Jon Hochschartner
As an animal activist, I’m a vocal proponent of cultivated meat. For those who don’t know, the new protein is grown from livestock cells, without slaughter. I view developing the nascent field of cellular agriculture as the most promising means of reducing nonhuman slaughter and premature death. It offers a number of potential public health and environmental benefits as well.
Still, I occasionally wonder if all the hope I’ve invested in this technology is misplaced. After all, I’m not a scientist. I have to take the word of experts who say mass producing cultivated meat at a price competitive with — if not lower than — slaughtered meat is eventually feasible. Similarly, I’ve never tasted the new protein, early iterations of which are only available in limited locations.
I can’t say how close cultivated meat is now to the taste of slaughtered options. From what I understand, various qualities, like texture, remain a work in progress. It would represent an immense failure, in my mind, were the new protein only ever to become an improved offering for existing vegans and vegetarians. My deep wish is a mature cellular agriculture will be transformative.
Amidst these doubts, a number of states, most recently Texas, have preemptively banned the sale of cultivated meat. This is undoubtedly a bad development. I don’t really want to try to spin it otherwise. That said, in an odd way, it’s also been somewhat reassuring to me, reinforcing my belief that cellular agriculture is a threat to animal agriculture, and my activism is on the right track.
There’s a risk here of assuming the livestock industry, which frequently backs such bans, is completely rational. I don’t think that’s the case. Just because a campaign, or in this case, a technology, is the focus of government repression, doesn’t mean it’s the most effective vehicle for change. Still, I’d be a little worried if the livestock industry was totally unconcerned by cultivated meat.
I also do my best to remember it’s not an all or nothing proposition. I certainly hope cultivated meat will some day relegate slaughterhouses to the trash heap of history, but even if this doesn’t come to pass, the field has the potential to do an immense amount of good. Very low rates of cultivated-meat adoption among existing omnivores could save billions of animals a year.
So I plan to continue picketing my elected officials, calling on them to support public funding for cellular-agriculture research. This isn’t an unprecedented demand. Such funding has been allocated at both the state and federal level before. For instance, in 2024, the Massachusetts government invested a little over $2 million in the Tufts University Center for Cellular Agriculture.
I’m unaware of other forms of animal activism which have anything close to the promise of accelerating cultivated-meat development. As an example, campaigns against vivisection, fur farming, and zoos face industries where the total number of yearly animal victims is counted in millions. Given the ubiquity of nonhuman exploitation, I believe some degree of triage is necessary.
Cultivated-meat bans are reprehensible and should be fought, and yet they are very much to be expected. If cellular agriculture has anything like the potential we hope it does, cultivated meat represents a threat to the livestock industry. Maybe it’s only a threat to one percent of the existing meat market. But this preemptive legislation suggests it’s a threat the industry takes seriously.
Jon Hochschartner lives in Connecticut. He is the author of a number of books, including The Animals’ Freedom Fighter: A Biography of Ronnie Lee, Founder of the Animal Liberation Front.
