To the Editor:
Re “$3 Billion Later, Where’s the (Planet-Saving, Lab-Grown) Beef?,” by Joe Fassler (Opinion guest essay, Feb. 11):
In his extensively reported piece, Mr. Fassler pulls back the curtain on cultivated meat. The hard sell for lab-grown meat has always sounded more like Theranos-style spin than feasible innovation, and Mr. Fassler’s reporting certainly gives that impression. So where does that leave us?
The industrial meat industry takes a terrible toll on the planet and animal welfare, and cultivated meat enthusiasts have long argued the only alternative is to provide consumers with facsimiles of the real stuff.
In the essay, one alt-meat die-hard compared the solution to this dilemma to two hypothetical runners, one, representing cultivated meat. The other? “Grass-roots activism, political advocacy, nutritional education, farm policy, fair labor practices, animal conservation.” While he wanted to root for this multiplicity of approaches, he noted that most people want to invest their dollars where they can get a return.
That may be true of venture capital, of course, but there’s another story emerging around the world. A growing number of foundations are putting their money on that other runner: not fake meat, but a multipronged approach to transition to regenerative agriculture. These solutions need the boosterism — and the billions of dollars — cultivated meat has benefited from.
In this make-or-break decade as the climate crisis intensifies, making such big bets is the best way to give us a fighting chance against the billion-dollar antiquated and dirty sector that is industrialized meat.
Anna Lappé
Berkeley, Calif.
The writer is the author of “Diet for a Hot Planet” and the executive director of the Global Alliance for the Future of Food.
To the Editor:
Joe Fassler writes that “investors poured almost $3 billion into cultivated meat and seafood companies” over six years. He sees the lack of cost-competitive products as indicative of failure.
But $3 billion is not a lot of money, and six years is not a lot of time. Three billion dollars is about the cost of one electric-vehicle battery factory, and those investments into cultivated meat have been spread across more than 100 companies.
The biggest cultivated meat company in the world, Upside Foods, has raised a total of $600 million; that’s less than the half the average cost required to develop a single drug, and that’s if you already have a massive drug company from which to build.
And six years? General Motors launched the first modern, mass-produced electric vehicle in the U.S. in 1996, and Tesla was founded in 2003. It took electric vehicles until 2017 to reach 1 percent sales in the U.S. and globally, and now they’re on track for both U.S. and global domination.
Technological progress takes time and costs money; nothing about cultivated meat’s trajectory so far indicates that it’s costing more or taking longer than what’s expected or reasonable.
Curt Albright
Vero Beach, Fla.
The writer is a managing member of Clear Current Capital, which has invested in a cultivated meat company.
To the Editor:
It is surprising that in his obituary for cultivated meat, Joe Fassler spends so few words on the viability of the science and cites more chief executives than scientists.
Just recently, the chair of Tufts University’s biomedical engineering department, David Kaplan, who has published more than 1,000 peer-reviewed papers, told a room full of cultivated meat scientists that progress over the past five years gives him “complete confidence that we’re going to get to where we need to go.”
There are many eminent scientists all over the world who share Dr. Kaplan’s view, but readers would not know that from reading Mr. Fassler’s essay, which argues that cultivated meat is a project of Silicon Valley “dreamers with a fancy prototype, a pitch deck and a good amount of natural charm.”
This groundbreaking science may be taking longer than initially thought, but it’s making strides, so it’s a shame that Mr. Fassler spends so little time exploring it.
Mindy Kursban
Fairfax, Va.
To the Editor:
Joe Fassler shows that these companies have overpromised and underdelivered on cultivated meat. But ultimately, I read his piece as an indictment of the venture capital and investment banking funding models for developing lab-grown meat when there have been limited financing options otherwise.
Venture capital is not patient. Companies are pressured toward visible progress quickly — Potemkin bioreactor facilities, costly products and impossible timelines — to get the next check. It’s clear now that cultivated meat still needs more academic work to solve scientific challenges before we can try again with private companies.
Instead of relying on venture capital, we need more public funding for cultivated meat and social efforts, as Mr. Fassler proposed, to transition the world away from animal agriculture.
Animal agriculture is arguably the most destructive industry on the planet, leading to ecological and socio-economic costs in the trillions of dollars. Spending $3 billion is a trifle.
Karthik Sekar
Oakland, Calif.
The writer is the head of data science at Climax Foods, a plant-based food company, and the author of “After Meat.”
To the Editor:
If a piano were falling from the sky, who would just stand there, waiting for some brilliant technology to be developed to save them? Cultivated meat is an exciting future prospect, but there are many barriers before it will appear in the local supermarket freezer. The real revolution is here now: Just go vegan. It’s not hard.
We now know that raising and slaughtering animals for food is killing the planet: Nearly a fifth of human-generated greenhouse gas emissions come from animal agriculture — making it a leading driver of the climate catastrophe.
Animal agriculture also wastes and destroys precious resources, whereas vegan foods require 75 percent less land than meat-based eating. Moreover, animal agriculture is a significant driver of deforestation, particularly in the Amazon rainforest.
Of course, factory farms subject animals to almost unimaginable suffering before their frightening ride to eventual slaughter.
We don’t have to wait for a new solution; it’s already here.
Ingrid Newkirk
Washington
The writer is the president of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA).
