by Hopkins and Dacey. They see they made a moral plea for cultured meat. And the naturalness, or unnaturalness of cultured meat was one of the themes. They straightforwardly argued that since many aspects of our normal or traditional meats are so unethical. So they thought about factory farming and slaughtering practices. In this case, it might be precisely the unnaturalness of cultured meat that we are looking for. So they said what is natural is not automatically good.
Matthew
This was similar to the argument made by John Stuart Mill - that while natural is pleasing to us, it doesn't necessarily steer humans on a better course, for ourselves or for the environment. We’ll link in our shownotes to the Hopkins and Dacey 2008 paper and other research Cor discusses in our conversation.
Cor
So another further perspective on the cultured meat and naturalness that I will want to mention is that we could wonder what cultured meat would mean for our relations with animals and with nature. Here, I think that relations with animals could improve greatly if cultured meat helps us to eat less traditional meat and get rid of factory farming, for example. And another great promise is that cultured meat would free large amounts of land. At least that's what all the calculations say. And that can be rewilded and given back to nature. And that would be good for the desperately needed space for wild animals and good for biodiversity in general.
Matthew
I can just jump in here to say, because this field is still pretty new. There's not tons and tons of papers and evidence on what are the impacts of cultured meat compared to other forms of production. But I think all these studies do point to a significantly reduced land footprint, water footprint, a smaller amount of greenhouse gas emissions depending on which animal production system you're comparing it to. And the bigger question is around energy use, and that also depends on whether or not renewable energies are used.
Cor
That remains the biggest, the biggest worry, but of course these numbers are still evolving.
Matthew
We’re going to next take a tour of the development of cultivated meat across the last 15 years as witnessed by Cor van der Weele. To give you a sense of how much this industry has grown, we’ll start at the Chalmers University of Technology in Western Sweden, where a workshop was being hosted to set the research agenda for the future of cultivated meat.
So I want to just jump into a very specific moment in time, which was in Gothenburg, Sweden. How big was this field back then in 2011?
Cor
All in all, not more, more than 12 or 15 people. And when we estimated how many people were working on cultured meat at that moment. Our estimate was that there were not more than, let's say, two handfuls of full time jobs for making cultured meat at that moment worldwide.
It was a time in which it was very hard to get money for research on the subject. So that was our main, main subject of discussion, actually. And also, when we decided that cultured meat would be a better name, than in vitro meat, as it was called earlier. But we were not so very optimistic at that point.
Mathew
That's extraordinary, to say that one more time. When the industry was called in vitro meat back in 2011, there were less than 20 people employed to think about and develop this technology. Now in 2024, barely more than a decade later, there have been over 3 billion dollars of investment in cultivated meat and seafood companies - most of which has come from private funding sources. And there’s 174 publicly announced companies focused on cultivated meat inputs or products.
Matthew
And I guess the industry is now moving towards the name of cultivated meat, which again, is similar - not to say in vitro or lab grown - not tap too much into that imaginary of what that means, but just hint at it a little bit. So two years later, in 2013, the Dutch scientists Mark Post was behind the famous 250,000 Euro lab grown burger.
Mark Post (Clip)
What we’re going to see is a world first. This is the first time ever a hamburger from cells grown outside of the cow is being made and presented.
Cor
That changed a lot indeed. And in fact, already in Gothenburg, that was the only point of hope that we had that he had. We knew that he had found this private investor for making this hamburger.
Clip continued
Everyone is sitting here with bated breath dying to see what’s underneath the cloche, so can you do the honors and lift the lid on your creation.
Cor
Yeah, so then, and he did it, because his technology was still very primitive, then he could only make very small parts of meat. But he did it 1000s of times. And his explicit goal was to ask for more attention and for more money to put it more on the map.
Matthew
Yeah, I guess also a bit of a proof of concept. And I think it worked too, right. It certainly attracted a lot of media headlines, and a lot of coverage on the back of it.
Cor
Sure. I was present with the presentation. And the next day, I bought all the English newspapers. And they all were very big.
Matthew
NY Times “A Lab-Grown Burger Gets a Taste Test” ; Economic times: “World's first lab-grown burger is now ready to be served!”
The voice you heard earlier was the Dutch scientist Mark Post and then a clip from the actual press conference held in London. During this presentation a decade ago, he said the technology could be about 10 years away.
Matthew
So you were conducting some focus groups around that time? I'm curious to hear what were people's attitudes then?
Cor
With my colleague Clemens Driessen in early 2013, we had different kinds of groups, older people, younger people, mixed ages, people who professionally were involved with food. Well in all of them, because cultured meat was not so well known as it is now. Everybody found it very strange at first. But I had already learned in interviews, that first responses are just that first responses and that it's more interesting what happens next. So I had interviewed people and asked them what they thought of cultured meat and I remember very vividly the first interview the very first person said, yuck. But immediately continued by saying, Oh, but wait a minute, if I imagine what it means for animals, it already looks quite different. So I thought so much for first impressions, this changes when people start to think more, and so I decided to do these focus groups instead of for example, surveys or whatever.
Matthew
Right, because surveys could give a misleading impression of people just offer, “Oh, I think this is gross, and I'm moving on with my life.”
Cor
In almost every group, there was always someone who asked, “but isn't this very unnatural?” And then there was always someone else who said, “Yeah, but how natural is our traditional meat?” And then the discussion went back and forth between meat and cultured meat and people, more or less discussed a lot of the attractive and the unattractive things of meat. Most people, their primary objection was always about factory farming.
So what you can see from this is that cultured meat turned out to be a trigger for thinking back and forth between cultured meat and ordinary meat, People started saying such things as “hmm, isn't it actually strange that we find it normal to raise and kill animals and eat them and then find it strange to raise a few cells and eat them.” We saw that happening before our eyes actually.
Matthew
I was personally pretty surprised to hear of this shift in such a short time period. Cor and Clemens Driessen documented this change in an article called 'How normal meat becomes stranger, as cultured meat becomes more normal.”
Cor
They say wouldn’t it be too technological and too unnatural. Wouldn't it alienate us further from our food? And wouldn't it put further power in the hands of big companies. And then in one of the early groups, the ideas spontaneously came up to make cultured meat on a small scale, so not by big companies. But on a neighborhood scale. So the idea came up that you have a few pigs, say, on a children's farm or in a backyard or in a city park, you take a biopsy, that is to say, a few cells from those animals every week. And then there is a small local factory to turn those cells into meat. And the first group in which this idea arose was simply euphoric. It was very interesting to see.
So they said, “Well, this is so good, you are in contact with the source of your food, but you're also closer to the animals because you're with them, and you don't have to kill them. So you can also love them without losing them.” It's also local, and it connects you to your neighborhoods. So they were - they found it almost too good to be true. And maybe it is too good to be true. I mean, we called the scenario “the pig in the backyard” and a backyard is probably not a very realistic way to realize this.
Mathew
So once the focus group participants started to use their imaginations and think about new possible futures, they came a long way from their initial "yuck" reaction. Because unnaturalness wasn't just about the use of technology."
Cor
Doing it on a small scale made such a difference. All the ideas of cultured meat being too unnatural or being too technological has simply disappeared from their thoughts.
Matthew
If you’re like me, you may have been wondering this whole time, what do livestock farmers think of this? Since they’re the ones who are perhaps most threatened by this technology. But when you consider this pig in the backyard approach, there could be a different way to bring income to the farm - by raising the genetic material that goes into these cultivated meat products. Cor also spoke with livestock farmers to understand their views on cultured meat.
Cor
I think many people found it strange or they were skeptical anyway. And the people who did come, skepticism was still a very prominent thing. And I could easily understand that because, well, actually how you would do that is still so vague and uncertain, the technological side of it, the commercial side of it. But there were also enthusiasts who wanted to start as soon as possible. And one of them is actually now working towards realizing a real cultured meat farm with cow cells, he has cows that roam free in nature, and then he wants to - he doesn't want to kill them anymore. He wants to use their cells for cultured meat production. And farmers spoke well, in the course of those groups, they also they spoke about lots of things, and also lots of lots of worries. For example, irritations about consumers who say that they want to pay more for more animal welfare, and then don't do it. Or about the government that comes with evermore rules that they have to comply with.
Matthew
From 2018-2020, Cor conducted another set of focus groups. She realized across all these groups the importance of the concept of ambivalence. Instead of flattening the human experience, she wondered how conversations around cultivated meat would change if we embraced the fact that people hold many conflicting views all at once.
Cor
It's very often seen as something negative, you ought to be of one mind. Many consumer scientists, they implicitly seem to assume that there is a clear ranking of values, and one is on top. And it's all very straightforward and non ambiguous and non ambivalent. But what we had seen in the focus groups is that there came a lot of ambivalence to the surface.
So many people who said “well, on the one hand, I have wanted to be a vegetarian so many times. But then on the other hand, I love meat so much, that I find it really very hard.” And people struggling with these things and struggling with different values. Also, for example, saying that, “Well, I'm very sensitive to animal welfare, and I would be tempted to try alternative meats, but then my partner so hopes to get meat on the plate” that this is also a value conflict that people were struggling with.
I approached this question about ambivalence about meat by asking people what they want to know about their food. And when it came to meat, a typical answer was, “Well, if you want to eat meat, you shouldn't know too much about it.” And this may look like a paradoxical answer, but it was nevertheless in various forms very frequent.
Matthew
It's like a coping mechanism.
Cor
Yeah, it’s really a coping mechanism. So people know, or suspect, then when you really start thinking about it, and you are confronted with hard choices, and you therefore keep the subject a little bit at a distance instinctively. Although that is hardly a conscious choice, people find it very easy to recognize as they do it. And it has a name, this phenomenon, it's called strategic ignorance. It's all around. Not only about meat, but about all kinds of things that we are not ready for, and that are coming with unwelcome choices that we might feel we should be perhaps responsible for. So it's a way of protecting ourselves for unwelcome responsibilities.
Matthew
So strategic ignorance is a tool people use to avoid being faced with a moral decision. That could mean either not seeking out infoRmation or deliberately protecting yourself from information that is deeply confronting to you. For example, you might block out any negative information about a politician you like, or choose to not learn more about where the factory meat you eat comes from.
Cor
And, of course, strategic ignorance becomes more difficult when the environment changes. When information goes on and on. And when more attractive products become available as alternatives, or when these products become better, or cheaper. So gradually, it becomes more difficult to remain strategically ignorant and more easy to make alternative choices.
Matthew
This brings me to a question I have. We talked about different attitudes in focus groups, but I'm curious about actual buying patterns. So when you're in a market, and you see all these options in front of you, it's a different environment than when you're having conversations around a table in this, more structured manner, where you have time to open up and reflect on your values and how you see the world as opposed to a split second decision. So do the focus groups that you've conducted, do you think they reveal anything about the future of purchasing patterns of these products?
Cor
People will actually in the focus groups reflect on their own behavior in supermarkets that they realized they were part of the problem. And it's, of course, indeed, well known, the so called paradox that people say that they want to buy other things, but then they don't do it. And you often hear that, that people say or that researchers say, “Well, those are then empty words, when you say your intentions are to be different.” Or they call it hypocritical, or they call it unexplained paradox or whatever, they find it something very negative.
And I'm tempted to see it as something more positive, namely, a sign of change. A sign that people are in the process of change, they are ambivalent. But it takes time. And in the beginning, it's only the pioneers who stick out their neck and, and make different choices. Most people really love to be in harmony with their environments. So as long as meat is still the dominant environmental choice. That's also a value for them. So they're really stuck in a very ambivalent situation. The time for that things remain invisible and under the surface and the dominant norm is still everywhere. It's almost ending I think.
Matthew
So there's a really interesting dynamic here where, yes, there's a dominant trend and that dominant trend is being questioned. And I think people in that dominant trend feel threatened. And there's a bit of a backlash to it. So, if you look at, say, Italy, where the Prime Minister Giorgio Meloni, she recently banned the import of meat alternatives and sought to stop their production in the country. And she did this as a way to protect Italian food culture and also Italian farmers. And this is here, showing that there’s people really excited about these meat alternatives. And there's other people who are really terrified of what it represents. So just curious if you could reflect a little on these trends.
Cor
Yeah, so on the one hand, it looks threatening. And on the other hand, as real transition experts tend to say, this is precisely what you can expect, when it becomes serious. When change becomes serious, then there will be a backlash because interests will be threatened. The old is really, really now under a lot of pressure. This is a phase that cannot be avoided. The only thing you can avoid, I think, and that would be my feeling about it, that is why I find ambivalence so important. That if this turns into a polarized situation, then what happens is actually that a lot of people suppress part of what you really think. I mean, most people who have a firm position in fact, also having other thoughts, even if only now and then. So you lose a lot of information, and you lose a lot of potential for connection if you live in a culture where you are, perhaps for good reasons, but often are also because you think that's what you should do - only have firm opinions for or against something. And in reality, people are seldom of one mind. Values are not neatly ranked from high to low, so they can clash, and they can clash in messy ways. So cutting the knots is something that you can do, but it's not a way that brings you into contact with yourself or with the other half of yourself, I should say, or with other people with whom you can then try to find common ground or try to find exchange values that you perhaps can both share. So I think what is important in those times of backlash is well, when you are working on those alternatives, is to remain open to the worries and to the obstacles. And to not buy into this polarizing game.
Matthew
So wrapping up, does naturalness matter? Is it something that is going to affect the cultural acceptance of these products?
Cor
If we for one moment, go back to Mill. Let's remember that, for him pure naturalness would be either senseless or silly and unethical. I deeply agree that purity is indeed not what we should be looking for in value issues. Because we have so many values, and we have to fight to do justice to as many as possible of that.
I think although Naturalness is partly unhelpful, it's also worthwhile to see what might be behind it, what people really mean when we use the word. And having said that, I think overall, it's of course not helpful to think in either/or ways, that we should be either natural or unnatural is a bit strange.
And here to John Stuart Mill was in fact saying good things he said, “nature is not purely beneficial”, and it's up to us to work with the beneficial parts of nature and, and amend them for our purposes.
For example, cultured meat might help us to eat less meat. And then if we feel encouraged to go further then at least, perhaps start eating more pulses, and then cultured meat need not be the endpoint.
Matthew
Cor, thank you so much for speaking with us.
Cor
It was a pleasure.
Matthew
A big thanks to Cor van der Weele for speaking with us. You can visit the episode’s webpage to see photos of the 2003 disembodied cuisine exhibit, clips from the press releases of the world’s first lab-grown hamburger, and the many articles written by Cor and others on the perceived naturalness of cultivated meat.
And if you’re interested in hearing more about meat alternatives and the future of meat and livestock in general, you can listen to the podcast series we produced last year called Meat the four futures. All of this is in our episode shownotes and on our webpage: tabledebates.org/podcast.
This episode was edited and produced by me Matthew Kessler, with special thanks to Hester van Hensbergen, Tamsin Blaxter, and Tara Garnett. Music by Blue dot sessions. We’ve got a few more episodes left in our nature season, but I’ll need some time to finish editing them! It’s been both a sprint and a marathon staying on top of weekly episodes. I’ll talk to you soon.
