When I looked into it, it looks like GMO usage is growing globally.
"In 2023, GM technology was used in 76 countries and regions globally, and 206.3 million hectares of GM crops were planted in 27 countries and regions, representing 3.05% growth over the previous year. The planting area of GM crops has expanded 121-fold since 1996, and now accounts for approximately 13.38% of the total world farmland area (1,542 million hectares), with a total planting area exceeding 3.4 billion hectares."
Thanks for commenting! Here's some quick thoughts:
You're right, 13% of farmland isn't terrible! But it is also much less than they had the potential to be by now. Hopefully their growth will continue and in a few decades from now will be totally normalised. It took pastuerisation 60 years to get to 50% in the UK, and GMOs are at 13% after 30 years, so there's time yet.
I shouldn't have said "GMOs are a failure" but "the rollout of GMOs was a failure", or "public acceptance of GMOs has been a failure".
The fact that roughly half of all people think that GMOs are unsafe, and only 13% think they are safe, is a big part of what makes me think the GMO introduction was a failure.
The biggest failure has probably been in Africa, where there was lots of optimism that GM crops would enable small farmers to escape subsistance and accelerate the decline of poverty in the region, but except for South Africa, they're barely grown on the continent today.
Also, I think the report you read includes GM cotton which is big in countries which ban GM food (e.g. India), as the concerns about health effects isn't an issue there as they're not eaten. I tried to exclude cotton in this post as I was focusing on GM food. I didn't even try to untangle the GM crops that are used for animal feed, but I probably should have, as that's also not very relevant for the GM acceptance of the public. I haven't found a good number on it, but it seems like something like 2/3s of GM food we grow is fed to farm animals. As the post was using GM foods to understand "how does the public react to a new food technology?" for the purpose of thinking about cultivated meat, cotton and animal feed aren't relevant.
There has been less uptake than may have been hoped for (and I think animal feed is a large percentage in US at least), but it still could be considered impressive growth since the 90's.
It's hard for me to know what the expected take off for this technology should have been and how it compares to similar things (slower than AI and smartphones but faster than tv's and electricity, but these aren't great reference classes).
I'm not as convinced by public opinion surveys as I imagine you'd probably get a similar proportion, if not higher, that think factory farming should be banned, which doesn't stop them being used if people are prioritising price/taste/etc.
With reducing poverty, I think that is a whole host of other things that GMO's wouldn't have made much of a difference, even if they were 100% of food.
Growing GMOs is completely banned in the two most populous countries, China and India, along with Russia, and many more countries. In the EU there's only one variety which is allowed to be grown (maize), and Spain is the country with the highest amount (20% of their maize production).
(Random fun fact, in Hungary they even introduced a clause in their constituition against growing GMOs for some reason)
To me it's clear that something went badly wrong with the introdcution of the technology when so many countries have actively banned it.
(I'm talking about banning the growing of it, not the importing of it for animal feed, which many of these countries do)
I think China, in the last few years, has approved a few crops (from here, lots of interesting sections).
Maybe that's why I'm more optimistic, despite the public being against GMOs (In 201846.7% of respondents had negative views of GMOs and14% viewed GMOs as a form of bioterrorism aimed at China), China leadership is still pushing ahead with them as it benefits the country.
Over time the countries that don't use GMOs will either have to import, give larger subsidies to their farmers, or have people complain about why their food costs so much vs neighbouring countries.
I'm not so sure it has gone 'badly' wrong vs other tech innovations but I'm not as well read on tech adoption and the ups and downs of going from innovation to mass usage.
Thanks for writing this Cian. I think it is a really important conversation, and I agree we should not assume cultivated meat will inevitably go mainstream simply because of the benefits it promises.
Alongside the concerns you raise, I think nutritional equivalence also deserves more attention. Muscles in animals often store nutrients that muscle tissue itself does not need in order to grow. Cultivated meat will not naturally contain these nutrients, so unless it's fortified, its nutrient density will be lower than that of conventional meat. Since fortification adds costs without improving taste, producers may only do it partially, as we already see with plant-based alternatives today. As a result, it's unlikely that cultivated meat will fully match the nutritional profile of conventional meat, at least in early products. We can already see this with current products, e.g. Wildtype's salmon, which is not nutritionally equivalent to conventional salmon. This could become a significant barrier to consumer acceptance.
On your visual comparison between the production processes of GMO soybeans and cultivated chicken, I think it's important to consider the counterfactual in each case. Non-GMO soybean farming looks much the same as GMO farming. While cultivated chicken production may not look especially appealing or natural, conventional chicken farming looks far worse and to most people shockingly unpleasant. Animal advocates have been working for decades to raise awareness of these conditions, but in the absence of alternatives that deliver the same results, it's understandable that so little has been accomplished. Cultivated meat could change this, but for that to happen, I believe it's crucial to build positive narratives that highlight not only adequacy or equivalence but the many advantages (e.g. optimised nutritional value, no antibiotics, no risk of zoonotic pandemics, lower environmental impact, and more). Of course, it's important that producers actually deliver on this potential. Also, while many cultivated meat companies currently work with GMOs, certification schemes such as the C-Label require certified products to be GMO free, which shows an awareness of consumer scepticism on the part of producers.
Overall, I find your conclusions very compelling and the post a very important contribution to the debate. Much appreciated!
Thank you for taking the time to write this as I learned a lot! I do have some quips, some of which I wrote down below.
Cultivated Meat Approved by US Regulators Is Mostly Non-GMO
“This piece is about drawing an analogy between cultivated meat and GMOs, but in fact this isn’t just an analogy, as abouthalf of the companies working on cultivated meat use genetic modification of the cultivated cells! So not only is cultivated meat an unsettling new technology, it also uses a technology which consumers famously hate.”
The cited source: “A 2023 survey found that nearly half of cultivated meat companies are exploring genetic engineering for either R&D or commercial use, and several patents describing various engineering approaches have been filed. Ultimately, the extent of genetic engineering and types of modifications incorporated into final products will depend on the regulatory approval process for engineered products and consumer perceptions in different regions.”
There have been five cultivated meats approved in the US, three are GMO-free, one likely uses a GMO cell line and one I don't know. For the uncertain ones, I'm learning towards they do use GMOs because if they were free of that why wouldn't they make that very clear?
Three are Non-GMO
Mission Barns ““The fact that our process is Non GMO is attractive to potential partners in Asia and Europe.” (source)
“According to GOOD Meat’s safetydossier, GOOD Meat’s cells are “not recombinant or engineered (i.e., non-GMO) and have not been exposed to any viruses or viral DNA” while tests “indicate that the starting cells used for cultured chicken do not have tumorigenic potential.” (source)
Not Certain, But I Would Guess Are GMO
Upside does seem to be considered to be GMO (source)
Wildtype – no public information I could find.
Europe
Only two cultivated meat companies have applied for approval, Gourmey and Mosa Meats, and both are non-GMO. Source for Gourmey (source) and Mosa Meats (source).
Rest of the world
Also, remember there is cultivated meat research, business and regulatory activity in India, China, and other parts of the world which I haven’t checked. But are likely self-aware about their country’s stance on GMO, and if they aren't their investors will make them so since they want a return on their investment, and therefore probably won’t use GMO cell lines.
Trump’s FDA Has Approved More Cultivated Meat Than Biden’s FDA
“RFK Jr (the US Secretary of Health) has also madenegativecomments about cultivated meat before taking office. The fact that cultivated meat is becoming a culture war issue before making it onto supermarket shelves doesn’t bode well.”
RFK Jr.’s negative and strange remarks about “pesticide filled” cultivated meat has been a very poor indicator of what the FDA has done under his indirect leadership (FDA is under HHS). Biden’s FDA approved two cultivated meats in his 4 year term, while RFK Jr’s FDA has approved 3 cultivated meats in less than a year.
The FDA under RFK Jr. has approved so many cultivated meats RFK Jr’s own media outlet, Children’s Health Defense, called the government agency “captured” by industry on the news of Wildtype’s approval. What is behind this strange mismatch between rhetoric and actions? I only have theories and they mainly revolve around cross political pressure.
Under Biden (Though Started Under Trump’s First Term)
I think there are more facts that have been left out in your post that make your case less strong, and support a more moderate position. But I am too lazy at the moment to write these out and dig up sources so here are some crude bullet points:
EU government investment in startups and partnering government agencies with those startups with the explicit goal of bringing it to market. (Counter point: the EU government has historically been more pro-GMO than individual member countries so might end up true of cultivated meat too.)
Texas and Indiana’s cultivated meats have an expiration date of 2027 while the other bans are indefinite. That is a big difference when it comes to possibly legalizing cultivated meat in those states.
There are more reasons to think GMOs are going to be treated differently by the public, like some of the same reasons people dislike GMOs they might like cultivated meat. But I am too lazy at the moment to write these out.
People eat more GMOs than is given credit for. Tons of foods in Walmart that working class people eat all the time contain GMOs. Like many health concerns, a smaller portion of people actually care enough and/or have enough energy to change behavior and many can't be bothered no matter how they respond to a survey question.
I want to end by saying I appreciate the effort you put in your post, and I am glad to see more discussion/debate around this. Even though I got my quips, I have updated significantly in the direction of being fearful that cultivated meat might end up like GMOs because of your arguments. And your post pushed me to think harder in the areas where I disagreed. I need to explore this topic more.
That's cool you looked into the different companies that have been approved, I didn't know which were using GMOs and which weren't. The fact that (probably) 2/5 of them are using GM doesn't update me from the 1/2 reference class though. My guess is that the nuance that only some cultivated meat companies use GM will be lost fairly quickly once it starts getting debated. Presumambly the non-GM companies are going to be emphasising that they don't use GM, while the other companies will be saying GM is nothing to worry about, so it will be a confusing message for consumers.
And good point that the regions which are most anti-GMOs (e.g. Europe) will presumably be served by companies not using GM cultivated meat which lessens the badness of the GM thing.
I don't know how much of a benefit the GM is for cultivated meat (I would guess a decent amount as otherwise they probably wouldn't use it), so I'm not sure how disadvantaged the non-GM cultivated meat companies will be in the race. If it's a big deal for scaling the technology then I guess the first products in supermarkets will be GMOs which would be a bad first impression.
Trump Approving Cultivated Meat
I don't know what to make of the fact that this admin's FDA is approving more than the previous admin, might just be that the technology is more developed now, or maybe this FDA is approving things faster generally. I guess cultivated meat still has a decent way to go before it will be in supermarkets, so even if this admin stopped approving new versions I'm not sure how much that would matter. I am more concerned by the general trend of the right-wing politicians spurning cultivated meat.
Other
I'd be interested in your thoughts on "some of the same reasons people dislike GMOs will mean they like cultivated meat". In my mind they share a similar aesthetic of "unnatural, messing with nature, playing God, etc"
And good point that 2 of the 7 bans are not permanent, I missed that.
Your comments are giving me ideas for forecasting questions: - Will the first cultivated meat GMO product contain GMOs? - What percentage of the first 10 cultivated meats approved by US regulators will contain GMOs?
Are GMO cell lines important for scaling? I don't know, but I agree it likely makes it easier. I need to look into this more.
Somebody to watch on this note is Meatly who is selling GMO-free cultivated meat pet food in Europe and Asia. And I have a somewhat uncertain belief cultivated pet food will reach larger scale faster than cultivated meat for humans so could be a preview.
Btw, found this map of GMO grown around the world (here)
Trump and Cultivated Meat
You have a valid point that they regulatory agencies are not more public-facing politicians, but it does show that the power dynamics in MAGA are far from completely against cultivated meat. (A little review of that here)
I have only done some searching, but it is worth noting CATO has came out against state bans, and Vivek Ramaswamy has been very pro it (though it is unclear me how much power he holds in MAGA, he might run for a governorship though).
It is worth noting some of those Republican officials who are doing things that seem part of the culture war, like mandated labels, also think it will become part of the American diet. "The way we’re headed, lab-grown meat is going to become a part of life whether we like it or not,” said Neyer, R-Shepherd. “But we have to make sure people have the ability to choose whether they consume it or not." (source)
Btw, I would appreciate it if you would consider making a forecast related to state bans-- see here. Your view point would make a healthy counter to my more bullish views.
Other
A big reason why people don't like GMOs is because of their associations with pesticides and chemicals, and the concern about pesticides is much more general than GMOs. RFK Jr. said cultivated meat was "pesticide-laden ingredients" which is absurd. Why would you need pesticides when the food is grown in a sparking clean lab? Especially compared to the all the crops animals need to eat.
So pesticides and chemicals, specifically the lack of coming in contact with them, could be a very large selling point for some of the public (5% to 20% i would guess). A decent portion of Americans are reasonable and aren't anti-vax, and would be open to hearing out this line of persuasion in my opinion.
I was overly optimistic before reading this so I appreciate you recalibrating me.
I think the best case for clean meat is how unacceptable the status quo is i.e. factory farming is so cruel its worth eating strange science slop to avoid.
- What I'm missing are examples of how we could create a positive image: e.g., completely new, diverse types of meat that make existing meat look "old" – a penguin-kangaroo burger, a crocodile steak, whatever – fancy stuff, all without harming the animals. Cult-promoted by celebrities who are open to the issue!
- Also neglected are aspects such as (from a human perspective) catastrophic events that could quickly bring industrial livestock farming to an end: Something like multi-resistance to antibiotics, rendering antibiotics ineffective not only in human medicine, but also in industrial livestock farming itself, which depends on antibiotics for its very existence. Possibly a pandemic, like the coronavirus mutations that killed the Danish mink industry at the end of 2020, which had until then been the largest mink industry in the world. But a pandemic on a larger scale, and affecting chickens and/or pigs. Probability? Hard to estimate, but by no means zero. Climate change/crisis would also be such an event, but it's apparently far too gradual to cause such drastic cuts.
Executive summary: The post argues—cautiously but firmly—that cultivated meat is likely to follow GMOs’ path toward public rejection unless advocates treat consumer perception as the central bottleneck: early missteps, politicization, and “unnaturalness” intuitions could dominate over technical progress, so success requires first-impression discipline, clear consumer benefits, and proactive, emotionally savvy PR (an exploratory, strategy-focused analysis with explicit uncertainty).
Key points:
GMO analogy: GMOs’ limited public acceptance stemmed less from safety/efficacy and more from branding, first products (Roundup Ready), corporate concentration, and activist-driven narratives—warning signs for cultivated meat.
Built-in headwinds: Roughly half of cultivated-meat firms use genetic modification; the category is already facing pre-market bans and culture-war framing, amplifying “unnatural” intuitions and stigma.
Opposition scale: Unlike GMOs (a seed swap), cultivated meat threatens the entire animal-ag supply chain; expect intense resistance from powerful rural constituencies and incumbents, plus suspicion of industry consolidation.
Consumer value proposition: Ethical/climate arguments likely won’t overcome disgust or risk perceptions; mass adoption probably requires clear personal benefits (much cheaper, healthier, tastier, or novel)—and those must be communicated simply.
Strategy implications:
Run proactive, category-level PR that targets emotions as well as facts (drawing on social-intuitionist psychology).
Treat first impressions as decisive (e.g., choose initial products/contexts—premium, novelty, or pet food—carefully; avoid a “Chernobyl for cultivated meat”).
Accept labeling as inevitable; focus lobbying on favorable terminology rather than fighting mandates.
Prepare visual/experiential framing to counter “pharma-vat” imagery and, where effective, contrast with factory-farming realities.
Forecast and path dependence: Even if price/taste/convenience match conventional meat, the author estimates ~33% chance of widespread adoption within 30 years; a best-case (~10% within 30 years) resembles vaccines (~75% uptake, politicized); failure is more likely without major investment in acceptance research and coordinated strategy.
This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, and contact us if you have feedback.
I’d challenge the comparison with GMOs as a useful precedent for failure as I do think you’re being too quick there. The rollout has faced obstacles as you say, but the technology hasn’t been rejected wholesale. I agree that cultivated meat can avoid many of the stigma issues if framed effectively. For example, comparing like for like, I’d choose the image of the cultivation lab as you have, next to an image of a slaughterhouse. I’d put how European countries look from an airplane now, next to how the landscape could look (more forests, meadows, wild nature) with even a partial adoption of the new tech.
There are also strong ethical and environmental arguments that make the stakes higher than for GMO’s. Even if adoption is slower than optimists want, incremental progress here will still prevent massive suffering, reduce emissions, land use, water use etc.
‘When consumers buy food, they are not just buying calories, flavour, and nutrients, but also a feeling of nostalgia for their grandmother's cooking, a sense of being close to nature, and a belief that they are wholesomely sustaining their body and mind.’ I see what you’re saying, but you could easily play the semantics differently. Consumers are also emotional about the climate, being seen as progressive, and not being seen as ignorant.
I share your sense that people's default attitude is to give cultivated meat a chance and many would happily try it (especially younger people, with about 1/2 of Gen Z saying they'd eat it). However, I anticipate a massive media effort by the meat lobby to convince people that cultivated meat is unsafe and gross, and I think people will be sensitive to that and quickly turn their backs.
For reference, before commercialisation GMOs had decent acceptance scores (50-70% of people said they'd eat it), but it didn't take long before people were against it.
As cultivated meat is such a risk to the meat industry, I expect the meat lobby to put an incredible amount of effort behind their campaigns, using the framings I pointed to above (unnatural, unsafe, etc). And yes, the pro-cultivated-meat groups will use the framings you're thinking of (anti-factory farming, good for climate), but I expect these "public-good" benefits will be weak compared to health concerns for the consumers.
I expect you're right - they're gonna put up a fight of course. However, I think public trust in the media is relatively low following Covid etc. We're all becoming more aware of how unreliable our sources of info are. That could inadvertently buffer the impact of counter-cultivated lobbying. If an attitude of 'what you see is what you get' becomes more the way, and cultivated meat is the same as slaughter meat in all aspects perceivable to the senses, then I think it'll happen. Not as fast as I hope, not as slowly as you believe, but somewhere in between. I give it 10-15 years before it's on supermarket shelves.
Generally when people turn away from traditional media, they instead get their information from social media, podcasters, youtubers, and influencers, all of which have even lower standards for scientific truth than the media does. This is how anti-vax conspiracy theories spread. I don't think it'll be particularly hard for the meat industry to turn a large segment of these alternative information ecosystems against cultured meat.
There are ample openings for the attacks on either side politically: To the right wing they can claim that cultured meat is attacking traditional values and culture, while to the left-wing they can claim that cultured meat is a monopolistic big-corporation enterprise.
Yes, and there are ample openings in favour of cultivated meat on either side, too. On the right, free market innovation + consumer choice. On the left, obviously, animal welfare and climate benefits (not to ignore the quiet majority in the centre who somewhat care about all of these things). I remain optimistic and look forward to seeing how things stand in the midterm future.
When you survey meat consumers, the majority of them say that they buy their meat from humane farms, when in fact of course ~95% of them are buying from massive factory farms (as that's where ~95% of meat production comes from). So in people's minds, they're not switching from factory farms to cultivated meat, they're switching from small independent farmers with great conditions to lab grown meat, which is a much less appealing jump.
I'm expecting massive food multinationals to be the ones bringing cultivated meat to market, e.g. Nestle, Unilever. And I think low-trust people will be put-off by this. I think people will want to side with the "small independent farmers" they think they are buying from.
Once headlines like these start appearing: New Nestle Lab-Meat Facility Opens, Expected to Cause Mass Unemployment For Small Farmers and Huge Profits for Corporate Multinational, I think more people still will be pushed away. Combine that with complicated and spurious health concerns, and people will stick with the default meat.
Politicians are desperate to pick up voters in rural areas, so I expect being anti-cultivated meat to become an increasingly popular political position. People who like the idea of cultivated meat won't care enough to make it an issue they vote on, and farmers who are threatened by the technology will make it their number 1 voting issue.
I think your 10-15 year prediction is very plausible, but the year at which it arrives in supermarkets is more a technological question. I guess the question about consumer adoption is, once they arrive on supermarket shelves, what share of the entire meat industry will cultivated meat make up after 10, 20, 30, 50 years?
Do you expect most consumers to switch very quickly, within a few years to a decade, or do you think it will be a generational thing? I used to imagine people switching over incredibly quickly, but now I think generational change is much more likely.
I think you're right about the spin - there'll be an abundance of spin in every direction. In the end it'll come down to consumer choice, where I expect millennial and younger gens to embrace the new products quite quickly (within a decade, yes), whilst older folks take longer to adjust. I trust that, eventually, the moral arguments will actually prevail once people no longer see 'traditional' farming (which, as you say, is mostly factory farming in practice) as the only option for getting meat.
FYI - there is an excellent Sentience Institute Report from 2018 which treated this issue in a lot of detail: https://www.sentienceinstitute.org/gm-foods
Don't you think that until the long-term side effects or their absence are not investigated well, a conservative approach to new food products can be considered as rational?
I guess if someone were sufficiently risk averse then it might be rational for them to avoid GMOs, as well as consistently extending this avoidance to many other technologies which have been deemed safe by health authorities but haven't been around for 80+ years for us to fully be sure of the long term health affects, things like new vaccines, new types of drugs, wifi, 5g, MRI scans, etc
This post presents the executive summary from Giving What We Can’s impact evaluation for 2025. At the end of this post we share links to more information, including the full report and...
I used AI to fix transcription errors, rerrarange the ideas, and suggest tweaks to the title and some sentences.
Three of the most exciting projects to come out of EA in recent years are, in a vague sense, CEA spinouts:
* Kairos is directly a spinout of CEA and now handles most support for university AI safety groups. Basically everyone I've found who knows them is really excited about what they do
* NEST is an opinionated ideas-fi...
Summary: Consumers rejected genetically modified crops, and I expect they will do the same for cultivated meat. The meat lobby will fight to discredit the new technology, and as consumers are already primed to believe it’s unnatural, it won’t be difficult to persuade them.
When I hear people talk about cultivated meat (i.e. lab-grown meat) and how it will replace traditional animal agriculture, I find it depressingly reminiscent of the techno-optimists of the 1980s and ‘90s speculating about how genetic modification will solve all our food problems. The optimism of the time was understandable: in 1994 the first GMO product was introduced to supermarkets, and the benefits of the technology promised incredible rewards. GMOs were predicted to bring about the end of world hunger, all while requiring less water, pesticides, and land.
Today, thirty years later, in the EU GM foods are so regulated that they are effectively banned[1], while in the Americas the situation is better, but limited to commodities which are only used as precursor products, such as soybeans used for vegetable oil, and corn used for corn syrup, with over 90% of these crops being GMO in the US. The rest of the world is similar, with countries either effectively banning it or relegating the technology to a small fraction of its potential uses. As far as I can tell, there are effectively no consumer-facing GMO plants (e.g. fruit, veg, wheat flour) with significant market share anywhere in the world[2].
The failure of GMOs is not a story of technology overpromising what it can achieve, but of the gap between what technology can deliver and what people will accept: a mistake the cultivated meat industry seems poised to repeat.
Why did GMOs fail to be widely adopted?
The problem that GMO foods faced weren’t technological or safety ones (they have been proven safe and effective numerous times), but an image problem among consumers. The scientific consensus is that these foods are just as healthy as conventional food, and yet 57% of the American public think they are unsafe, along with 75% of Europeans. The gap between what experts think of GMOs and what the public thinks is the largest that the Pew Research Center could find among all policy questions surveyed. We will examine a few causes of why GMOs developed such a negative perception among the public, what this tells us about the likelihood of cultivated meat succeeding, and what the cultivated meat companies should be doing to improve their chances.
A Bad First Impression
The company Monsanto took the lead in the GMO race and became the face of the technology. Monsanto had a bad reputation for (among other things) being one of the companies which developed Agent Orange (a herbicide used heavily by the US military in the Vietnam war which resulted in health problems for an estimated 1 million people). Along with its pre-existing bad reputation, Monsanto used aggressive litigation practices against farmers allegedly breaking the terms of their GMO seed contracts, which resulted in tarnishing the technology of GMOs as a whole.
To make things even worse, the initial GMOs to hit the market made a terrible first impression. The first wave of GMO varieties sold by Monsanto were designed to be resistant to RoundUp, a proprietary herbicide the company owned. The idea was that RoundUp could be sprayed over the entire field, and it would kill everything except the GMO crop, and the herbicide would be sold with the GMO seeds as a package. While a savvy business move by Monsanto, it was easy for environmental groups to (somewhat justifiably) criticise as a monopolistic way of ensuring dependence on a herbicide. And this was not only clear in hindsight, as Monsanto's competitors considered a similar move but decided it was too likely to be a PR disaster, with one of the executives at a competitor being quoted as saying "That's an ethical problem, we'll never be able to sell that." (pg 95). Once the wave of opposition hit Monsanto it was so powerful that it almost destroyed the company.
The fundamental problem was that these GMOs were designed for farmers, not consumers. The GMO companies had underestimated how much the public would care about this technology. While these varieties were tremendously popular with American farmers, with faster adoption than any agricultural technology in the nation’s history (pg 93), consumers saw no benefit, only the troubling image of crops engineered to sell more chemicals. Ironically, Monsanto had a much more consumer-friendly product in development. A year after the approval of the controversial RoundUp-resistant crop varieties, Monsanto released "Bt" corn; a variety which incorporated a natural insect toxin that was harmless to humans, meaning that this variety no longer needed to be sprayed with pesticides, a much more appealing feature for consumers. But by this point the damage had been done, and many people already associated GMOs as a way for companies to sell more of their own herbicides. The journalist Mark Lynas speculated that "Had Bt corn been Monsanto’s initial product launch instead of Roundup Ready soy, things might have been very different for GMOs. Genetic engineering could have been associated in the public mind from the outset with the reduction of chemical pesticides and might therefore have faced less widespread opposition. Some environmental groups might even have cautiously supported GMOs... Bt crops might even have been adopted by organic farmers as a more efficient way to deliver a biopesticide that they had already been relying on for many years." (pg 98)
Unpopular Corporate Concentration
GMOs, like medicines, require a lot of expensive R&D and regulatory testing to develop and commercialise, and so they have to rely on patents and aggressive litigation to ensure that these costs can be recouped. This increasing corporatisation of the food industry under GMOs was unpopular among some consumers, and a big reason for why GMOs became vilified. As most of the GM companies were located in the US, some citizens in other countries felt that importing patented US crops was ceding too much control to the Americans to stomach.
The launch of GMOs around the turn of the 21st century coincided with the peak of the anti-globalisation movement, and so GM foods arrived at an especially unwelcome time. Grassroots environmentalist movements were surprisingly effective at shamelessly pushing back against GMOs. Greenpeace went so far to fund a scientist whose research reliably produced the anti-GMO results they wanted to see, regardless of the methodological problems his work was known for. ActionAid (another large international NGO) spread GMO misinformation by radio in Uganda, with the message“GMOs cause cancer and infertility”. In 2002, after a pressure campaign from Greenpeace, Zambia blocked all imports of GMO food aid, despite the growing risk of famine in the country, which Greenpeace described as "a triumph of national sovereignty”.
Cultivated Meat IS GMO
This piece is about drawing an analogy between cultivated meat and GMOs, but in fact this isn’t just an analogy, as about half of the companies working on cultivated meat use genetic modification of the cultivated cells! So not only is cultivated meat an unsettling new technology, it also uses a technology which consumers famously hate. Genetically modified plants are one thing, but I expect genetically modified meat to freak consumers out even more. And even though there are some cultivated meat companies not using genetic modification, it is safe to expect that if any cultivated meat is genetically modified, then the public will probably associate all cultivated meat with GMOs.
There’s good reason to think that genetically modified meat will be rejected by consumers, as it has happened once before. In 2017 the first GMO farmed animal meat was brought in limited quantities in the US and Canadian markets, a variety of salmon which was genetically engineered to grow twice as fast as regular salmon. AquaBounty, the company behind it, had been created in the early 1990s and then“spent almost 25 years in regulatory limbo”. AquaBounty was only selling the fish meat for a few years before they ceased operations in 2024, due to the fact that many supermarkets and restaurants were declining to stock the product.
What timeline are we in?
Although it’s obviously too early to have much confidence, my impression is that the current trajectory of cultivated meat is closer to the GMO-timeline than the widespread-adoption-timeline. Even though cultivated meat is only in its very infancy of commercialisation (it’s only available as a proof-of-concept in a few restaurants), Italy has put a national ban on the sale of cultivated meat, along with 7 US states. I worry these bans are a preview to what will become a well-worn pattern.
In these cases, the farming associations lobbied for the ban, with their allied politicians pushing spurious health concerns. All of the 8 regions that have banned cultivated meat were controlled by a right-wing majority government, and so it’s clear that cultivated meat is becoming polarised across political lines (this is especially interesting, as the political parties which opposed GMOs most at launch were leftist Green parties). The rhetoric has become increasingly detached from reality, as can be seen in Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis’ comments when instituting the ban: “Florida is fighting back against the global elite’s plan to force the world to eat meat grown in a petri dish or bugs to achieve their authoritarian goals”. Although the political divide is not completely clean, for example Democrat senator John Fetterman wrote that he supported the bans on cultivated meat and he “would never serve that slop to my kids, I stand with our American ranchers and farmers.” RFK Jr (the US Secretary of Health) has also made negativecomments about cultivated meat before taking office. The fact that cultivated meat is becoming a culture war issue before making it onto supermarket shelves doesn’t bode well.
What can be done to prevent cultivated meat from becoming irrelevant?
Expect incredible opposition
Cultivated meat would be a corporatising force far beyond what GMOs were. For GMOs, it involved farmers replacing the kind of seeds they bought and planted, while for cultivated meat it is about replacing the entire animal farming industry. Because of this difference, we should expect extraordinary resistance from breeders, farmers, veterinarians, feed producers, and meat processors, whose careers depend on the status quo. In theory it doesn’t take all that much to start working in animal agriculture today, just enough money to buy some land and some animals, then raise them and sell them to a meat processing company[3]. In the age of cultivated meat on the other hand, starting a cultivated meat company requires a few hundred million dollars, and more than a decade of R&D. I expect consumers will find the shift from hundreds of thousands of farms across the US to just a few cultivated meat behemoths controlling the entire industry unacceptable. Rural agricultural states wield huge amounts of political power in many countries, and the total disruption of the meat industry would be immensely unpopular there. The success of cultivated meat would be an extinction-level event for the meat industry, and we should expect resistance proportional to the threat.
Be ready to tell a clear story about the benefits.
The advantages of the first GMOs to be commercialised were about herbicide-resistance, and the fact that this would make farming more efficient, thus increasing food production. However, having slightly cheaper crops and produce in the 90s and 2000s just wasn’t that great a benefit for rich countries, so it was a fairly low-cost decision for the public there to reject GMOs. [4]
For a new unsettling technology in food to succeed, there needs to be a clear and compelling answer to the consumer asking “but what’s in it for me?”. I expect that answers to this question which rely on climate change, animal welfare, or humanitarian causes will not be compelling enough to most consumers to overcome their ick factor. However, if cultivated meat becomes a far more appealing proposition than regular meat (e.g. by being much cheaper, healthier, or more interesting), then maybe people will be reluctant to turn their backs on it. Or perhaps as climate change progresses, this factor will become a stronger pull for people, maybe more so if governments introduce some kind of carbon tax on meat. However, the pandemic reminded us that governments pushing technology which some people find unsettling can have mixed results.
There’s also a clear asymmetry to the consumers, if you buy the new kind of meat then you run the risk of getting sick, or shunned by your family and friends for being unclean and weird. While if you stick with the normal meat then you are only missing out on some vague notion of fighting climate change or animal cruelty.
A proactive PR Effort
I expect a proactive public relations campaign would be necessary to educate consumers on the benefits of cultivated meat and not only respond to the hit pieces as they come. This might come in the form of some sort of generic advertising campaign, where the cultivated meat companies arrange to split the costs to advertise the product category as a whole (although the prisoner’s-dilemma nature of this agreement makes things difficult). These PR campaigns should not only focus on the rational questions of health and the benefits of the technology, but also target people’s emotional reactions, and tell a positive story about cultivated meat.
In the field of moral psychology, a theory called social intuitionism models people not as reaching moral judgments by carefully reasoning through the facts, but instead by experiencing an immediate, intuitive reaction and then constructing justifications afterward to support that initial feeling. When people's intuitive revulsion is triggered by an issue even when there are no rational arguments against it, they adopt weak or inconsistent arguments. When this happens, it's usually ineffective to present them with evidence against the arguments they landed on, as those arguments are not the true cause of their position. The developer of social intuitionism, Jonathan Haidt, thinks it is more effective to trigger other intuitions which push people in the other direction.
While there are some rational arguments against GMOs, most of the arguments anti-GMO groups use are irrational. I expect it will be the same for cultivated meat, and while we wait for the technology to develop, non-profit orgs could be building up a wealth of public knowledge to be utilised by the companies in effectively marketing their products. While there is some initial research in this area, it is still very neglected.
First impressions matter
As the history of GMOs tells us, the first products created from a new technology are critical in determining how the public thinks of it. Currently the biggest cultivated meat companies are focusing on standard products, for instance, it seems like the two companies with the most funding are Upside Foods and GOOD Meat, both of which are working on chicken. While this is the most mainstream approach, I wonder whether it is a mistake. While chicken is becoming the most consumed meat in the world, it is also one of the cheapest and most commoditised.
There are numerous different approaches that are being taken. For instance, perhaps the best approach is to frame it as a premium product which has common animal welfare concerns, e.g. producing foie gras like French cultivated meat company Gourmey (among others). Or maybe the best way is by introducing it as a novelty food, such as by creating cultivated meat from long-extinct animals such as woolly mammoths the way Australian company Vow did as a publicity stunt. An interesting approach is pet food such as the dog food being worked on by British cultivated meat company Meatly. The advantages are lower regulatory standards and presumably easier consumer acceptance, and so producing a premium pet food might allow a company to scale their output to a size which would help bring it to people. But the obvious risk is that it may associate cultivated meat with dog food.
We can only hope these companies are acting extremely cautiously and transparently, as it would only take one big scandal to set the field back decades; it’s not hard to imagine a “Chernobyl for cultivated meat”. However, as the cultivated meat industry is made up of two dozen or so independent private companies, if one of them were acting in a way which was seen as likely to tarnish the industry then I would guess the other companies would only be able to have a limited influence over them. As this paper points out though, it is unlikely that today’s cultivated meat startups will be the ones producing at scale. More plausibly, large established food multinationals will acquire them and ultimately bring the products to market - multinational companies with long histories and Wikipedia pages featuring extensive “Controversies” sections, think Nestle, Tyson, or Cargill.
Labeling
The GMO companies spent a lot of effort lobbying governments to not require GMO labelling on food. After years of court battles and lobbying, most countries made labelling for GMOs mandatory, with the US, Canada, and Argentina being the three biggest exceptions. The fact that GMO companies pushed so hard to not require labelling gave many people the sense that they had something to hide, which contributed to their negative perception.
It seems incredibly likely to me that almost all governments will require cultivated meat to be labelled to distinguish it from regular meat, so I would posit that it would be a waste of resources for the cultivated meat industry to lobby against the requirement of labelling. Plant-based meat and dairy alternatives have taken up a tiny share of the animal-product market in the EU (hard to find a solid number, but I think below 5%), and yet the EU still pushes strong packaging regulations. There have been numerous attempts to make it illegal for plant based meat products to use animal-meat terms such as sausage, burger, or schnitzel (the next proposed amendment to EU agricultural law will be voted on in a few weeks from now and, if passed, would result in the product term “veggie burger” becoming illegal in the EU). Since 2017 it has been illegal for plant-based milk to use the word “milk”, which is why most products in the region use terms like “Oat Drink”. Since the EU has invested this much energy in regulating the labelling of the plant-based products, it seems undeniable to me that cultivated meat will have very strict mandatory labelling.
Not only do I think it would be pointless to fight mandatory labelling, I think it wouldn’t even be a desirable outcome for cultivated meat adoption. The backlash to the absence of labelling can be seen in the launch of the GMO salmon meat in 2017 in Canada. There was much speculation about where exactly the salmon was being sold, with activist groups tracking down which supermarkets were stocking it so they could campaign against them, and many supermarkets announced they would not stock the product to allay consumers' concerns. While I think it would be counterproductive for the cultivated meat industry to fight mandatory labelling, I think they should be ready to push for specifics about the required labelling. E.g. what should the mandatory term should be, (cultivated meat, lab-grown meat, clean meat, cultured meat, etc).
Be ready to discuss concerns about unnaturalness
Many of the criticisms of GMOs invoke the idea that natural things are good, and GMOs are the opposite of that, and we shouldn’t be “playing God” with nature. I expect how appealing a new technology looks matters tremendously, as that is the first impression people will have of it when exposed to it in news footage and on social media.
For reference, this is what GMO soybean farming looks like:
Before GMOs were released, if someone asked you which of these two technologies is more likely to be accepted by the public, which would you guess?
1. Plants which have had 1 or 2 genes swapped out, but are otherwise identical and are farmed in the same way as other plants, by a farmer, in a tractor, on a farm.
2. Meat which has been produced in a facility resembling a pharmaceutical plant, in massive stainless steel vats, with no animals or farmers in sight, by hooded people in cleanroom suits.
To me, it's clear that cultivated meat will appear more unnatural and offputting to consumers than GMOs, a fact which might be enough to doom the technology from the outset. PR campaigns could remind consumers that many foods we are comfortable with are produced in facilities which look similarly high-tech, e.g. the production of Yoghurt, breakfast cereals, chocolate, beer, wine, etc, but this will clearly be an uphill battle.
It’s possible that another good approach would be to show that the reality of animal farming is far more horrifying and unnatural than people think. I’m not sure how effective that would be in practice, as animal advocates have been pushing in this direction for some time, and yet the combination of humane-washing from the meat industry, along with the fact that consumers are incentivised to turn a blind eye, means that there is little effect.
GMOs
Cultivated Meat
What does it look like?
Indistinguishable from regular farming
Pharmaceutical facility
Which groups are resistant to this tech?
Grassroots environmentalist groups
The meat industry and its prodigious lobbyists
If this tech were successful, how much would it change the industry?
The number of seed suppliers would be consolidated to a few big producers. Everything else (farmers, processors, etc) wouldn’t change
The few big cultivated meat companies would replace the breeders, farmers, feed producers, veterinarians, and processors.
What is the benefit to the consumers of this tech?
It promised to be cheaper, less land use, less pesticides, more food for people in developing countries
It promises less emissions, less land use, better animal welfare, and maaaybe lower prices far in the future.
Limitations of the comparison
One disanology between the comparison I’ve been drawing is that there was concern that GMOs would escape the farms and start growing in the wild, potentially becoming an invasive species. Of course this would not be a concern for cultivated meat, as it requires growth media in a vat to survive. Also, I may be too quick to describe the launch of GMOs as a failure, as it’s possible that in a few decades from now GMOs will become widely accepted, perhaps driven by generational change. This wouldn’t be the first time a hugely impactful food technology had a very slow adoption. Milk pasteurisation was initially unpopular, with concerns about taste and nutrition slowing its adoption, despite its incredible efficacy of reducing infant mortality. It was first commercialised in 1882, and it took another 6 decades before the majority of milk in Britain was pasteurised. If GMOs do eventually succeed, then the warning should still concern the animal welfare movement as it could mean cultivated meat will have an extremely slow adoption rate, resulting in factory farming persisting for decades longer than it had to.
Conclusion
We techno-optimists underrate important emotional consumer dynamics, and I worry that the neglect of these issues will prove to be the downfall of cultivated meat. I think that due to the rapid adoption of plant based milks in the 2010s, the alt-protein movement became overconfident and we began to think that ending factory farming was simply a matter of producing good enough alternatives, and people would gladly switch. Plant based meat had a lot of funding and interest in the 2010s, and this seemed to be going well until the crash of 2022. It is a common trap to think that a good product will win out among consumers, especially dangerous in a sector as personal and emotionally salient as food. When consumers buy food, they are not just buying calories, flavour, and nutrients, but also a feeling of nostalgia for their grandmother's cooking, a sense of being close to nature, and a belief that they are wholesomely sustaining their body and mind. If alternative proteins continue focusing on the specifics of the former and neglect the latter, then they are likely to be relegated to the fringes the same way GMO foods have.
I would guess that if all of the technological problems of cultivated meat are solved and it's as good as conventional meat on price, taste, and convenience, then there's maybe a 1 in 3 chance of it being widely adopted in the first 30 years after commercialisation. I expect the somewhat-realistic best case scenario for cultivated meat is that it achieves a similar level of adoption to vaccines. So roughly 75% of people opt for it, but it’s still fairly politicised and there’s a vocal minority who disavow it. In this world where it does succeed, I expect it would take many decades to penetrate the market to this extent. My guess is that there’s maybe a 10% chance of this happening in the first 30 years after commercialisation. I think the most likely outcome is that cultivated meat will be shunned by consumers as unnatural frankenstein lab tissue early on, and never reach the scale that would be required to bring the price down to a level low enough to make it a compelling option for most consumers. Ultimately, for me the most damning thing for cultivated meat is the immense amount of money and effort that will go into discrediting this technology, coupled with how easy it will be to smear.
However, whether a technology is accepted or rejected seems very path dependent, and so I expect these odds could be improved if the field of animal welfare took the prospect of consumer rejection seriously, and adapted their strategy accordingly. For instance, I am surprised by the small number of orgs working on research and strategy in this field. As I still think cultivated meat has a chance of making a huge impact on factory farming, I am not suggesting that the field is overhyped, but I am saying that it seems like there is not enough work going into understanding the best strategies for public acceptance. I think that the success of the technology is very contingent on the specifics of the situation, and unless a lot of things go right, the default outcome is failure.
While not completely banned, there is only one GM food crop that is approved in the EU (a variety of maize), and due to the labelling requirements and negative public perception, the farming of this variety is extremely limited, with Spain being the only country with significant GMO farming where 20% of the maize grown there is this GM variety. As GM animal feed doesn’t necessitate GM labelling on the animal products, EU countries import roughly 30 million tons of GM animal feed from the Americas.
In reality the meat industry is already very concentrated by the small number of big players who control the animal breeds, and meat processing facilities. Although the public mostly have the more romantic picture of small independent farmers described here.
What is more surprising is that developing countries rejected the tech in a similar way. Norman Borlaug, the father of the Green Revolution did not expect this in 2000 when he wrote: "The affluent nations can afford to adopt elitist positions and pay more for food produced by the so called natural methods; the 1 billion chronically poor and hungry people of this world cannot.”
It seems like the reasons developing countries also rejected the technology is 1. Pressure and disinformation from environmentalist groups 2. Growing GMO crops would make exporting all crops more expensive due to contamination regulations.
How is failure being defined here?
When I looked into it, it looks like GMO usage is growing globally.
"In 2023, GM technology was used in 76 countries and regions globally, and 206.3 million hectares of GM crops were planted in 27 countries and regions, representing 3.05% growth over the previous year. The planting area of GM crops has expanded 121-fold since 1996, and now accounts for approximately 13.38% of the total world farmland area (1,542 million hectares), with a total planting area exceeding 3.4 billion hectares."
Thanks for commenting! Here's some quick thoughts:
You're right, 13% of farmland isn't terrible! But it is also much less than they had the potential to be by now. Hopefully their growth will continue and in a few decades from now will be totally normalised. It took pastuerisation 60 years to get to 50% in the UK, and GMOs are at 13% after 30 years, so there's time yet.
I shouldn't have said "GMOs are a failure" but "the rollout of GMOs was a failure", or "public acceptance of GMOs has been a failure".
The fact that roughly half of all people think that GMOs are unsafe, and only 13% think they are safe, is a big part of what makes me think the GMO introduction was a failure.
The biggest failure has probably been in Africa, where there was lots of optimism that GM crops would enable small farmers to escape subsistance and accelerate the decline of poverty in the region, but except for South Africa, they're barely grown on the continent today.
Also, I think the report you read includes GM cotton which is big in countries which ban GM food (e.g. India), as the concerns about health effects isn't an issue there as they're not eaten. I tried to exclude cotton in this post as I was focusing on GM food. I didn't even try to untangle the GM crops that are used for animal feed, but I probably should have, as that's also not very relevant for the GM acceptance of the public. I haven't found a good number on it, but it seems like something like 2/3s of GM food we grow is fed to farm animals. As the post was using GM foods to understand "how does the public react to a new food technology?" for the purpose of thinking about cultivated meat, cotton and animal feed aren't relevant.
There has been less uptake than may have been hoped for (and I think animal feed is a large percentage in US at least), but it still could be considered impressive growth since the 90's.
It's hard for me to know what the expected take off for this technology should have been and how it compares to similar things (slower than AI and smartphones but faster than tv's and electricity, but these aren't great reference classes).
I'm not as convinced by public opinion surveys as I imagine you'd probably get a similar proportion, if not higher, that think factory farming should be banned, which doesn't stop them being used if people are prioritising price/taste/etc.
With reducing poverty, I think that is a whole host of other things that GMO's wouldn't have made much of a difference, even if they were 100% of food.
Growing GMOs is completely banned in the two most populous countries, China and India, along with Russia, and many more countries. In the EU there's only one variety which is allowed to be grown (maize), and Spain is the country with the highest amount (20% of their maize production).
(Random fun fact, in Hungary they even introduced a clause in their constituition against growing GMOs for some reason)
To me it's clear that something went badly wrong with the introdcution of the technology when so many countries have actively banned it.
(I'm talking about banning the growing of it, not the importing of it for animal feed, which many of these countries do)
I think China, in the last few years, has approved a few crops (from here, lots of interesting sections).
Maybe that's why I'm more optimistic, despite the public being against GMOs (In 2018 46.7% of respondents had negative views of GMOs and 14% viewed GMOs as a form of bioterrorism aimed at China), China leadership is still pushing ahead with them as it benefits the country.
Over time the countries that don't use GMOs will either have to import, give larger subsidies to their farmers, or have people complain about why their food costs so much vs neighbouring countries.
I'm not so sure it has gone 'badly' wrong vs other tech innovations but I'm not as well read on tech adoption and the ups and downs of going from innovation to mass usage.