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ORIGINAL RESEARCH
published: 10 July 2019
doi: 10.3389/fsufs.2019.00045
Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems | www.frontiersin.org 1July 2019 | Volume 3 | Article 45
Edited by:
Liz Specht,
The Good Food Institute,
United States
Reviewed by:
Noemi Elisabet Zaritzky,
National University of La
Plata, Argentina
Guadalupe Virginia Nevárez-Moorillón,
Autonomous University of
Chihuahua, Mexico
Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft,
Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, United States
*Correspondence:
Neil Stephens
neil.stephens@brunel.ac.uk
Specialty section:
This article was submitted to
Sustainable Food Processing,
a section of the journal
Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems
Received: 24 October 2018
Accepted: 23 May 2019
Published: 10 July 2019
Citation:
Stephens N, Sexton AE and
Driessen C (2019) Making Sense of
Making Meat: Key Moments in the
First 20 Years of Tissue Engineering
Muscle to Make Food.
Front. Sustain. Food Syst. 3:45.
doi: 10.3389/fsufs.2019.00045
Making Sense of Making Meat: Key
Moments in the First 20 Years of
Tissue Engineering Muscle to Make
Food
Neil Stephens 1
*, Alexandra E. Sexton 2,3 and Clemens Driessen 4
1Department of Social and Political Sciences, Brunel University London, Uxbridge, United Kingdom, 2Oxford Martin
Programme on the Future of Food, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom, 3School of Geography and the
Environment, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom, 4Cultural Geography Group, Department of Environmental
Sciences, Wageningen University, Wageningen, Netherlands
Cultured/clean/cell-based meat (CM) now has a near two decade history of laboratory
research, commencing with the early NASA-funded work at Touro College and the
bioarts practice of the Tissue Culture and Art project. Across this period the field, or
as it is now more commonly termed, the “space,” has developed significantly while
promoting different visions for what CM is and can do, and the best mechanisms for
delivery. Here we both analyse and critically engage with this near-twenty year period
as a productive provocation to those engaged with CM, or considering becoming so.
This paper is not a history of the field, and does not offer a comprehensive timeline.
Instead it identifies significant activities, transitions, and moments in which key meanings
and practices have taken form or exerted influence. We do this through analyzing two
related themes: the CM “institutional context” and the CM “interpretative package.” The
former, the institutional context, refers to events and infrastructures that have come into
being to support and shape the CM field, including university activities, conferences,
third sector groups, various potential funding mechanisms, and the establishment of a
start-up sector. The latter, the interpretative package, refers to the constellation of factors
that shape or assert how CM should be understood, including the various names used to
describe it, accounts of what it will achieve, and most recently, the emergent regulatory
discussions that frame its legal standing. Across the paper we argue it is productive to
think of the CM community in terms of a first and second wave. The first wave was
more university-based and broadly covers the period from the millennium until around
the 2013 cultured burger event. The second wave saw the increasing prevalence of a
start-up culture and the circuits of venture capital interest that support it. Through this
analysis we seek to provoke further reflection upon how the CM community has come
to be as it is, and how this could develop in the future.
Keywords: cultured meat, clean meat, cell-based meat, social science, sense-making, in vitro meat, naming
Stephens et al. Making Sense of Making Meat
INTRODUCTION
Cultured/clean/cell-based meat (CM) now has a near two-decade
history of laboratory research, commencing with the early NASA-
funded work at Touro College and the bio-arts practice of the
Tissue Culture and Art project. Across this period the field, or
as it is now more commonly termed, the “space,” has developed
significantly while promoting different visions of what CM is
and can do, and the best mechanisms for delivery. Here we
both analyse and critically engage with this near-twenty-year
period as a productive provocation to those engaged with CM,
or considering becoming so. We write with the conviction
that adopting a critical, self-reflexive approach to the history
of one’s own field is an important activity for reassessing how
the space came to be as it is, and recognize some of the
possibilities of how it may have been otherwise. Being aware
of how previous transitions within the field were shaped by
socio-cultural framings supports a more rigorous interrogation
of where the community may go next.
To be clear, this paper is not a history of the field, and nor
does it offer a comprehensive timeline. It is also not a technical
review of scientific progress over this period1. Instead it identifies
significant activities, transitions, and moments in which key
meanings and practices have taken form or exerted influence.
We focus particularly on events where CM makers have met,
presented and exchanged their ideas, and how these ideas have
been contested in other spaces beyond the CM community. As
such, the paper focuses upon cultural and political aspects of
CM’s development as it has been made sense of as meat (or not)
by different stakeholders. The paper was written in late 2018,
revised in early 2019, and aims to identify key cultural-economic
changes over the preceding 20 years. As critically-engaged social
scientists who have been actively studying CM for over a decade,
we see it as our role to render explicit political and cultural factors
that have shaped and framed the development of CM, just as
CM reframes and reshapes the cultural politics it inhabits. We do
this through analyzing two related themes: the CM “institutional
context” and the CM “interpretative package.” The former, the
institutional context, refers to events and infrastructures that
have come into being to support and shape the CM field,
including university activities, conferences, third sector groups,
various potential funding mechanisms, and the establishment of
a start-up sector. The latter, the interpretative package, refers to
the constellation of factors that shape or assert how CM should
be understood, including the various names used to describe it,
accounts of what it will achieve, and most recently, the emergent
regulatory discussions that frame its legal standing2. In practice,
these themes of institutional settings and interpretative work are
intrinsically linked, and we recognize this in our writing while
separating each into distinct sections of the paper.
Across the paper we argue it is productive to think of the
CM community in terms of a first and second wave. The first
wave was more university-based and broadly covers the period
1For technical reviews over time, see Edelman et al. (2005),Datar and Betti (2010),
and Stephens et al. (2018).
2The notion of an interpretative package was first developed in Gamson and
Modigliani (1989).
from the millennium until around the 2013 cultured burger
event. The second wave saw the increasing prevalence of a start-
up culture and the circuits of venture capital (VC) interest that
support it. While both waves are broad, there are key differences
in the institutional context and interpretative package produced
by each. This given, it remains important to stress this was a
slow transition as opposed to a step change, with overlaps and
continuities that remain, and an indebtedness of wave two to
wave one.
In terms of structure, we first describe the social science
research methods that inform this work, before dedicating
a section each to the institutional context and then the
interpretative package of CM. We then close with a final
discussion that critically engages with the practice and potential
of the institutional context and interpretative package as they
stand today, and could be in the future.
METHODS
This paper draws upon three separately conducted research
portfolios on CM. Stephens has been tracking the CM
community since 2008, and has attended most major events in
that time, as well as conducting 42 interviews with professionals
working in the field between 2010 and 2013, and is currently
conducting a second comparative set of interviews in 2018/9.
He has also conducted media analysis of public reporting during
this period. Sexton has researched the CM community since
2013, focussing particularly on activities based in and around
the San Francisco Bay Area in California, US (otherwise known
as “Silicon Valley”). She is engaged in ongoing fieldwork within
this region and has conducted 30 interviews with professionals
directly working in and affiliated with the field between 2014
and 2018. She has also conducted qualitative analysis on the
online narratives of the CM field. Driessen has studied the CM
community as it emerged in public media and in a series of
academic and public events especially in the Netherlands, since
2008. Together with Cor van der Weele, he has organized three
workshop-discussion sessions at bioethics, social science and CM
conferences, and also conducted a study with five focus groups
of prospective consumers on CM (although this work is not
reported here, see Van der Weele and Driessen, 2013, 2019).
Collectively the authors have engaged in frequent exchange
of ideas across the last 9 years for Stephens and Driessen,
and the last 5 years for all three. Specifically in delivering
this paper, the authors conducted a sustained dialogue on the
content of the theoretical and empirical account. However, due
to the research integrity practices of each individual project,
the authors did not share data (e.g., interview transcripts) so
as to maintain their ethical commitments to their interviewees
and research participants. Instead authors discussed their data
anonymously and developed upon existing publications in
building their analysis.
The paper draws upon multiple independently conducted
studies. Two of these studies involved recorded interviews with
human subjects. Both secured written informed consent from
their participants through protocols that were reviewed and
approved by their respective ethics committees. For Stephens’
work this was Cardiff University School of Social Sciences
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Stephens et al. Making Sense of Making Meat
Research Ethics Committee and Brunel University London
College of Business, Arts and Social Sciences Research Ethics
Committee. For Sexton this was King’s College London Ethics
Committee. Driessen’s philosophical contribution did not involve
data collected from human subjects but was conducted in
accordance with the procedures of Wageningen School of
Social Sciences.
THE INSTITUTIONAL CONTEXT OF CM
All practices require some range of institutions to support their
cultural, economic, and spatial accomplishment. In this section
we first analyse how the early CM community emerged largely
within a biomedical academic context and worked to develop
institutional mechanisms to better support their endeavors. We
then document a shift toward the second wave signaled by an
increased reliance upon a venture capital fuelled start-up culture.
Life in the University: The First Wave
CM Community
Before the first wave of collective efforts to produce CM
there were a small number of pioneers conducting laboratory
work around the turn of the millennium. Two projects in
particular—one in bio-arts and one funded by NASA—were
both independently producing tissue around 2000-2001. One
of these was conducted by Benjaminson et al. (2002). Morris
Benjaminson first became aware of the concept in the mid-
90s from his cousin, a chief food inspector at the New York
City Department of Health. Having an existing track record of
securing funding from NASA, he later submitted an application
to their Small Business Innovative Research programme, which
NASA funded. During the project the team cultivated goldfish
explants to increase their size. It was inspected, smelt and
described as “acceptable as food” (Benjaminson et al., 2002 p.
885). Importantly, the focus of this work was entirely to develop
a muscle protein production system to support meat production
during long-term space travel. They subsequently also grew
chicken muscle (Wolfson, 2002), but NASA chose not to fund
a subsequent research application as long-term space flight was a
low priority.
The other early project to develop, and this time eat, CM was
by bio-artists (Catts and Zurr, 2013) through their Tissue Culture
and Art Project (Catts and Zurr, 2002). Initially developed during
a residency at Harvard Medical School in 2000, the artistic project
produced semi-living steaks from pre-natal sheep cells, before
later growing steaks from living frog cells. The steaks were eaten
at the world’s first CM dinner party as part of their Disembodied
Cuisine exhibition at L’art Biotech, Le Lieu Unique, Nantes,
France, in 2003. This provocative work sought to engender
discussion about the transgressive status of the tissue, as the frog
muscle was consumed with the live frogs from which the cells
were sourced also sitting at the dinner table3.
The early 2000s saw a number of scientists who formed the
first wave of research on CM (although it was mostly known as
3Images of the feast are available here: http://www.tca.uwa.edu.au/disembodied/
dis.html
in-vitro meat at the time), with key figures including Vladimir
Mironov, then of the Medical University of South Carolina
(MUSC), Douglas McFarland of South Dakota State in the US,
and Henk Haagsman of Utrecht University in Europe. Mironov
and McFarland co-authored the first academic CM review article
with Edelman et al. (2005). Edelman had previously written a
review article in 2003 during a science journalism course in
Wageningen, the Netherlands. Matheny had been inspired by the
NASA work and was in the process of establishing a non-profit
supporting the sector, which came to be the now well-known New
Harvest, which at that time gave 100% of donations to research
at universities.
Haagsman was Professor of Meat Science when in 2001 he was
approached by another early pioneer of the community, Willem
van Eelen, who had already secured a 1995 patent for in-vitro
meat production. Early coverage of CM often revelled in Van
Eelen’s colorful life story, citing his time in a World War II
Japanese internment camp as key to the genesis of his thinking
(Spectre, 2011). Van Eelen was an entrepreneur and a larger-than-
life character who convinced initially skeptical Haagsman to seek
funding for research. After 4 years of trying they secured around
e2m for a four-year project based at Utrecht, Amsterdam,
and Eindhoven Universities. The money came from a small
interdepartmental programme of the Dutch government called
the Programme of Sustainable Food Systems (PSFS). This is
pertinent, as they are not the typical funders of Dutch research on
tissue engineering or food science, as those groups had remained
hesitant to fund CM studies. The project explored embryonic cell
line development, algae-based culture media, and cell stimulation
methods (Boonen et al., 2010; du Puy et al., 2011). Among the
team members were Mark Post, and meat industry contact Peter
Verstrate, who would go on to develop the cultured burger after
this first project completed; meanwhile Haagsman led a second
CM PSFS grant.
During this period other university laboratories pursued
projects, notably Tor Lea and Stig Omholt at the Norwegian
University of Life Sciences who grew fat and cartilage from pig
umbilical cords, and Julie Gold’s group at Chalmers University
in Gothenburg who worked on bioreactor designs and adhering
muscle cells to starch cells. Bioethicist Welin (2009) was also
central to the Swedish group, articulating the moral value of
CM and pursuing research funding. He was one of a broad
range of social scientists, artists and designers active at this time
who offered support, raised questions, or suggested speculative
futures through a broad set of analytical frameworks (King, 2006;
Hopkins and Dacey, 2008; McHugh, 2010; Stephens, 2010; Van
der Weele, 2010; Driessen and Korthals, 2012)4.
Further strengthening the role of the third sector in the
community, in 2008 People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals
(PETA) offered $1m for the first group to sell in-vitro chicken
that was indistinguishable from livestock chicken in 10 US
states. The campaign was fronted by PETA President Ingrid
Newkirk, although a key driver of the campaign within PETA
4See Dilworth and McGregor (2015) for discussion of early social
science publications.
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Stephens et al. Making Sense of Making Meat
was Bruce Friedrich, who later co-established CM and plant-
based meats advocacy group the Good Food Institute (GFI).
Scientists within the CM community at the time felt the prize
was a little gimmicky, as no one was close to producing tissue
at that quantity or quality. Their preference would be to invest
the money in a grant, which PETA subsequently did, funding
Nicolas Genovese (who would later co-found Memphis Meats)
to work with Mironov at MUSC on their “Charlem” (Charleston-
engineered-meat) approach. Other third-sector groups were also
active, including van Eelen’s own in-vitro Meat Foundation, and
Austria-based Future Foods. By 2013, New Harvest had attracted
sufficient funds to take on its first employee, its Executive
Director Isha Datar, who steered the organization as the CM
communities of the first wave transitioned into the second.
In general, the first wave CM community was typified by
university-based projects (sometimes with industrial contacts)
driven by environmental and animal ethics concerns but
overwhelmingly hitting a wall when trying to attract funding
from the traditional institutions that support university work.
They generally saw their work as basic science, focused on
building a knowledge base for subsequent innovators to develop
products. The majority of the researchers involved came from
biomedical backgrounds, often based in biomedical departments,
and were fully aware of how some colleagues attributed an
oddness to their pursuit of tissue-engineered meat. For many,
it was a side-project financed through whatever funds could
be found within existing budgets or through PhD and Master’s
student projects, conducted as a secondary activity to their
biomedical research and teaching. While they often attracted
(sometimes frustratingly high levels of) press attention, they
typically did not see their role as laying pathways for marketing
or PR purposes, believing the technology to be too early-stage
for PR to be a core emphasis of their day-to-day work. These
roles, they believed, would be fulfilled by a different type of
professional who would enter the field when the technology
was better understood. This meant that across the community
there were more diverse opinions about exactly what CM is or
what it could be, with more openness than today both to the
possibilities for whether it would be meat or a meat alternative,
and the realistic opportunity for its world-transforming potential.
Privately expressed, the dominant attitude tended more toward a
sense that “we think this could have an incredibly positive impact
so it is worth pursuing, but we would need to wait and see,”
compared to the more confidently-asserted notion that “this will
definitely deliver benefits in multiple ways” that we see in 2018.
For some in the first wave, an uncomfortable tension remained
between the visions they were asked to provide for what they
saw to be media hype, and the realities they knew of their limited
budgets and early-stage technology.
The biggest challenge facing the first wave of CM was funding.
Many research proposals were submitted to governmental
funding bodies in multiple countries, but met with no success.
One core barrier was that CM remained a fundamentally novel
concept that blurred existing categories. It did not fit well
with funders that usually support tissue engineering research,
because it was aiming to produce food. Equally, it did not fit
well with funders that usually support food research, because
it was tissue engineering. The ambiguity over its status meant
it sat uncomfortably along the established disciplinary lines of
university funding mechanisms. While we cannot evidence this,
we hypothesize another barrier to attaining government finance
was that the funding bodies may simply not have believed
CM was a viable technology, more akin to science fiction than
science fact, and possibly even that CM was stigmatized as
an oddball science. During the first wave, CM’s unusualness
remained central to how it was understood.
Then, famously in 2011, Mark Post of Maastricht University
was interviewed in The New Yorker saying the technology was
already available to grow muscle cells into animal protein in the
lab, if the money was available to do it (Spectre, 2011). Within
weeks an anonymous donor had offered the money, and Post was
developing a programme to deliver the world’s first laboratory-
grown burger. By 2013 the financial donor was revealed as Google
co-founder Sergey Brin during the press conference in which
the burger was cooked and tasted. It provided what remains the
defining moment for the emergence of CM technology, setting
in place a coherent vision for what CM is and what it can
accomplish that has remained the robust and dominant account
within the CM collective imagination. By staging the public
eating of CM, the burger event asserted its realness, and realness
as food (O’Riordan et al., 2017; Sexton, 2018). It set the template
for making sense of making meat, as meat as we know it, and
a technology designed for environmental, human health, and
animal welfare benefits. The PR sensibility of the event brought
a new aesthetic to the field, focused on style, slickness, and
confidence. It was also significant in signaling a shift toward
funding from commercial but mission-based Silicon Valley and
Bay-area sources. In this regard, it sowed the seeds for the vision
and economic underpinning of CM’s second wave.
Conferences and Events
Key to the emergence of a CM community has been a
set of events that have functioned to both bring people
together and symbolically mark new stages in the field’s
development. International events of this type started with an
April 2008 meeting called the “First International In-vitro Meat
Symposium,” at the Norway Food Research Institute, Ås. The
three-day event hosted over fifty people discussing large-scale
production, mission-critical challenges, R&D and feasibility.
While these themes remain central today, few of the 2008
attendees would be known to a new entrant of the CM space
in 2018. Jason Matheny, then and now of New Harvest, spoke
at the event, as did Willem van Eelen, describing it as “a dream
coming true.” Largely organized by the Dutch In-vitro Meat
Consortium and colleagues in Norway, the symposium sought to
enact community and, by taking the form of an academic event,
usher in a new disciplinary trajectory.
It would be 3 years before the next international event,
a European Science Foundation (ESF) funded exploratory
workshop titled “In-vitro meat: Possibilities and realities for an
alternative future meat source” held in Gothenburg, Sweden in
late summer 2011. Stephens was one of around 30 attendees,
many of whom had never previously met those from other
countries. This event was notable as the first presentation to
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Stephens et al. Making Sense of Making Meat
the emerging community by Hanna Tuomisto of her now well-
cited life-cycle assessment of CM, a study funded by New
Harvest (Tuomisto and de Mattos, 2011). The symposium
is also remembered as the time the field decided to adopt
“cultured meat” over “in-vitro meat.” Such accounts overstate the
agreement around the room at the time, as discussed later in the
section on nomenclature. It was in the months leading up to this
event that Mark Post announced plans to produce the burger,
and Mironov later announced the first tasting of his Charlem
would be at the Gothenburg event. However, neither were able to
attend the workshop. Post was absent due to ESF rules on funding
limits to prevent over-representation of any single country at
their events, as numerous others from the Dutch consortium
were already confirmed, while Mironov had been suspended by
MUSC for unacceptable behavior unrelated to CM (Saenz, 2011),
although Genovese attended in his place.
The following year, 2012, the community further sought
to establish the academic representation of the field at two
events in which CM-related panels were hosted at major
scientific conferences. The first, in February, was a panel
organized by Genovese and funded by New Harvest titled “The
Next Agricultural Revolution: Emerging Production Methods
for Meat Alternatives” at the Vancouver, Canada, meeting of
the American Association for the Advancement of Science
(AAAS), and included Pat Brown (Impossible Foods), Mark
Post, and Genovese himself. Later that year, in September,
a panel on “Tissue Engineered Nutrition” was hosted at the
Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine International
Society (TERMIS) conference in Vienna, Austria, an enormous
conference on biomedical research. Speakers included bio-artist
Ionat Zurr on the first consumption of CM in 2003, Mark Post on
the plans for the burger, and Modern Meadow co-founder Gabor
Forgacs, then the first start-up focused on CM. Notably, at the
presidential plenary, the panel was name-checked as a distinct
and unusual addition to the portfolio of work conducted under
the rubric of tissue engineering. These panels were devised to
give visibility and legitimacy to the still-then unusual technology
of CM within the established academic realm by situating it
as equal with the diverse range of other panels. Perhaps most
noteworthy here is that as well as being the first panels of their
type, to our knowledge, at the time of writing these were also the
last. While we know of academic social science conferences with
panels on CM, the articulation of technical knowledge on CM
has moved away from sessions at large academic conferences to
other forums.
A major moment came in October 2015 when Maastricht
University, New Harvest, and Limburg-based technology support
platform Brightlands hosted the “First International Symposium
on Cultured Meat.” The event adopted the form of an academic
conference, although the speakers came from a wider set
of backgrounds. With around a 100 attendees, it combined
speakers working on CM from laboratory and social science
perspectives, along with others from biomedicine working on
biomedical tissue engineering challenges with relevance to CM.
It drew heavily on the legitimacy of the cultured burger and
the Maastricht group’s role in it, with large photos of the
burger prominently displayed in promotional materials. The
significance of the event was not lost on those who attended,
and was reiterated multiple times by the organizers. This first
international event was a milestone in the emergence of the field.
Although it wasn’t the first international event. It was either
the second or the third, depending upon what was counted.
But perhaps what was key here was that it was a significant
milestone for the “field,” not the “space.” The trajectory
aspired to by the organizers was still an academic, disciplinary
mode of organization. The event featured a discussion on the
establishment of an international CM society, modeled upon
other academic societies, although the perspectives on the utility
of this varied across the room, and we are not aware that the
idea was pursued further (see also Jönsson et al., 2019). The
conference was also a key networking moment as many met
others in the field for the first time. It was also a key moment
of inspiration for others, and we know of two CM start-ups today
founded by individuals who attended Maastricht out of curiosity,
but left with the seeds of a future career change.
2016 saw the New Harvest conference, branded as the “first-
ever cellular agriculture conference,” in San Francisco in July.
Unlike those prior meetings, this event did not adopt the
academic conference as its model. Instead of lone-presenters
reporting research findings, it featured panels and interviews
on a range of topics. Conspicuously stylish in its aesthetic, this
was an event to support the CM “space,” as opposed to the
CM “field.” It captured the shift in the center of gravity of the
community away from the university-based disciplinary activity
of the first wave to the start-up culture and its distinct ways of
acting, being, and looking of the second wave. That’s not to say
that New Harvest was turning its back on universities at this time.
Indeed, the event saw announcements of New Harvest funding
in their university-based Research Fellows scheme. However, the
culture was shifting, and this event symbolized and instantiated
that shift.
The Maastricht and New Harvest events became annual, and
other countries witnessed broadly similar events, such as the
May 2017 Modern Agriculture Foundation event in Israel, in
March 2018 the “1st Cellular Agriculture Conference in Japan,”
and in 2016, 2017, and 2018 the Cultivate events in the UK. In
the US, the Cultured Meat Symposium and GFI launched their
own respective conferences in 2018, both in the San Francisco
Bay area.
The establishment of conferences and meeting spaces has been
both practically and symbolically important for the community.
Events such as these make the notion of a community
meaningful, as group photographs of attendees are circulated
afterwards as evidence of their communing. These early events
attained a sense of fanfare that ushered in this new community
and the new technology they support. This is evident in the repeat
assertion of the “firstness” of the events, be it the first for CM,
for Cellular Agriculture, or in a new territory. In the early days
the work of hosting an actual physical event lent credibility to
the view that CM was an actual physical technology, and fought
against the science-fiction label in an attempt to show it as a
serious scientific and academic enterprise. Yet in the chronology
of these events we also witness a shift from largely academic
points of reference to those of a broader “space” typified by
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Stephens et al. Making Sense of Making Meat
diverse cultures from entrepreneurship, the third sector, as well
as those in universities.
The Second Wave CM Community: Rise of
the Start-Ups
With public funding generally unavailable at such a nascent
stage of the technology, many CM developers sought out (or
were approached by) wealthy philanthropic individuals and the
investment streams associated with high-tech ventures. This shift
became a key feature of what we here identify as the second wave
of CM research. Technology accelerator programmes are one
such model that has germinated a number of leading ventures
in CM, including the first start-up active in the space, Modern
Meadow, founded by Gabor and Andras Forgacs. While they
already had start-up experience with the successful launch of
biomedical 3D-bioprinting company Organovo, they opted to
go through the 2013 programme of Singularity University, a
tech business incubator in Silicon Valley aimed at breakthrough
technologies to address humanity’s global challenges. At the time
the Forgacs focused on both meat and leather, having eaten fried
CM during a 2011 TEDMED talk5, and then producing CM
“steak chips” in 2014, before focusing primarily on leather.
The typical structure of a tech accelerator involves cohorts
of entrepreneurial teams who apply with an idea that they
wish to develop into a for-profit business. The teams spend
an intensive period of usually 3–4 months in residence at the
accelerator, during which time they are given physical space,
technical resources, seed funding and networking opportunities
in exchange for an equity stake in the company. The programmes
usually culminate in a “demo day” where the teams showcase
their prototypes and pitch their business potential to an invite-
only audience of investors, business personnel and media. The
model was developed within and for the information technology
industry, but has been extended to other sectors, in the case
of CM most notably by IndieBio. Based in San Francisco and
operating under the umbrella of investment management firm
SOSV Ventures, IndieBio claims to be the first accelerator in
the world specifically focussed on facilitating the upscaling of
biotechnology companies. IndieBio’s first cohort included Clara
Foods, a company formed through New Harvest that uses cellular
agriculture to produce animal-free eggs whites, which quickly
raised its seed fund of $1.7m. Following this success, IndieBio
sought out potential CM start-ups to join the programme,
resulting in Uma Valeti and Nicholas Genovese’s Memphis Meats
entering their second intake. By demo day they were showcasing
footage of the world’s first CM meatball, and went on to raise
$17m in their Series A funding round6. Other CM IndieBio
graduates are Finless Foods and New Age Meats, among other
cellular agriculture companies.
The concentration of CM start-ups within Silicon Valley has
in large part been a result of the region’s growing institutional
interest and investment in food technology over the last decade,
of which IndieBio is just one part. “Food tech” has become a
5TEDMED talk available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDmkK8brSWk
6https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/memphis-meats.
distinct genre of entrepreneurial activity within the region’s high-
tech ecosystem. It has featured as a frequent topic of industrial
conferences and been heralded as a new frontier of Silicon Valley
disruption; the hopeful successor of the clean energy movement
that, for many in the Valley, failed to deliver on its (short-
term) promises and profits. During Sexton’s fieldwork in the
region it became clear that a shift was underway concerning
which global problems and solutions mattered to the Valley
community. A common format for budding start-ups when
pitching their ventures is to identify the explicit problem(s) that
their innovation will purportedly solve. What is considered a
problem and solution in the region are subject to particular
conditions and rapid shifts in the attention economy of the Valley
milieu. Sexton was told that previously “global warming” had
been a big “world problem” that would appeal to mission-driven
investors at the time, yet “global food security” has since become
the new issue for start-ups to tackle7. In part a response to and
driver of this broader shift in institutional interest, some of the
region’s established VC firms have over the last decade expanded
their investment interests to food technology ventures, including
those developing CM. In addition, a more recent evolution has
seen a number of new VC firms founded with a specific remit
of funding early-stage food-tech ventures developing animal-
food substitutes: examples include New Crop Capital, Stray Dog
Capital and Kale Invest. The locations of these firms range from
Silicon Valley to other parts of the US, as well as in Europe
and Asia.
Other recent CM ventures have their origin stories closer
to academia. Mark Post’s Mosa Meat (Netherlands), Aleph
Farms (Israel) and Cellular Agriculture Ltd (UK) are examples
of companies routed in, or with strong links to, academic
biomedical research programmes, often with lead researchers
acting as CSO, or Scientific Director in conjunction with their
existing university roles. There are also a number of university-
based projects that do not have links to specific companies. New
Harvest have long funded university-based work, and in 2018
GFI also announced funding for a set of projects. Subsequently,
the shift toward wave two has not seen the end of university-
based programmes, as by our reckoning there is more university
laboratory work in 2019 than there was in 2009, but the
universities have lower media profiles and incomes than the start-
ups, and operate increasingly in relation to the language and
aesthetic of the start-up space.
Other funding mechanisms have also been pursued. Israel-
based company, SuperMeat, launched a crowdfunding campaign
on IndieGoGo early in its formation, and has since gained seed
funding from a number of VC firms within the US, some of
which are solely focussed on animal-food substitutes. It was
also reported in 2017 that the Chinese government had signed
a $300 million trade agreement with SuperMeat, Aleph Farms
(then Meat the Future), and another Israeli CM company called
Future Meat Technologies. The deal was reportedly motivated by
China’s current strategy to reduce carbon emissions and secure
a safe future protein supply. Government-funded agencies in
7These comparisons were observed by Sexton during fieldwork visits in the San
Francisco Bay Area in 2014-16.
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Stephens et al. Making Sense of Making Meat
Singapore and Japan have also participated in recent funding
rounds of cellular agriculture ventures (Friedrich, 2018b; Lee
and Koh, 2019). By 2018, Mosa Meat revealed a significant
funding round had been secured from the investment arm of
German pharmaceutical company Merck, and leading European
meat processor, Bell Food Group. This period has also seen an
increase in Intellectual Property activity, as companies including
Memphis Meats and Supermeat have filed patents on CM-
related technology.
Investments from multinational (food) corporations are
indicative of a pivotal shift in the institutional support of the CM
sector. Until 2017, the bulk of investment secured by CM start-
ups had come from wealthy philanthropic individuals, early-
stage VC firms, and Valley accelerator programmes. Since 2017,
the investment rounds of CM companies, and indeed the wider
movement of recent alternative protein ventures, have made
global headlines for including some of the biggest names in the
conventional livestock industry, such as Tyson Foods, Cargill,
and PHW. These developments represent strategic investments
by the major incumbent players to keep track of the emerging
sector; to ensure they are the disruptors, not the disrupted.
Alternative proteins including CM are also beginning to attract
attention from the global investment community beyond venture
capital firms. The FAIRR Initiative, a ‘collaborative investor
network’ established by the UK-based Jeremy Coller Foundation,
has been a key player in consciously engaging the investment
community—particularly those operating multi-billion dollar
pension and asset management funds—on the environmental,
social and governance risks posed by intensive livestock farming.
One of the recommendations promoted by FAIRR has been
for active investment in alternative proteins, including CM
(FAIRR, 2018). The increased involvement of established food,
pharmaceutical and investment companies can be associated
with a softening of the rhetoric around disruption by some
in the space, with GFI shifting to using “transforming” animal
agriculture over “disrupting” it (Centre for Effective Altruism,
2017), and Memphis Meats suggesting the Silicon Valley
approach of “move fast and break things” is an “awful” way to
produce food (Watson, 2018a).
However, one company that still looks very attached to the San
Francisco disruptive food tech space model is “JUST,” formally
Hampton Creek, who in summer 2017 announced they would
release the first commercially available CM product before the
end of 2018. Echoing the 2003 frog-meat bio-arts project of
Catts and Zurr, JUST released a video showing their team
eating chicken nuggets in a sunny garden as a live chicken, the
purported source of the cells, walks around them. The 2017
announcement that JUST planned to enter the market by the
end of 2018 seemed incredibly bold, even by the standards of
optimism and ambition of the second wave start-up sector. As
we finalize this paper in early 2019, it is clear JUST missed their
target. The reason, they suggest, was that regulatory approval
could not be secured in time in any of the number of countries
they approached. Currently they anticipate launching by summer
2019 (Watson, 2019). Should this happen then the related
regulatory approval and media coverage could form another
key element in framing how CM can be understood and how
it can be contested. The short timeline to market proposed
by JUST was an acceleration of previous estimates, and the
impact of such increased expectations concerned some in the
community at the time. Anxieties over an early launch remain as
we write. Media reports tell how Eric Schulze of Memphis Meats
addressed other start-ups during the 2019 “Industrializing Cell
Based Meats” conference, arguing that the first to market bears a
responsibility for the perception of the rest. He is quoted as saying
“we’ve seen from other areas in the food industry how subpar
early products can stigmatize an entire category for decades... or
botched regulatory strategies can result in years or even decades-
long delays,.. . what one company does or says will affect us
all” (Watson, 2019). How JUST’s product will be presented, how
much it will cost and its physical properties, are all questions
waiting to be answered.
In early 2019 the CM space is characterized by significant
optimism, with new companies coming out of stealth mode
almost monthly. Memphis Meats raised a disclosed amount of
$17m in the first Series A funding round of any CM venture, a
significant feat for a company without a steady revenue stream.
Compared to wave one, the CM start-up community has more
money, looks more confident, stylish, and a little younger. It
has also been characterized by the rise of Silicon Valley as an
important regional hub of CM activity and hype. By 2018 some
companies were able to pick and choose which venture capitalists
they took seed funding from. This period also saw the beginnings
of start-up companies located beyond the US in Asia (e.g.,
Integriculture and Shiok Meats) and Europe (e.g., Meatable and
Higher Steaks). However, seed-level venture capital is, of course,
highly speculative, and VCs expect a high proportion of their
investments to fail. No doubt some CM companies will meet
this fate, perhaps with some staff subsequently recruited by those
that survive. The optimism of wave two could be tested as more
seek Series A funding, and the patience of investors could be
tested if projected milestones for delivering scaled-up operations
are missed.
THE INTERPRETATIVE PACKAGE OF CM
The first-wave CM community knew well that most people
thought their work was unusual, a genuinely strange concept
more associated with science-fiction than edible reality. As a
profoundly novel practice, the real-world production of CM had
no existing framework for making sense of the tissue. Those
in the community needed to engage in the cultural work of
developing sense-making mechanisms that not only rendered it
knowable, but also desirable. Ambiguity over CM’s status has
been a persistent feature of the first 20 years of its development,
evident in its media coverage, the claims to its naturalness
and potential, early regulatory discussions, and perhaps most
enduringly, within the so-far continuous discussions as to what
it should be called. We explore each in turn.
Nomenclature
Central to the interpretative package of any novel entity is what
it is called, and this has certainly been true in the case of CM.
Readers will have noticed our use of CM within this paper
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to strategically avoid siding with cultured, clean, or cell-based
meat, the three main contenders at the time of writing. But even
focusing upon these three examples hides a broader complexity
and a politics that stretches across the 20-year history discussed
here, and will likely stretch further into the future. It is important
because words do work. They invoke meanings, potentials,
futures, networks, and identities. Here we discuss naming in the
Anglosphere, but we note that there are additional complexities
and cultural-specificities as the same issue is addressed in other
languages. The NASA funded work used the terms “in-vitro
edible muscle protein,” while the provocative artworks of Catts
and Zurr opted for “semi-living steaks.” However, the first
communally-used term was “in-vitro meat,” used by the Dutch
in-vitro Meat Consortium, van Eelen’s In-vitro Meat Foundation
and a number of early academic publications (Langelaan et al.,
2011). Literally “in glass,” the term in-vitro comes straight
from an academic repertoire evoking the world of the research
laboratory, reflecting the center of gravity within the field of
wave one.
In-vitro meat was the dominant term from at least as early
as 2005. A narrative has built up within the CM community
that this changed in 2011, specifically during the Gothenburg
“European Science Foundation Exploratory workshop in In-vitro
Meat.” However, Stephens attended this meeting and we argue
this narrative writes out a level of hesitancy among many present
to adopt the proposed “cultured meat,” as the merits of this and
“in-vitro” were discussed collectively. More than “a name” was at
stake in this discussion, as the very status of the technology and
the participants’ research programmes were implicated. Being
regarded as the scientifically accurate phrase, the term “in-vitro”
remained the preference for some participants. That said, it was
recognized that the term could alienate some people in a way
less likely with “cultured,” which benefitted from the combined
meanings of “cell culture,” “fermented,” and “artistic or classy”
(cf. Datar, 2015). “Cultured” was embraced by some who deemed
it more appealing to potential consumers, and was accepted
by others because the cell-culturing element meant it remained
within a scientific repertoire. However, it was clear many in
the room would not accept a term that distanced the science
altogether; as noted above, many present identified themselves
as science researchers, not marketers, and that any name would
need to be of the scientific realm, with a subsequent renaming
of the technology to be led by a different set of professionals
(perhaps in public relations) in a future moment once the
technology shifted from research to commerce. As such, through
the exchange on naming, those partaking in the field were
defining themselves, the proper category of work they engaged
in, and the status of the technology and the tissue itself.
While the 2011 meeting was not a decisive turning point, it
was certainly an important moment. The switch to “cultured”
developed over the coming months and years, finally becoming
stamped as the phrase of the moment with its use at Mark Post’s
cultured beef burger event. However, it is worth noting that at
the time of announcing the burger in 2011 Post was using the
term lab-grown meat, and even just 2 months before the burger
launch, in his TEDxHaarlem talk, Post still did not say cultured,
although it did feature on one of his slides. Returning to the
2011 Gothenburg event, it is also worth noting that many of
those most wedded to the term in-vitro meat did not switch to
cultured meat, but became increasing less visible in the field,
some leaving altogether.
Then, in late 2016, clean meat became pushed more strongly,
most notably by GFI, who used the term frequently at the 2016
Maastricht Cultured Meat conference, and explained why in a
September 6th blog post. Here, Friedrich (2016) articulates the
preference for clean meat based upon the term’s accuracy, its
synergy with clean energy, and its capacity to lead conversations
onto the positive aspects of why the meat is clean. Clean meat
then became the title of Shapiro’s (2018) influential book. By
May 2018 Friedrich published another blog post, documenting
the increasing prevalence of the term among some start-up
companies, media publications, and google searches (Friedrich,
2018a). The post also reasserted the term’s appropriateness, while
commenting on four surveys of potential consumers showing
their preference for “clean” over “cultured.” However, the switch
to clean was far from total, with notable exceptions being Mark
Post and New Harvest. Indeed, there is an extent to which
an individual’s preferred term sometimes reflected their greater
alignment with GFI or New Harvest.
Then, during the summer 2018 discussions around FDA or
USDA regulation (discussed in more detail later), Memphis
Meats used the term cell-based meat. This phrasing, they
believed, could bring a level of alignment between the needs
of regulators, companies in the CM space, and the livestock
industry who have largely criticized the term clean meat for
its suggestion that meat produced by slaughtering livestock
is unclean. Cell-based meat was also used in the joint letter
signed by Memphis Meats and the North American Meat
Institute (NAMI) suggesting a combined FDA/USDA regulatory
approach. Following this, at a private meeting after the inaugural
GFI conference in September that year, a group of company
founders decided to establish a trade association for the space,
adopting the term cell-based meat to describe their future
product. The FDA and USDA themselves, however, have tended
to use “cell-cultured,” typically followed by “product” or “food
product,” and not using the word “meat” at all.
At the time of writing it is unclear whether cell-based meat
will stick in the way in-vitro, cultured and clean have. It is clear
there remains resistance as some continue to assert the strengths
of clean meat, while others still retain cultured and others
again avoid adopting any specific phrase in their promotional
materials. However, there are a set of learning points here. First,
we would argue that the ongoing renaming and discussion over
terminology is likely to continue at least for the short-term. It
reflects both a fundamental ambiguity about what the tissue is
and the cultural-institutional space it may come to inhabit in
society, as well as the micro-politics within the CM community
itself. Second, we note these naming disputes do not just reflect
ambiguities over what the tissue is, but renaming efforts also seek
to intervene in this meaning-making process by framing what it
can accomplish, and by asserting it is meat. Third, there is an
underlying identity politics in choosing preferred names, that
relates to assumptions about the correct mode of activity—and
the appropriate audience to be addressed—for the community at
a point in time. Within this, there can be a second level of identity
politics around who supports whom within the community, and
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Stephens et al. Making Sense of Making Meat
what term they prefer. Fourth, in late 2018 we are witnessing
perhaps the greatest level of pluralization of terminology since
in-vitro meat became the established term. There are now clear
and sometimes entrenched camps behind the cultured, clean,
and cell-based nomenclature, as well as others adopting none
of these. Equally, we are also seeing single actors using multiple
terms, and may see the emergence of potential trade names
such as JUST Meat and Memphis Meats, that could seek to
advertise through brand names instead. This reflects similar
strategies by the plant-based Impossible and Beyond Burgers
which both avoid generic descriptors such as veggie burger.
We may increasingly see the differentiation of terminology as
one term is preferred for institution-facing regulatory work and
another for consumer-facing promotional work. Collectively,
these observations point to the significance and complexity of
naming in the interpretative repertoire of CM, as doing so
works to define appropriate roles for the community and what
their tissues can accomplish. And as our final comment on this,
we should note one constant across this flux and plurality of
CM terminology within the community: the use of the word
“meat” has remained. We would argue this signifier does more
work than whatever term precedes it, and it is telling that the
community has rarely deviated from it, since the early NASA and
art practice work. While many in the community argue it should
be called meat because it is meat, we again stress the contingent
nature and interpretative flexibility of meaning for any words,
no less those used here. While meat has been robustly sustained
within the community, it remains imaginable that this may be
challenged if actors decide that provenance is more important
than biological physiology in meaning-making, accuracy and
labeling. Indeed, as we will show, such challenges have already
been made.
Other elements of the emergent discourse can also be analyzed
in a similar way, such as umbrella terms “cellular agriculture” or
the “post-animal bioeconomy.” In the 2018 GFI conference it was
suggested that bioreactors are better termed “cultivators” to align
more closely with the terminology of the food sector. Detailed
analysis of these extends beyond the limit of this paper8, but we
note such terms are used to assert meanings, draw boundaries
that include some (and exclude others), and to attract the support
and approval of various groups of actors. Words matter, and that
is why the continued negotiation of language has been an ongoing
feature of the CM interpretative package.
Normality and Transformation
CM researchers over the last 20 years have sought to develop a
technology that initially strikes many as odd. They seek to present
it as paradoxically both normal and transformative, describing it
as both familiar yet facilitative of profound social change. This
work has been deemed necessary to bring meaning to CM in a
way that seeks to soften any discomfort people may experience
with this novel form of tissue, particularly as a substance intended
for eating, while also articulating the reasons for supporting it.
One key strand of the rhetorical strategy for asserting the
normalness of CM has been ever-present since the early days
8See Sexton (2018) for more discussion.
of New Harvest: that the production method for CM reflects
familiar (even artisanal) production methods of existing and
well-trusted foods, most typically beer, bread, and cheese. New
variants on this theme have arisen over time. During the later
stages of wave one, Nicholas Genovese promoted the term
“carnary” for a CM production facility, mirroring the brewery, or
dairy as established food production operations (Notaro, 2011).
More recently, New Age Meats presented the vision for a shared
craft beer and CM production facility with similar machinery
for meat and beer flanking each side of the room to show
consumers the commonalities of the two. However, during the
second decade of the emergence of a CM community we have
seen another key strand of the rhetorical strategy articulated with
increasing conviction: that CM is meat, real meat, exactly as
we know it from traditional forms. Scientists in the first wave
of CM research were more likely than those of today to admit
ambiguity as to whether CM (or in-vitro meat as most called it at
the time) really was meat, or a meat-like foodstuff. The term in-
vitro meat was sufficient, for many at the time, in capturing both
the similarity and difference between meat made through tissue
engineering and meat from animal slaughter. The argument
claiming CM should simply be called “meat,” because that is what
it is, was less strongly pronounced then in comparison with the
second wave.
The narrative that CM is meat, ‘just not in a cow’, we argue,
became established as the central line for the community through
the 2013 cultured beef burger event. In many regards, this was
a key moment for articulating a coherent and socially-visible
form of interpretative package for CM that has continued to
frame much of the discourse five years later. Yet even here,
in the pre-recorded film introducing the event, the issue of
sameness and difference required addressing. During the piece,
Post hypothesizes a future encounter in 2033 when a shopper
enters the supermarket to find two identical pieces of meat.
He then articulates differences between the two – one involved
killing animals and has an eco-tax – before again stressing that
they are exactly the same in taste, quality and price, although the
CM product may be cheaper. This example captures a paradox
that remains inherent within the CM interpretative package:
those supporting it seek to assert it is both ontologically the same
thing, while also being different in crucial ways9. This thinking is
now well established within the CM community. CM needs to be
recognized as meat to deliver upon its world-changing potential;
if it is seen as a meat alternative then it becomes another case in a
long list of meat alternatives that as yet have not convinced most
meat eaters to give up slaughter-based food10. Asserting CM’s
status as meat is implicated in its promissory narrative and has
been a central component of it being made sense of as ‘food’ by
its developers (Sexton, 2018).
The asymmetry here is that some components of the
difference between traditional meat and CM are stressed, indeed
celebrated, while others are denied or played down (Sexton
et al., 2019). In particular, the components of difference that
9Similar negotiations of sameness and difference have been examined by Sexton
(2016) in the context of recent plant-based meat products.
10See House (2016) for related discussion on edible insect products.
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are stressed are promissory elements such as the environmental
footprint and animal welfare impact, which are articulated as
knowable and fact-like, a confidence that has often drawn
legitimacy from the small number of life-cycle analyses that have
been conducted to date (e.g. Tuomisto and de Mattos, 2011;
Mattick et al., 2015). The components of difference that are
played down are the radically different mechanisms by which
CM is produced compared to livestock-rearing methods. These
components of difference are, of course, inherently linked: the
promissory elements are premised upon different production
methods. Yet it remains culturally significant that sameness
and difference are being constructed in a particularly nuanced
manner intended to afford interpretations of CM being meat
like any other meat. It is normal, yet, or precisely therefore,
transformative (Sexton, 2018).
However, it is important to analyse the narrative that CM
is meat as we know it. Little inspection is needed to see
that this articulation operates by seeking to assert that the
status and meaning of something is a function of its physical
properties. Proponents of this frame describe the cellular and
tissue compositional properties of CM, or potential future
CM, to validate its sameness as traditional meat. However,
physical properties are only one way of asserting meaning, and
typically meaning-making involves the interweaving of multiple
historically-situated ways of knowing. A clear alternative frame
found widely in the food industry that would stress differences
between CM and livestock-produced meat is provenance. The
two clearly come from, and come into being, through very
different mechanisms. Another way meaning can be ascribed
to something is through what it does, or how it is used11. In
this performative or practice based understanding, CM could be
understood as meat if it is consumed as meat, and recognized
as such by all parties involved, including producers, consumers,
and governments. This of course gives some agency to the
CM community in making it “meat,” but also makes clear the
community alone cannot assert a decisive outcome. Writing on
the distinct yet related category of “edibility,” House (2018 p.
83) warns against “seeing the construction of edibility as the
responsibility of entrepreneurial strategy” alone, but rather as
something that is “co-produced by a diverse range of actors”
(see also Vialles, 1994; Roe, 2006; Evans and Miele, 2012;
Sexton, 2018). Likewise, in establishing the “meat-ness” of CM,
consumers and, as we discuss in the next section, regulators
are just some of these wider actors that have a key role in
CM’s meaning-making.
Also key to developing an interpretative package for CM
has been providing articulations of what it will achieve. Such
narratives have always been used to convince people of the
case for supporting the technology (Chiles, 2013; Jönsson, 2016;
Stephens and Ruivenkamp, 2016; Ferrari and Lösch, 2017).
We would argue that in the first decade of the community’s
practice they were also used to counter intuitions that CM was
11There are a diverse set of philosophical perspectives and empirical case-
studies to support this understanding of meaning, including Wittgenstein (2009
[1953]) and Law and Singleton (2000); for food specific cases, see Roe (2006)
and House (2018).
a frivolous, even ridiculous idea, by pointing to serious issues the
technology could be positively associated with. Such narratives
have a promissory character, in that they assert future benefits
that are not achievable at the time of articulation, and request a
level of faith that CM is technically feasible and able to drive social
change in the absence of any material evidence. Subsequently,
a diverse range of interrelated promissory narratives were
developed that are now familiar to anyone with any experience
of the community. This given, we can observe shifts in what
form these promissory narratives take. The early work was
exclusively focused upon space travel, before this largely faded
from sight. Animal welfare and then environmental narratives
became more visible, while more recently human health and
food safety narratives have been stressed, particularly in relation
to debates about antibiotics in the US (Sexton et al., 2019).
And, of course, for those in industry, the prospect of gaining
a potentially lucrative market share in the global meat industry
has also motivated engagement (Mouat and Prince, 2018). As
such, these promises are being used to drive support for the
community. As part of this, recent years have seen the emergence
of species-specific sub-promissory narratives that apply broader
CM narratives to the particular farming contexts of their target
species. Examples include Finless Foods’ focus on overexploited
fisheries, as well as mercury and plastics in the ocean, and New
Age Meats’ suggestion that industrially-farmed pigs are subject
to four times the antibiotic use of cows per pound of meat. This
emergence of sub-promissory narratives is in part a response
to a need for start-ups to differentiate among themselves in
order to attract venture capitalist support, as each jostles for
funding and status. But viewing promises as driving funding
alone would underrepresent the rich work future visions do in
making CM knowable and desirable (Stephens, 2013). The story
of CM is a story of framing links between the now and a realm of
potential futures.
Regulation
To date, the interpretive package of first and second wave CM
has largely operated through the articulations of stakeholders
and events within the CM space, with most framings being of
a promotional nature. The sense-making of what CM is and
what it can do has thus primarily been the work of an academic
field turned nascent industrial sector attempting to stabilize
and promote a novel endeavor. During 2017-18 the space
matured enough from its “nascent” status to enter the broader
consciousness of established (food) corporations and national
regulatory bodies. This transition brought powerful actors from
outside the CM space—both supporters and challengers—into
the interpretative process of CM, leading to this novel entity
being held up for scrutiny against existing regulatory frameworks
and the political and institutional orderings of the incumbent
livestock industry.
With such shifts we find new questions being asked of CM
by a new collection of stakeholders. While the question of
whether CM is “meat as we know it” has followed the sector
throughout the first and into its second wave of development—
albeit with varying levels of engagement−2018 saw this query
take on new political and cultural meaning. Through the
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contestations of newly-involved stakeholders, mainly lobbyist
and other interest groups of incumbent agricultural industries,
the sense-making of CM has become entangled in competing
value-laden ideals over what a protein food system should
look like quite literally on the ground, and what (in)tangible
services it should deliver (Sexton et al., 2019). Such disputes
have sought to entrench the necessity of meat’s status on its
physical connections to particular environments (i.e., outdoors),
institutional landscapes (i.e., farms, ranches), and animal bodies
that are reared and slaughtered in the “traditional” manner,
as well as its cultural entanglements in the livelihoods and
rural economies within these places. The most high-profile
examples of these contestations have originated in the US.
The state of Missouri made headlines for passing a bill in
August 2018 prohibiting the use of the label “meat” for any
products that do not come from a slaughtered animal reared
through conventional methods (General Assembly of the State
of Missouri, 2018). The bill has since triggered CM-advocacy
group GFI, in partnership with the Animal Legal Defense Fund,
the American Civil Liberties Union of Missouri and plant-
based meat company Tofurkey, to file a lawsuit accusing the
bill of protectionism and violation of multiple legal doctrines,
including the First Amendment. In 2018 a similar bill was
deliberated by the French government to restrict the use of
the label “meat” and its related terminology (e.g., “sausage,”
“steak”) solely to conventional animal-derived products (BBC,
2018). Proponents of the bill argue that such restrictions will
guard against consumer confusion and protect the traditions and
livelihoods of conventional livestock producers.
Parallel contestations have come from US meat lobby groups
which have, over the course of 2018, filed several petitions and
open letters calling on US regulatory bodies to explicitly exclude
CM and plant-based products from the statutory definition of
meat and related terminology (e.g., “beef”)12. A shared feature
of their arguments has been the necessary connection between
such products with reared animals and conventional producers
[e.g., “actual livestock raised by farmers and ranchers” (NCBA,
2018 p. 1)]. However, the ontological ambiguity of CM has
somewhat complicated these debates. The National Cattlemen’s
Beef Association (NCBA) was among a few early contesters in
2018 who supported the inclusion of CM in the legal definition
of meat products, but not “beef” (NCBA, 2018 p. 2). It was
voiced within the CM space that this stance was politically
motivated: the inclusion of CM under the statutory definition
of meat would result in the sector falling under the regulatory
remit of the USDA, a federal body that is seen as having close
links with the incumbent US livestock industry. In response,
many CM stakeholders supported the FDA acting as the sector’s
regulatory body, on the grounds that the FDA would be more
politically neutral in its assessments and that it possessed more
relevant experience given its dual role in regulating food and
biomedical products. A position of compromise was put forward
by Memphis Meats CEO, Uma Valeti, and the president of NAMI.
In a letter submitted to President Donald Trump in October 2018
12See, for example, the US Cattlemen’s Association’s (USCA) petition filed to FSIS,
an agency of USDA (USCA, 2018).
they outline a framework that would see both FDA and USDA
regulating CM, but at different stages of its product development
(Watson, 2018b). A joint meeting of the USDA and FDA was
convened later that month with a view to developing a combined
system. In March 2019 the two agencies announced a formal
agreement to share the regulatory oversight of CM products
(USDA, 2019).
In the EU, a key market for the CM community, the use of
GM techniques in some CM production methods remains a key
issue of regulatory uncertainty. It has been suggested that the
EU’s approval of GM-produced rennet (i.e., chymosin) could act
as a precedent for CM products that include GM methods in
their production. At the time of writing there is also ambiguity
about whether CM will be classified as a novel food, a category
which comes with its own more detailed, expensive and lengthy
bureaucratic processes. As of early 2019, the message from UK-
EU regulators in events we have attended indicate that CM will
be classified as a novel food, and that its product labeling will
be required to make explicit that it was produced in cell culture
and is “different” from conventional meat (although the exact
phrasing is not yet clear). Another area of uncertainty is how to
label the “country of origin” for CM products, an issue which will
likely depend on where the cells are sourced. The potential use of
immortal cell lines could pose particular traceability issues within
this context. Questions have also been raised in regulatory fora
over the potential health risks CM could pose to consumers13.
Even if CM ventures endeavored to comply with EU regulations
as they currently stand, it is recognized by regulators that existing
frameworks are not sufficient to deal with CM, and this may
add significant time to the process as additions and refinements
are made.
As with the other components of CM’s interpretative package,
regulatory frameworks at multiple scales and across different
geographies present further spheres through which the meaning
of what CM is (and what it can do) is being shaped and contested.
Such dynamics signal a key shift in this meaning-making process
moving beyond the confines of the CM community: it is no
longer a community engaged solely with itself but is now
being required to engage with new questions and contestations
from a range of stakeholders over what role CM should play
(if any) in the future food system. As Sexton et al. (2019
p. 62) note, such disputes touch on longstanding hopes and
fears over the meaning of “good food” and the “contested
place of science, technology and capitalism in the ordering
of postmodern societies.” So far, the contestations within the
regulatory context have primarily concerned the labeling of
CM, its safety, and the political, cultural and economic stakes
associated with its legal inclusion in the category of “meat.”
This question of whether CM can be legally classified as meat
is only the first step along a range of different and, at least in
some regions, long and expensive regulatory pathways for CM
13For example, MEP Mara Bizzotto submitted a Parliamentary question
to the European Commission in July 2018 on the potential health and
economic risks ‘lab-produced synthetic meat’ poses to consumers and traditional
meat producers (see http://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-8-2018-
004200_EN.html).
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Stephens et al. Making Sense of Making Meat
products. Indeed, as Jönsson et al. (2019) note, the question may
be reframed from whether CM is meat to where CM is meat. As
such, considerable uncertainty remains a prevailing feature of
these deliberations, both regarding the status and implications
of CM but also how existing regulatory frameworks should
potentially respond.
DISCUSSION
Above we have offered an overview of the institutional
context and interpretative themes that have characterized CM
development during the first 20 years of laboratory work. We
identified two distinct waves in which CM has emerged. The first
wave was largely university based and embedded its practices
within the format of an academic field. However, it struggled for
money, despite repeatedly seeking funds from typical university
funders for basic “in vitro meat” research. The technology,
and the community of people who pursued it, retained an
unusualness to many onlookers, with persistent ambiguities over
what was being produced and why it was being developed. The
second wave saw the rise of the start-ups, who, often backed
with Silicon Valley money and Silicon Valley ideals, sought to
recast CM’s unusualness as “transformational.” Embracing the
disruptive paradigm (Morozov, 2013), these early companies
and their supporters provided much slicker visions of how CM
would change the world, and why the world needed changing.
As such, the institutional and the interpretative are linked, as
new funding sources opened up new research opportunities in
companies, and new aesthetics for promoting the technology.
In the process, increasingly the CM community has reframed
the cultural politics it inhabits, reconfiguring what constitutes
tissue engineering (to include food), and as part of a movement
that reshapes what counts as meat, while also problematizing
livestock production methods. Through the gradual move from
wave one to wave two, and through the continuities and
indebtedness between them, the CM community has increasingly
asserted a shared vision for what its technology is and what it
can do.
In the final part of this paper we aim to specify a number of
themes and questions that in the coming years are expected to
be crucial in defining the further development of (the space of)
CM. We address several in turn to provoke speculation on the
possible futures for CM and what may bring them into being,
and to question often taken-for-granted assumptions in the CM
discourse as it currently stands. As such, we look forward to
the ways in which certain interpretations and infrastructures
can be at the center of future debates about what CM could
be and might achieve. We do so by exploring interpretations
and infrastructures on three themes: future corporate structures;
environment, landscapes and rural infrastructures; and global
meanings and institutions.
Future Corporate Structures
The space of CM is defined by the types of actors involved and
the places and institutional settings where CM R&D occurs and
is communicated. As we move from the academic enthusiasm
of biomedical professors to a VC-funded and IP-driven start-up
culture, questions emerge about which institutional structures
will come to drive subsequent CM development. Potentially
the companies and products that will emerge from the fierce
competition of the incubator ecosystem, in which only a
subset are expected to thrive, may not eventually challenge
the concentration of power in the food system. Assuming CM
technology develops successfully, there are a range of commercial
trajectories for contemporary start-ups in what may become the
CM “third wave.” These potentially include becoming new giants
themselves; being incorporated into existing larger companies
(either current corporate meat behemoths seeking to vertically
integrate the industry, the even larger food multinationals, or
emerging plant-based meat alternative companies); selling or
licensing technologies to other companies; or remaining smaller,
potentially niche, businesses. Considering how these and other
possible routes for a potential third-wave CM community relates
to food system power structures should continue to enliven both
critical thinking in the area, and analysis of how promissory
narratives, meanings, and practices are produced.
Another important consideration is what institutional
structure may exist in a future third wave if CM technology
is not developed successfully, or develops more slowly than
some anticipate. Much depends on why planned progress would
be halted or slowed, and how the diverse range of venture
capitalists currently supporting the work respond. Interesting
in this context would be whether any progress attained during
the second wave is sufficient to entice governments and other
supporters of public research to channel funds into a new wave
of university-based work in support of future commerce (as is
seen in many novel technological markets). Conversely, failure
of the wave two start-ups might be seen to validate previous
government funders’ decisions to stay away. Whichever of these
diverse outcomes, we expect the emergence of a third wave
would bring new institutions and interpretations, which will
bring with them new issues for consideration.
Environment, Landscapes, and
Rural Infrastructures
The impacts of large-scale CM production on rural livelihoods
and landscapes remains ambiguous. Current intensive livestock
farming has been increasingly positioned (with ongoing
contestations) as an environmental dead-end. Yet how and
to what extent CM would transform the meanings and
infrastructures of the countryside is unclear. It is often assumed
the mere “disruptive force” of CM will solve the current ills of the
global food system. But CM does not inherently address issues
of social injustice, food sovereignty, productivist interpretations
of global food security, loss of agrobiodiversity, and the
concentration of power within the current food system. CM
tends to be defined as clean, ethical, low-impact meat (Sexton
et al., 2019), but making good on its environmental and ethical
promises will depend on how efficient the process can become
and what steps are involved in the chain of CM production, as
well as the forms of infrastructure and economic means in place
to enable it (materials, transport, energy source etc.). It is also
dependent upon the motivations of those organizations that
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Stephens et al. Making Sense of Making Meat
produce future CM (and their funders) as they may face trade-
offs between the most environmentally-friendly or socially-just
production methods against the cheapest or safest.
Many CM actors have emphasized the devastating effects
of feed production elsewhere—e.g., South American soy—for
intensive farming, and the environmental destruction from
animal production through emissions, land and water use,
growing antibiotic resistance, and pollution associated with
manure lagoons. The impacts of a dominant CM sector on
global agriculture would however involve a reorganization of the
role of animal production (including feed) and soil fertilization,
which is easily overlooked when “intensive” and industrial
“factory” farming is conflated with all farming methods involving
animals. If CM can make good on the promise of reduced
land use, it is still not certain this will result in scenarios
that will produce more beneficial outcomes in environmental
or indeed socially just ways. At the time of writing there
are currently no regulatory mechanisms for supporting the
transition of any land spared through CM development to
projects of reforestation, rewilding, or other forms of ecosystem
restoration and conservation, clean energy production or other
uses intending to generate environmental benefits. It is also
not clear that market mechanisms alone can be relied upon
to deliver optimal environmental outcomes. Equally, these
examples of land-use change are highly contested in terms
of the types of social and environmental benefits they bring,
particularly within different geographical and cultural contexts
(Benton and Wellesley, 2018). The potential for CM to spare
significant amounts of land from conventional agriculture (itself
still a speculative promise), and the possible directions of
land-use change this could trigger, remains a critical issue
for further consideration by the CM community and external
stakeholders. The frameworks of understanding that emerge with
commercialized CM, and the institutions and infrastructures that
are generated to support it, will be central to its impact on
landscapes, livelihoods and environments.
Global Meanings and Infrastructures
While there are a growing number of CM start-ups
internationally, particularly in Asia, it remains an open
question how CM would land on emerging markets where some
aspiring middle classes are developing an appetite for meat
(WEF, 2019b). Early studies on consumer attitudes beyond
Europe and North America have indicated that acceptance
of CM will depend on existing perceptions of what counts as
meat, both in terms of the raw materials used (e.g., animal
flesh, plant matter) and desired sensory characteristics such
as mouth-feel and taste (Bekker et al., 2017). The cultural and
political status of meat in different places, as well as established
histories of meat abstinence (e.g., India), will also likely shape
how alternatives are received into national and individual
food practices (WEF, 2019a). Notions of “naturalness” and the
acceptance of technoscientific interventions in food production
have additionally been highlighted as important attitudinal
drivers toward CM (Bryant and Barnett, 2018), both of which
are subject to key regional and cultural differences. Moreover, we
might speculate that the political landscape of different places
will also play a key role in CM acceptance: for example, the
prominence of environmental and welfare issues on political
agendas and their explicit connections (or not) with conventional
livestock production, and the makeup of regulatory frameworks
will likely shape where CM activity expands over the coming
years, and who its consumers, advocates, and contesters will be.
One concern about the emergence of global meanings and
infrastructures should be whether CM comes to be part of
a neo-colonial project that seeks to feed the Global South
with the protein fixes of Northern corporate marketers (Sexton
et al., 2019). Such a scenario risks ignoring the varieties of
economic and cultural value afforded livestock production and
consumption in the Global South, as well as the relative
environmental footprints of its different systems (WEF, 2019b).
It also risks the continued reimagining of Southern nations
through the logics of the global free market. Such trends have
been critiqued for advancing neoliberal interpretations of food
security, which in many cases have been shown to exasperate the
very issues of hunger, poverty and environmental degradation
that motivated their introduction, as well as further entrenching
political-economic imbalances across Northern and Southern
geographies (Jarosz, 2011).
This given, livestock production in the Global South
is highly differentiated in size, operation, and political-
economic power. For example, middle-income nations in
Latin America and Asia have some of the highest livestock
numbers in the world (Robinson et al., 2014), with production
ranging from small-scale subsistence farms or nomadic
pastoralists to highly industrialized operations with animals
numbering over 50,00014. As has been experienced in Northern
contexts, concerns have been raised about the long-term
ecological sustainability of industrialized livestock and animal
feed production in emerging economies (FAIRR, 2016 p.
11). Specific concerns such as food safety—an issue of
considerable public concern in China (Garnett and Wilkes,
2014)—may also continue to plague the reputation and
long-term economic sustainability of intensified conventional
production. Indeed, initiatives such as FAIRR are actively
applying pressure through investment channels to redirect
protein production away from factory farm facilities on
account of their rising environmental, social, governance—and
thus economic—uncertainties (FAIRR, 2016). It is possible,
therefore, that CM could become an attractive alternative for
large-scale meat producers in some Southern nations. Yet
in the same way as Northern contexts, it remains to be seen
whether this would assume a wholesale replacement of meat
production or rather come to exist in addition to conventional
livestock operations.
CONCLUSION
We have detailed how, during nearly 20 years of laboratory work,
CM has shifted from a university-based first wave into a start-
up led second wave. Across these, the institutional context and
14 The largest farm in the world is Mudanjiang City Mega Farm in China which
manages around 100,000 dairy cows. The largest dairy farm in the US has 30,000
cows (Fair Oaks Farms), while Europe’s largest dairy farm reportedly under
construction in 2017 had plans to house 20,000 cows (McShane, 2017).
Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems | www.frontiersin.org 13 July 2019 | Volume 3 | Article 45
Stephens et al. Making Sense of Making Meat
interpretative package have been vital to the form this progress
has taken. In closing, we also pointed to future interpretative
and institutional potentials that could frame practices and
outcomes in forthcoming third, or indeed fourth or fifth,
waves of CM activity. We outlined these potential futures as
well as possible concerns specifically in terms of corporate
structures, environmental landscapes, and global meanings and
infrastructures. We urge readers to be attentive to how cultural
politics has reshaped CM, and how CM reshapes the cultural
politics it inhabits. Such attention remains necessary when
considering CM’s past, present, and future.
ETHICS STATEMENT
The paper draws upon multiple independently conducted
studies. Each study involved recorded interviews or focus groups
with human subjects. NS 2010–2015 work was carried out in
accordance with the recommendations of the Cardiff University
School of Social Sciences Research Ethics Committee, with
written informed consent from all subjects. NS 2018–2019
work was carried out in accordance with the recommendations
of the Brunel University London College of Business, Arts
and Social Sciences Research Ethics Committee. AS work was
carried out in accordance with the recommendations of the
King’s College London Ethics Committee, with informed consent
from all subjects. CD work was carried out in accordance
with the recommendations of the Wageningen School of
Social Sciences.
AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS
All authors were involved in developing and writing the paper.
Each provided their own independently collected data-set. Each
author approved the final draft. NS led on managing and
administrating the writing process.
FUNDING
NS work was funded by the Economic and Social Research
Council [RES-349-25-0001], the Seventh Framework Programme
[288971], a Wellcome Trust small grant [WT096541MA],
a Centre for Society and Genomics Visiting Scholarship
(15/5/11-15/7/11), and a Wellcome Trust Research Fellowship
[WT208198/Z/17/Z]. AS research was funded by the Economic
and Social Research Council [grant number ES/J500057/1], and
a number of small grants for fieldwork including the SSPP Small
Grant for Postgraduate Research from King’s College London, a
Small Grant from the Department of Geography (King’s College
London), and a KCL Mary Clark Travel Bursary. The writing
of the paper was supported by the Wellcome Trust, Our Planet
Our Health (Livestock, Environment and People–LEAP) [award
number 205212/Z/16/Z]. CD work has been funded by the
project Ethical room for maneuver in livestock farming funded
by The Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO)
project # 253-20-013 and a grant from the Ministry of Economic
Affairs for the report (Van der Weele and Driessen, 2013) Burgers
over Kweekvlees.
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Conflict of Interest Statement: The authors declare that the research was
conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could
be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
Copyright © 2019 Stephens, Sexton and Driessen. This is an open-access article
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original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original
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No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these
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