Legal challenges and slick propaganda are the preferred tactics as the fake meat industry fights bans on its products. Action Alert!
THE TOPLINE
- Companies like Upside Foods frame the debate as a fight for consumer freedom to choose lab-grown meat, but the underlying concern is public safety and transparency, as laws in Florida and Alabama seek to protect consumers by banning these products.
- The concept of lab-grown meat relies on the flawed notion of bioequivalence, oversimplifying meat as just a few key fats and proteins while ignoring its complex and variable biological composition. Emerging research suggests lab-grown meat may contain unknown compounds with potential long-term health risks.
- Lab-grown meat companies benefit from lenient regulation on products that are completely new to the food supply. The debate should focus on informed choice, with consumers needing transparency and more rigorous testing before these products are widely accepted.
Lab-grown meat companies like Upside Foods are pushing the narrative that lab-grown, or “cultivated,” meat offers consumers the freedom to choose guilt-free, sustainable alternatives. They have tried to position themselves as champions of consumer rights. Their petition against lab-grown meat bans in Florida and Alabama hinges on claims that “everyone should have the freedom to make their own choices about the foods they eat.” On the surface, it’s a persuasive argument. But underneath lies a more complex reality—one that raises serious concerns about transparency, safety, and the very definition of “meat.”
Is it really about consumer choice?
Upside Foods is framing the debate over lab-grown meat as a battle for consumer choice. But this seems to be something of a decoy to distract consumers from the real issue: the safety of fake meat. The laws Upside Foods is contesting in Florida and Alabama are not attempts to limit freedom or options—they’re actually about safeguarding public health by ensuring transparency around what’s being sold.
Remember, Upside Foods, Meatable, and other lab-grown meat companies are marketing their products as equivalent to real meat, or even superior. Meatable claims to be “pioneering the new natural.” “It isn’t like meat,” the company says. “It is meat.”
Their pitch relies on the bioequivalence principle—the idea that these synthetic meats provide the same taste, texture, and nutritional value as traditional meat. But this assumption is not only deeply misleading, it’s downright incorrect, scientifically.
The myth of bioequivalence
Lab-grown meat producers operate on the simplistic notion that real meat is nothing more than a simple combination of a few key fats and proteins. To illustrate this point: one synthetic biology (synbio) company has developed additives for products like the Impossible Burger, isolating a couple of fat molecules they believe are responsible for the taste of real meat. But this reductive view ignores the complexity of natural meat. Real meat is a product of living organisms, comprising thousands of different proteins, peptides, amino acids, nucleotides, fats, vitamins, minerals, hormones and other compounds that interact in ways we barely understand.
Even the USDA’s understanding of food composition is limited. For example, the USDA lists around a dozen compounds in raw garlic, while other scientists have cataloged over 400. If we’re using such incomplete data as our benchmark, what are we missing in lab-grown meat?
Safety: the unknowns we can’t ignore
This brings us to the issue of safety. Foods like lab-grown meat (and a host of other products) made through so-called ‘precision fermentation’ are novel foods that have never been part of our diet in all of human history. Emerging research raises concerns about the “precision” of the processes involved. John Fagan, a scientist at the Health Research Institute (HRI), recently identified 92 previously unknown compounds in Bored Cow’s biosynthetic, genetically modified milk. These compounds, he notes, are “completely novel to our food…nutritional dark matter.” If lab-grown meat is filled with similarly unknown substances, what are the long-term health implications? We simply don’t know.
The comparison to natural foods like garlic shows how little we truly understand about the biological complexity of even the simplest foods. If 99% of garlic’s composition remains a mystery to the USDA, how can we confidently claim that lab-grown meat—which is far more complicated—is safe and equivalent to real meat?
Controlling the narrative
Companies like Upside Foods are shaping public perception with slick marketing while they benefit from a lax regulatory approach from the USDA and FDA. The truth is that lab-grown meat remains largely untested, with insufficient understanding of its long-term effects. The bans in Alabama and Florida should be seen as progressive steps to protect consumers from potentially hazardous foods, rather than as limitations on freedom of choice.
The inconsistency from the FDA is also telling. Massive road blocks are being erected to prevent you from taking exciting, innovative vitamin formulations that are “new” to the food supply, but when it comes to meat grown from GMO yeast in a lab—it’s all systems go as far as the FDA is concerned.
As these companies continue to push the narrative that their products are indistinguishable from real meat, it’s critical to ask: what meat are they referencing? Is it the factory-farmed, highly processed meat linked to chronic health issues? Or is it the more nutritious, ethically raised meat from regenerative practices? Without clear answers, lab-grown meat could be another ultra-processed product, designed more for profit than for health…and one that has an eager market in the wake of the widespread climate change narrative that demonizes livestock farming and real meat, not the factory farming systems that produce so much of it.
In the end, the conversation should not focus solely on choice, but on informed choice. Consumers should not be misled. They deserve transparency, rigorous testing, and an honest discussion about the risks and rewards of this emerging technology. Until that happens, we should approach lab-grown meat with caution, questioning whether it’s truly the “guilt-free” alternative it’s made out to be.
Action Alert! Write to Congress and the FDA, telling them that we need more testing of gene-edited foods that research is increasingly finding are not bioequivalent to traditional foods. Please send your message immediately.
