Does cell-cultured meat have a future? This is not the moment.
I subscribe to AgFunder News, not least because I so admire Elaine Watson’s reporting on the food industry.
I was particularly interested in her detailed account of investment in cultured meat and seafood startups: Preliminary AgFunder data point to 78% decline in cultivated meat funding in 2023; investors blame ‘general risk aversion.’
Here’s what’s happening:
Funding may have dropped, but investors put nearly $200 million into this technology in 2023. That isn’t nothing.
Watson reviews the reasons for the funding decline:
- High interest rates
- Risk aversion
- Too many companies seeking investment
- Scalability of the product
- Cost parity
- Lack of government funding
Cultivated meat is not yet on the market. It’s hard to assess it or predict its future without tasting it. I’m trying to keep an open mind.
For a deep dive into what’s happening in this industry, see Joe Fassler’s excellent piece in the New York Times: Opinion | The Revolution That Died on Its Way to Dinner.
His point: Cell-cultured meat is “an escape hatch for humankind’s excesses.”
For all its terrifying urgency, climate change is an invitation — to reinvent our economies, to rethink consumption, to redraw our relationships to nature and to one another. Cultivated meat was an excuse to shirk that hard, necessary work. The idea sounded futuristic, but its appeal was all about nostalgia, a way to pretend that things will go on as they always have, that nothing really needs to change. It was magical climate thinking, a delicious delusion.
In the course of his investigations, Fassler got to taste cell-cultured chicken. This did not make him optimistic about its future.
As I said, I’m trying to stay open minded. I suspect this story is not over yet. Stay tuned.
