Where's the Beef?: The lab-grown-meat revolution that wasn't

# Where's the Beef?, by Erin Somers Source: [https://harpers.org/archive/2026/09/wheres-the-beef-lab-grown-meat-erin-somers/](https://harpers.org/archive/2026/09/wheres-the-beef-lab-grown-meat-erin-somers/) On August 5, 2013, a man and a woman ate a burger\. Not just any burger: a world\-historical burger, made from cattle cells grown in a lab by Mark Post, a professor of vascular physiology at Maastricht University in the Netherlands\. The burger had taken two years to produce and cost $330,000, money furnished by the Google co\-founder Sergey Brin\. Now it was being tasted in public for the first time at Riverside Studios in London, at an event attended by two hundred members of the press and livestreamed to thousands\. To make this particular burger, Post had extracted stem cells from the shoulder muscle of a living cow, then cultivated them in plastic containers filled with a nutrient\-rich supplement called fetal bovine serum, which is derived from cow fetuses\. The cells eventually became twenty thousand strands of tissue, which in turn became a single, five\-ounce patty\. Post believed that beef produced this way had the potential to dramatically reduce greenhouse\-gas emissions and slow climate change\. Raising cattle for consumption requires massive amounts of land and water—and massive amounts of feed grown at a high environmental cost\. He projected that global demand for meat would soon outstrip our ability to produce it the old\-fashioned way, at which point our food systems would become unsustainable\. But that didn’t have to mean a mass recalibration of our consumption habits or a global shift away from red meat\. Post and his team had found another way\. Standing at a blond\-wood island on an otherwise empty soundstage, Post lifted the kind of stainless\-steel cloche usually found on a room\-service cart to reveal his creation\. The raw patty sat in a petri dish on a bare plate, where it shone wetly under the studio lights\. With the ITV London anchor Nina Hossain presiding, a Cornish chef named Richard McGeown pan\-fried the burger in sunflower oil and butter for two volunteer tasters: Josh Schonwald, the Chicago\-based author of*The Taste of Tomorrow: Dispatches from the Future of Food,*and Hanni Rützler, an Austrian nutrition scientist\. So precious was this meat that they were given just the one burger to share between them\. It was served deconstructed, alongside a sesame\-seed bun, lettuce, and tomato—showmanship to sell the burger a bit, give it context\. The patty itself was reddish brown, flat, and perfectly circular\. When Schonwald and Rützler cut it, the burger did not bleed\. The two of them ate with forks and knives, passing the plate, sawing off thoughtful bites\. Chewing slowly\. Afterward they rendered their verdicts\. “I would say it is somewhere on the spectrum between a Boca Burger and McDonald’s,” Schonwald told a reporter from NBC\. “The absence of fat makes a big difference\. It has the texture, which I was not expecting\. It was like an animal\-protein cake\.” Rützler noted the burger’s blandness to a reporter from*Science\.*“There is room for improvement here,” she said\. At the end of the event, roughly $150,000 worth of burger remained uneaten\. But none of this stopped Post from predicting that meat cultivated in a lab would become a consumer product within the decade\. The event—the theatrical reveal, the PR spectacle—triggered a kind of gold rush\. One hundred and forty companies sprang up in six continents, trying to replicate what Post had done with beef across a range of other species: chicken, pork, fish, even quail\. Investment to the tune of $3 billion flooded into the sector\. True believers claimed that cellular agriculture would not only fight climate change and global food insecurity but also slow the spread of zoonotic disease and antibiotic resistance\. A company called Upside Foods touted its plans to “set the new standard for meat” and to “make meat a force of good in the world\.” A company called Vow created an enormous woolly\-mammoth meatball, though no one was allowed to eat it, since the DNA came from a fossil and the company didn’t know whether it was actually fit for human consumption\. The think tank RethinkX predicted that cultivated meat would decimate the U\.S\. beef industry by 2030, reducing demand for the conventional variety by a whopping 70 percent\. As the organization wrote, “We are already on the cusp of the deepest, fastest, most consequential disruption in food and agricultural production since the first domestication of plants and animals 10,000 years ago\.” And yet, despite the frenzy, the meat itself never arrived\. The challenges were numerous\. There was the exorbitant up\-front cost of building manufacturing facilities and the daunting amounts of energy required to run them\. There was the difficulty of producing sufficient quantities of the stuff, at a price point low enough for people to buy\. There was the lack of a highly skilled workforce trained to operate the new technology\. There were rounds and rounds of inspections by the Food and Drug Administration and the U\.S\. Department of Agriculture\. There was even, occasionally, the unwanted appearance of rodent DNA in research samples, which happened to the companies Upside and Eat Just\.1After peaking in 2021, investment began to fall off\. In 2023, the industry raised a measly $177 million\. But it wasn’t only venture capitalists who had started to grow skeptical of cultivated meat\. The technology soon became a target of conservatives\. The state governments of Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Indiana, Montana, Nebraska, and Texas moved in quick succession to legislate against cultivated meat, passing laws that banned its sale, production, or both\. Governor Ron DeSantis made a media event out of signing the Florida law, posing for pictures in front of a blood\-stained cutting board piled high with steaks\. “Take your fake lab\-grown meat elsewhere,” he said\. “We’re not doing that in the state of Florida\.” In 2024, the industrial biotech consultant Joel Stone told the*New York Times*that, if he had to put odds on it, the likelihood of the industry’s producing even 10 percent of the meat supply in the foreseeable future “would be zero\.” Today, cultivated meat is available for purchase at just one store in the world: Huber’s Butchery in Singapore, where customers can buy packages of lab\-grown chicken shreds from a manufacturer called GOOD Meat\. These developments were inconvenient for me, a person who became obsessed with the prospect of tasting cell\-grown meat just as the possibility of ever doing so seemed to recede before my eyes\. I was enthralled by the story of the meat, which seemed to contain so much of what defined this era of American life: dubious techno\-optimism, bombastic culture\-war posturing, carnival oddities like the mammoth meatball\. It presented a snarl of competing motives, a mix of altruism and cold\-blooded striving for capital \(nothing can ever exist just for the common good; it has to make someone a billionaire\)\. There was also the fact that I had been a vegetarian for almost twenty years\. The last meat I ever ate was a hot dog at Shea Stadium in 2007\. I don’t remember how it tasted—probably like every other hot dog I had eaten before\. I washed it down with an exorbitantly priced but very cold Budweiser in one of those metal bottles\. I quit eating meat after that, not because the hot dog had been disgusting but because I didn’t like the sensation of the inevitable bad bite, the periodic tangle with gristle or tendon or bone\. Then my abstention grew into habit, and the habit was reinforced by other concerns: the catastrophic environmental consequences of industrial meat production; the creeping doubt, as I grow older, that I’m necessarily higher in the cosmic order than a chicken or a cow\. But cultivated meat raised a compelling question\. If you could subtract some of the downsides—make meat less destructive, engineer away its aesthetic flaws—what reason would there be not to eat it? This question had begun to feel moot as the potential of cultivated meat grew less and less promising\. But just when it seemed as though Post’s vision would never be realized, encouraging news emerged out of a surprising place: North Carolina\. In May 2024, when many of his peers were fleeing the sector, Jeff Bezos granted $30 million through his Earth Fund to establish the Bezos Center for Sustainable Protein at North Carolina State University, an initiative dedicated to developing “dietary proteins that are environmentally friendly, healthy, tasty and affordable\.” The donation cemented the state’s status as a new global center of the cultivated\-meat industry\. The Bezos Center would join the North Carolina Biotechnology Center, an economic\-development organization for the life sciences in Research Triangle Park\. On the commercial side of things, Believer Meats, an Israeli company producing cultivated chicken, had recently broken ground on a 200,000\-square\-foot manufacturing plant in Wilson, North Carolina\. The plant would be the largest cultivated\-meat facility in the world—capable, the company claimed, of producing twenty\-one million pounds of engineered chicken per year\. Last fall, Believer received a “No Questions” letter from the FDA, indicating that the agency did not encounter safety concerns in its inspection of the company’s products\.2“We are proud to be commercializing in this state, creating high\-quality manufacturing jobs and enabling us to realize our vision to lead food innovations that care for the planet,” said Believer’s then CEO, a man named \(for real\) Gustavo Burger, in a press release celebrating the milestone\. I got in touch with the company shortly after\. In a Zoom meeting with Heather Hudson, Believer’s chief product and growth officer, and Rodrigo Lavall, from sales and marketing, the two dangled the possibility of a ribbon\-cutting ceremony\. They could tentatively plan something and invite me down to visit\. The whole thing felt a bit Wonka\-ish\. No one from the press had been allowed inside the factory yet\. Only a few professionals in the field had even toured it\. Why should I get the golden ticket? But I tried not to question my good fortune\. Excited by the prospect of exclusive access, I started planning a trip to the Triangle\. If lab\-grown meat had a future, I might find it there\. Maybe, I thought, I’d even get to taste it\. On a mild day in early December, I arrived at NC State’s sprawling campus, home to some forty thousand students\. I expected it to be lively, teeming with kids, but it was eerily dead\. Rohan Shirwaiker, the friendly, bespectacled director of the Bezos Center, met me in a pristine building where I didn’t see a single student\. Everyone, he explained, had gone home for the holidays\. Shirwaiker is an industrial engineer whose research interests run the gamut from cellular agriculture to the 3D printing of human tissue\. With the supremely patient demeanor of a professor used to answering repetitive questions from the uninitiated, he walked me through a PowerPoint presentation about the center’s work\. It began with a technicolor image of a charcuterie board and a Winston Churchill epigraph from his 1931 experiment in future\-casting, “Fifty Years Hence”: “We shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium\.” Shirwaiker then clicked through to an infographic of a burger illustrating the center’s mission\. The bun wasresearch\+development, engagement\+outreach, workforce development, andinterdisciplinary teams\. The lettuce wasmaterials, processes, and systems\. The meat wasplant–based, cell–cultivated, and fermentation–made\. The plate waspublic–private partnerships\.The cheese was nothing\. The Bezos Center aims to address, as its website puts it, the “critical barriers and gaps” still dogging cultivated meat\. The process has changed as the industry scales up\. It’s no longer Post laboring over a single burger in his lab for years at a time\. Cultivation now takes place in sterile factories that look more like breweries, with cells grown not in culture dishes but in giant, stainless\-steel bioreactors\. Producers have also moved away from feeding the cells with fetal bovine serum, which is expensive and requires harvesting cow blood from slaughterhouses \(not exactly a good look for a cruelty\-free alternative meat product\)\. The industry now relies on what is referred to as “serum\-free media,” or SFM, proprietary compounds that vary from company to company\. Still, the basic science remains the same: in one typical version of the process, stem cells are harvested from a living animal via needle biopsy, then nourished in solutions containing glucose, vitamins, fats, minerals, proteins, and amino acids, which are swished around inside a reactor to ensure an even diffusion of nutrients\. In these conditions, the cells divide, multiply, and differentiate just as they would inside an animal\. They are ready for harvesting when they reach the desired density: roughly within two to eight weeks, depending on the species being cultivated\. But what also remains is one of the industry’s fundamental challenges\. You cannot simply grow a steak—yank it out of the reactor and slap it on the table at Peter Luger—because a steak contains multiple kinds of tissue\. At the moment, muscle and fat can only be cultivated separately, and typically they do not form solid matter but a semisolid slurry that must be taken from the reactors, washed, combined with other ingredients for flavor and texture, and extruded or 3D\-printed into something you’d recognize as meat: a burger or a nugget or a meatball or a fillet\. Some companies are trying to circumnavigate the slurry stage by building scaffolding inside reactors for cells to cling to, producing a firmer product\. \(Certain types of cells don’t like floating in a tank all free like that\. Tissue, I’m told, wants to adhere to bone\.\) The cost of all this has come way down since Josh Schonwald called Post’s burger an “animal\-protein cake,” thanks to the isolation of starter cells with rapid doubling rates and breakthroughs in SFM that have made the process faster and more efficient, trends that scientists claim will only continue\. But right now, cultivated meat is far more expensive than the real thing\. At Huber’s, in Singapore, the ominously named GOOD Meat 3, which contains only 3 percent chicken cells, retails for $5\.62 per four\-ounce serving\. Meanwhile, chicken at my local ShopRite, containing 100 percent animal cells, starts at $3\.49 per pound\. After the PowerPoint, Shirwaiker took me on a tour of the Bezos Center’s brand\-new protein lab, which was still being set up\. It was spacious and filled with light, lined with 3D printers and a humming but empty stainless\-steel fridge\. The printers in particular were huge and impressive\. I entertained a fantasy of being the person to load in the slurry and press the button, initiating the printing of a crab cake or something\. The godlike feeling that might accompany that\. From nothing: crab\. But the lab was still in the early phases of assembly; cables dangled from the ceiling, waiting for equipment that had yet to be delivered\. No one would be printing a crab cake for a while\. As Shirwaiker and I walked back to his office, we discussed the day’s shocking headline: while I was traveling to North Carolina from my home in upstate New York, news broke that Believer Meats was being sued for $34 million by Gray Construction, the firm that built its hulking factory in Wilson\. Believer had recently defaulted on an agreement to pay Gray an installment of $22 million\. Maybe I should have seen it coming: after her initial enthusiasm, Heather Hudson, my contact at Believer, had ghosted me in the days leading up to my trip\. When I followed up about the possible ribbon cutting—my golden ticket\!—she said only, “It doesn’t look like our factory ribbon cutting will be aligned with your timeline\.” I asked Shirwaiker what all this meant\. Believer Meats is a partner of the Bezos Center, along with many other startups\. The cultivated\-meat industry is collegial; there is a culture of amicable collaboration\. So I expected him to have some kind of insider knowledge\. But Shirwaiker was as surprised as I was\. He thought that the plant was so close to opening that the staff just needed to turn on the lights and boot up the chicken vats\. No one knows yet what happened at Believer, he told me\. It’s unclear whether the company will survive\. Before I left the Bezos Center, Shirwaiker introduced me to the concept of the Gartner Hype Cycle\. To me, it had the ring of an old concept, a framework invented in the mid\-twentieth century by an economist or a professor\. But no: it was formulated in 1995 by a woman named Jackie Fenn, who worked at the consultancy firm Gartner\. Its purpose, according to a YouTube video made by the company, is to help you—a savvy investor, the video assumes—“understand the real risks and opportunities of an innovation so you can avoid adopting something too early, giving up too soon, adopting too late, or hanging on too long\.” Shirwaiker showed me a chart to illustrate\. The*x*\-axis was time, and the*y*\-axis was visibility\. The cycle begins with an Innovation Trigger, when a new technology is introduced to great fanfare, then arcs upward toward the Peak of Inflated Expectations as excitement mounts\. But this rise is inevitably followed by a dramatic fall, when investors realize how difficult it’s going to be to actually commercialize the innovation\. Later comes a gentler climb up the Slope of Enlightenment, when second\- and third\-generation products emerge, until, finally, we reach the Plateau of Productivity, the slow, unflashy development of the technology\. If Post’s burger was the Innovation Trigger, I asked Shirwaiker, where were we now? He circled the deep valley in the middle of the chart: the Trough of Disillusionment\. Before leaving campus, I tried Heather Hudson again\. I let her know that I was in the area and asked if I should “stop by,” as though the Believer facility were a conveniently located coffee shop rather than a meat factory in the boonies\. I immediately received an auto\-response that her email account was no longer active\. Then I thought, Fuck it, and decided to drive out to Wilson, about forty\-five minutes from Raleigh\. I’ll go see what’s up, I figured\. I’ll talk to someone face\-to\-face, have some sort of confrontation with a person overseeing the plant—maybe even Hudson herself\. Rural North Carolina felt enormous, flat, and empty\. The landscape was almost featureless; huge swaths of nothing streamed by, and then I hit factories\. Believer was located among a loose cluster of manufacturing facilities\. To get there, I had to turn off a main strip containing a Chick\-fil\-A, a Bojangles, a McDonald’s, and a Best\-N\-Burgers\. At one point, I yielded to the flashing lights of what I thought was an emergency vehicle, only to find, as it passed, that it was a pickup truck towing a meat smoker\. I was surrounded by the stuff\. I thought of Mark Post’s prediction that demand for meat would soon outstrip our ability to produce it\. Sometimes it seems that this will happen tomorrow\. What I found when I got to Believer was grimmer than I expected\. Not a chipper\-then\-confused\-then\-annoyed desk clerk wondering who this was showing up at a meat factory without an appointment, but no one at all\. The facility was deserted, gated: a royal\-blue cube under a pale late\-fall sky, millions of dollars of groundbreaking technology locked inside\. There wasn’t a single car in the lot on a Tuesday afternoon\. I was struck with the brief, demented urge to scale the fence, but it was topped with barbed wire—and what was I going to do, anyway? Stare through the windows into an empty lobby? There is a widespread feeling in this country that everything is a hoax or a Ponzi scheme, and this feeling is only reinforced by the news\. The news that self\-driving taxis, when they become confused, are actually operated remotely from the Philippines\. The news that the mysterious invention that could scan your blood for any number of disorders was an era\-defining scam\. The news that the crypto entrepreneur who pledged to secure the longtime survival of the human race was actually stealing $8 billion of his customers’ money to fund his polycule in the Bahamas\. I became paranoid, standing in front of the abandoned parking lot, that cultivated meat was just another lie, or a semi\-lie, or a bluff\. That the reason the meat was so difficult to get my hands on was that it did not exist\. The possible implosion of Believer was disappointing not just because it represented a setback in the quest to reduce our carbon emissions and fortify our food systems against climate collapse, but because it seemed to confirm that we live in a cheap, mendacious world, where what passes for progress almost always turns out to be a confidence game\. The morning after my reconnaissance mission, more news broke: Believer was declaring bankruptcy and would shutter the factory in Wilson before it printed a single chicken strip\. I had timed my trip to North Carolina to coincide with the first annual Global Forum for Plant\-Based and Alternative Proteins, held at the North Carolina Biotechnology Center\. This was how I found myself cloistered among the faithful as their meat dreams unraveled in real time\. All the local industry players were in attendance, and more had flown in from around the world\. We were sitting together in NCBiotech’s blandly carpeted lecture hall for the opening session, listening to optimistic remarks about international collaboration, an opaque joke about an extruder, a shout\-out to “Ian in the back from the insect side,” all the while knowing that the industry’s biggest gambit yet had just failed\. With Believer gone bust, I hoped to salvage a glimmer of optimism for the industry from the day’s proceedings—or, at the very least, an honest assessment of what had gone wrong\. During a break in the program, everyone filed out and congregated in the atrium\. We were in the Trough of Disillusionment, but we were also in the divot of gossip\. We were in the furrow of hanging around outside the auditorium talking excitedly\. We were in the ravine of wanting to know what the fuck had happened\. I was surrounded by guys in crisp button\-ups and thermal vests and navy\-blue blazers\. There were not a ton of women present\. All around me speculation began to fly\. “There was a time about three or four years ago, post\-pandemic, the money was so easy to come by\. All you had to do was put a pitch deck together, and VCs would throw money at you\.” “They have a pretty star list of investors\.” “Yeah\. That doesn’t guarantee a success\.” “They got the building up\. The building is ready to, like, turn on\.” “It’s probably gonna be a liquidation\. Again, we’re all assuming\. We don’t know what the heck’s going on\.” “There’s got to be some news out of Israel\.” Later, we heard from venture capitalists who had no choice but to address the news head\-on\. “I mean, elephant in the room: Believer Meats just down the road basically went out of business,” said Steve Simitzis, from Replicator VC, a firm that invests in early\-stage food\-tech companies\. “I don’t have any information about it, but I would speculate that building factories around technology that isn’t ready at scale is probably a cause\.” Well, duh, I thought\. The VCs on the panel saw Believer as a cautionary tale\. Don’t scale too quickly\. Lower costs\. Make something consumers actually want to eat\. All these observations were sensible, even obvious, and yet wasn’t it also the case that the VCs*themselves*had pressured companies like Believer to expand rapidly in order to provide the returns they sought?  In the afternoon, we all tried to rally for a tasting of products by food startups\. At last, I was sampling things\. I drank some kind of fizzy peach tea\. It was not immediately obvious to me what the innovation was, so I asked the young guy handing out the cans about it\. It’s supposed to be refreshing, he said\. Like after a run you can drink one and it won’t make you puke\. Curiously, though, there was no cultivated meat on offer\. The Research Triangle may be an industry hub, but the product did not seem to be available here\. The product was still a prototype, or the product was too expensive to give out as samples\. The closest thing on hand was plant\-based vegan meat\. I tried wheat\-based turkey and wheat\-based pepperoni from a company called The BE Hive\. I tried “some kind of pulled meat,” as the person wheeling it out from the kitchen described it, from a company called Delight Soy\. It had a stringy texture and was an orangish brown\. I tried a fungi\-and\-soy\-based salmon substitute from a company called Juicy Marbles\. This one was very close to tasting like salmon\. They’d gotten something right, everyone around me agreed\. To our wonder and dismay, Juicy Marbles had nailed the fishiness\. Probably algae in there, someone remarked\. We nodded\. Yes, probably algae\. The experience was nauseating, though the cube of salmon tasted good\. Or rather, it would have tasted good if you could isolate taste from the other senses\. Like, if you didn’t see the morsel of fake fish, or feel it in your mouth, or smell its oily smell\. And if you didn’t also know that it was synthetic\. The knowing added a layer of queasiness\. The idea that they’d infuse soy with an*unappealing smell*for verisimilitude—a cloying, marine smell, like the hold of a fishing boat\. So all it would take for this thing to be palatable would be to experience it in a sensory vacuum and preferably context\-free, or immediately after a blow to the head that wipes out everything you know about it\. Then it would be pretty nice\. In January, a few weeks after my trip to the Research Triangle, a man ate a chicken sandwich\. He ate two, actually: one made with conventional chicken and one made with a cultivated fillet\. In a video of his visit to the Upside Foods factory in California, he stands next to a vat of swirling chicken cells\. The cells are foamy, the cheerful yellow of Campbell’s broth\. The man’s name is Jimmy Donaldson, though he’s known more widely as the YouTube sensation MrBeast, and he thinks that cell\-grown meat has a lot of advantages\. “These chickens don’t get diseases,” says MrBeast\. “So then you don’t have to worry about a disease spreading on the farm and then you eating a sick chicken\.” When it’s time to try to guess which sandwich is which, he can’t do it\. “I honestly can’t tell,” he says, before guessing wrong\. Watching the video on my phone, it irked me that MrBeast had tasted the meat\. That should have been*me*standing next to the churning chicken water\. For months I’d been trying to find cultivated meat on the East Coast; I had even considered buying it from Singapore on the gray market\. Nothing panned out\. Finally, Rohan Shirwaiker sent me details for a public tasting in the Bay Area held by Mission Barns, another partner of the Bezos Center\. It would take place at the supermarket Berkeley Bowl West, which had previously sold a limited run of the company’s meatballs\. On a Friday in February, I flew out to San Francisco and cabbed over to the Mission Barns office, which was located in SoMa, on a desolate and unlovely block of warehouses\. Not many Waymos swooping by out there, but at least it felt appropriately industrial, with the office upstairs and bioreactors below\. Not that I got to see them: when I asked, I was gently rebuffed with the excuse that the company was in the process of moving to a larger facility in Alameda\. I felt the ambient paranoia I’d experienced in North Carolina start to kick in again\. After the collapse of Believer, Mission Barns seemed like one of the American companies closest to having its products on grocery\-store shelves\. At the end of last year, it received USDA approval for its cultivated pork fat\. At the time of my visit, its products included bacon, pepperoni, meatballs, and a couple varieties of sausage\. Bianca Le, a smiley, put\-together Australian and the then head of external affairs at Mission Barns, took me up to the company’s third\-floor office, which contained a large kitchen on one side\. As we sat at the wood island, she told me about the origin of the cells for all of the company’s cultivated fat: a single Yorkshire pig named Dawn who was still, per the company’s marketing materials, “happily roaming free” in an animal sanctuary in upstate New York, not far from where I live\. Dawn reminded me of Dolly the Sheep—a mascot for something much larger than herself\. One wants to picture her soulful\. “Can I ask how Dawn was selected?” I said, hoping to hear something about Dawn as a superior specimen, the fattest, happiest, healthiest, smartest pig in America\. “Yeah, honestly, it’s not that interesting of a story,” said Le\. “It’s just that she was available\.” The Mission Barns cultivation process takes about two weeks\. At the end, they drain the bioreactors until they are left with just the fat slurry\. “It’s white, it’s semisolid, it’s really pasty,” Le said\. That slurry is then combined with plant protein to create the final product, which typically contains less than 10 percent animal cells per serving\. I tried to understand how they got the fat out of one container and into the next, miming a large scoop or shovel, but this part was a secret\. The company’s ultimate goal, Le told me, wasn’t even to sell products but to license the system itself\. Mission Barns’ then CEO, Cecilia Chang, appeared: another smiley, put\-together Australian\. As she joined us at the counter, I asked her about the biggest challenges the company faces\. “The timeline on being able to get costs down fast enough to get to a point of profitability,” she said\. “The technology is there, but investors have really aggressive timelines\.” Chang also mentioned a newer hurdle: the distrust of food science stoked by Trump’s secretary of health and human services, Robert F\. Kennedy Jr\. Still, the industry was trying to look at Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again movement as an opportunity rather than as a disaster\. After all, MAHA*is*focused on protein; Kennedy’s new, inverted food pyramid features steak at the very top\. And although the movement broadly disdains processed foods, Chang told me, it may appreciate that cell\-cultivated meat is usually organic and antibiotic\-free\. I recalled the lay wisdom of MrBeast: “These chickens don’t get diseases\.” As we chatted, Zachary Tyndall, Mission Barns’ product\-development and culinary manager, prepared some meat for me in a skillet\. Tyndall is a former chef who once worked at the three\-Michelin\-star restaurant Noma, an apprenticeship that seemed unnecessary for the level of cooking involved here\. He used a spatula to roll a single meatball around in a pan\. The meat was a pale, pinkish beige, like real pork\. It’s not that different from cooking conventional meat, he told me, though maybe a little bit quicker, since the company’s meatballs are precooked and only need reheating\. It smelled savory, like food, and indeed, it was food\. I’ll give it that\. I received my meatball on a tastefully speckled earthenware plate\. Though nearly delirious with excitement, I tried to zoom out for a second and glimpse the situation with objectivity\. I was looking at a single small meatball in the middle of a plate in a chilly, industrial office thousands of miles away from home\. This was what I had elected to pursue over the course of months with single\-minded determination\. With all eyes on me, I used the fork to cut it in half and took a bite\. The taste\. The taste was not terrible\. It was seasoned, oregano\-heavy\. It even had a kick\. Everyone was watching as I chewed, so I feigned deep consideration, the way you do when the waiter brings you a sample of wine at a restaurant\. “Hmm,” I mused\. I am contemplating the tasting notes, my face said\. I am weighing the mouthfeel\. I tasted the salami too, which looked exactly like regular salami\. It tasted like salty paper\. Salty paper with a kick—they’re good about putting in the kick\. I could not find much to say to Chang and Le about the meat, though I tried\. The phrase “blandly inoffensive” came to mind\. The word “anticlimax” came to mind\. This was what I had come all this way for? To eat something that felt like mushy cardboard in my mouth? “It’s good,” I managed to tell them\. Then, suddenly, the nausea hit, a taste of vomit in the back of my throat\. It was the Juicy Marbles effect again\. The problem was not the flavor, not the texture, but the knowing\. The Knowing\. Knowing about the fat tank, about the sticky white substance\. The envisioning of the scoop\. The knowing about Dawn, an ordinary pig who was available, and the extraction process that took her cells\. Earlier, I’d thought this feeling was triggered entirely by Juicy Marbles’ ersatz fish odor, by its inherent artificiality\. I hoped it would be different with the cultivated meat, which was, in the end, an actual animal product, at least in part\. But no\. If anything, it was worse\. After I left Mission Barns, I walked around San Francisco for two hours trying to quell my seasickness: up into its peaks of inflated expectation, down into its troughs of disillusionment\. Perhaps the nausea was not related to the product*\.*Perhaps it was just meat, any meat, after so long an abstention\. In conceiving my cultivated\-meat journey, I’d assumed this product was kind of*for me*: a longtime vegetarian with loosely held convictions\. I had also assumed my nineteen\-year clean slate would be an asset\. No biases here, just detached curiosity\. But I was wrong\. What it had actually done was put me out of touch with the taste of meat\. I couldn’t really remember what it was supposed to taste like\. I needed a control group\. At a red\-sauce Italian restaurant across the street from my hotel near Union Square, I sat at the bar and ordered tagliatelle with pork meatballs\. When my food arrived, there were five large meatballs nestled into the pasta, a truly conspicuous portion\. It seemed—irrationally, I know—that everyone in the restaurant was looking at me, a woman alone about to go in on a giant bowl of meat\. I ordered a glass of red wine to try to get in the spirit\. I was psychedelically nauseous at this point, barely holding it together\. I didn’t really want to eat the meatballs\. At the risk of exaggeration, I’ve maybe never wanted to eat something less\. But I would never know how close the cultivated ones came to the real thing unless I did it\. So I followed the same process from earlier in the day\. Cut one in half\. Took a bite\. Affected the seriousness of a wine connoisseur\. The real meatballs were richer and wetter\. I ate one and a half and tried to draw up the sensation of the cultivated ones\. Did they taste reasonably similar? Which was better? What would a butcher think? A cattle rancher? A gourmand? A very hungry person? I suddenly noticed a Sophia Loren movie that was being projected silently onto a wall of the restaurant\. What, I wondered, would Sophia Loren think of the fake meatballs? I was really unmoored now, rocking on a boat inside my own stomach\. Seeking clarity, I came away more confused than ever—not just about why I had decided to do this, but the entire project of cell\-grown meat\. Who was the imagined consumer of this product? I didn’t finish my bowl of meatballs, needless to say\. But I did finish the wine\. The next day at Berkeley Bowl West, a large grocery store across the Bay, I watched a couple dozen customers line up to taste the meatballs\. Le explained that Mission Barns has a fan base, people who follow the company’s progress and register for events in advance\. Here, a new contingent of the public revealed itself to me: my fellow cultivated\-meat\-curious\. They were young and slightly goth\. They were Gen Z vegans with lip rings and huge black pants that flapped in the wind\. Aside from these devotees, the crowd was made up mostly of people who happened to be at the grocery store for other reasons: Saturday shoppers, parents with kids in tow, people in athleisure\. It was a warm and sunny February morning, a good day for a free sample\. Passersby queued up, mildly interested\. Previous tastings had drawn protesters\. In 2024, the week before the Florida cultivated\-meat ban went into effect, Upside Foods hosted the Freedom of Food pop\-up, a tasting on a Miami rooftop that was pitched as a protest of the new law\. A chef from Caja Caliente, a restaurant in Coral Gables, made chicken tostadas with chipotle crema while a group of conventional\-meat zealots parked a van in front of the venue’s entrance\. The van was affixed with a huge LED screen displaying criticism of lab\-grown meat\.no long\-term health studies, it read\.secret chemical formulas\. But nothing like that happened in Berkeley\. Tyndall stood at a hot plate, gamely rolling the meatballs around a pan and placing them into small bamboo trays\. As the samples were distributed, I made myself eat another one to see if my reaction would be the same as the day before\. Instantly, I was clobbered by the Knowing, but around me, muffled sounds of approval rose from the crowd\. A few people told me, shrugging, that the texture seemed right\. A child, maybe two years old, accepted a meatball from her dad\. She ate it happily, bobbing around like little kids do, with no objection\. A woman in a fleece jacket walked around asking tasters to fill out a survey on an iPad\. She was an independent researcher conducting a study on consumer acceptance of cultivated meat for Tufts University\. After the science, this is one of the biggest challenges to the product’s long\-term success\. Do people actually want to try it? Do they want to incorporate it into their diets? According to a report published last year by the Good Food Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to promoting alternative proteins, only 18 percent of Americans find cell\-cultivated meat extremely or very appealing, and almost 60 percent say they are somewhat or very unlikely to buy it\. Interest typically decreases with age and increases with educational attainment, which tracked with my own observations\. The goth college students were the most excited by the meatballs, but even they were muted in their praise\. No one said “I love it” or “Hell yeah” or declared it a triumph\. I did not hear the word “yum\.” I found myself talking to Chi Dixon, Berkeley Bowl West’s marketing and communications manager\. She told me that the store was excited to stock these products\. \(When they sold a limited run of Mission Barns meatballs in the fall, they were priced at $13\.99 for a tray of eight\.\) Dixon guided me past the granola and local bread and legumes to show me where the store planned to stock cultivated meat in the future\. “It’s on the nose,” she said, but it would go right between the veggie burgers and the real ones\. To me, this seemed like the inevitable destination for these products: a niche shelf in the refrigerated aisle, the Impossible Burger’s quirkier cousin\. The days of cultivated meat as a possible panacea for climate change are long gone\. Many of the industry’s biggest players—the ones still in business, anyway—are now embracing a more modest role in our food system\. Since I tried its meatballs earlier this year, Mission Barns has announced a new strategy: it is pivoting from retail to wholesale and developing new products that will combine plant protein with*conventional*pork fat—to be replaced by their own, cultivated fat only once they’ve achieved a certain scale\. Elsewhere, cellular agriculture is being used to create exclusive novelty items that could be fairly described as Frankenmeat, whereby their freakiness and limited availability are not liabilities but rather the selling points\. Vow, the Australian company behind the mammoth meatball, has also developed a variety of Japanese quail foie gras as part of its objective to craft meats “unconstrained” by “the limits of nature\.” Why, one might wonder? No real reason, except that they can\. This, at least, feels like a more fitting use for cultivation technology and a more honest reflection of the ecosystem that has financed it\. “From a bird so petite, a quail foie gras was simply impossible—until now,” reads the copy on Vow’s website\. Notably, the company’s marketing materials make no mention of climate change, sustainability, or even animal welfare\. This isn’t to say that engineered food needs to be virtuous to justify its existence\. Before I left Berkeley Bowl West, Dixon gave me a tour of the store’s produce section, which was filled with the inordinate splendor of California\. There must have been twenty varieties of crazy\-looking mushrooms\. She insisted I take two Sumo Citrus oranges—the ones with the bump on top—back home with me\. Sumos aren’t naturally occurring; they were created in the Seventies by Japanese scientists who crossbred two citrus hybrids in a bid to produce a more flavorful, seedless fruit that might sell better than existing varieties\. I peeled a Sumo and ate it as I walked through Berkeley\. The afternoon was hot and windy, but the orange was sweet, hydrating, refreshing\. Enormous and delicious\. It was one shade paler than a traffic cone, with a palm\-filling heft\. It was perfect: a perfect example of an orange\. A miracle, really, how it had just been handed to me\.