Roughly ten thousand years ago, humans began to domesticate plants and animals. Instead of hunting and gathering, we made our food come to us. Smart move, right? Jared Diamond famously called it “the worst mistake in the history of the human race.”
The remains of early farmers show that they were shorter and less healthy than hunter-gatherers. Their diets narrowed to a few staples, leaving them more vulnerable to famine. Daily labor was grueling. Packed in with animals and with each other, farmers were exposed to more infectious disease. Dense, sedentary populations were also easy victims of exploitation—through social hierarchy, slavery, and oppressive divisions of labor between the sexes.
From today’s vantage point, though, it all seems to have been worth it in the end. Compared to our ancestors, we are far healthier, wealthier, and longer-lived. Public health and modern medical science have been major life-savers.
The industrial and scientific revolutions ultimately corrected humanity’s worst mistake. Yet these same advances have been catastrophic for animals under our care—arguably our worst moral mistake.
Animal life on traditional farms was never idyllic, but care and slaughter at our hands was far kinder than life in the wild. By turning farms into factories, industrial farming flipped the moral scales: now over 100 billion land animals are killed brutally each year, after being confined and abused for all of their short, unnatural lives.
And yet, just as the agricultural revolution ultimately led to improvement of the human condition, the industrial revolution’s toll on farm animals may prove only temporary—and far more brief.
Advances in technology mean you can now serve meat that is entirely free from slaughter. To begin, you extract a small batch of cells from a living animal and place them in a sterile bioreactor filled with a nutrient-rich growth medium. The recipe gets a bit more complicated from there. Next, you catalyze the differentiation of cells into the tissues found in meat—muscle fibers, fat cells, and connective tissue. After a few weeks, you harvest the meat and heat up the frying pan.
The underlying technology was pioneered in the early 2000s. In 2013, the world’s first lab-grown burger was served, with a price tag of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Since then, hundreds of startups have launched to improve the technology and drive down costs. Singapore became the first country to approve commercial sales in 2020; the United States followed in 2023.
In practice, it’s been easiest to ground up cultivated meat and form it into patties, meatballs, or nuggets. More structured meat products like steaks are still in the works. UPSIDE foods and GOOD Meat began selling chicken cutlets in limited venues, often judged virtually indistinguishable from the “real” thing.
Commercially, cultivated meat is still in its infancy. And while enthusiasm is high in some quarters, there remains much uncertainty about whether it can scale to compete with farm-grown meat. Some experts are pessimistic about its economic viability, arguing that further breakthroughs are needed. Although the technological hurdles are significant, the political hurdles are even more daunting.
In 2023, Italy became the first country in the world to ban cultivated meat. In 2024, Florida became the first US state to enact a ban, followed soon after by Alabama. In 2025, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Indiana, and Texas passed similar measures.
These bills are seen as one way to “own the libs,” but they’re also backed by powerful lobbyists for the livestock industry, now pressuring additional states to pursue bans, labeling restrictions, and other regulations. At the federal level, they’ve pushed Congress to introduce the FAIR Labels Act—which would force cultivated meat to be labeled “cell-cultured” or “lab-grown”—and compelled the Department of Defense to shelve a pilot project to source cultivated meat for military rations.
Bans are clear government overreach, infringing on the liberty of consumers and businesses, stifling innovation. Livestock producers would love to eliminate the competition, and their allegations are only superficially plausible.
Take the claim that cultivated meat is “unnatural”—“Frankenstein meat,” as one Florida legislator put it. Even if that mattered (it doesn’t), so are artificial sweeteners and neon-orange cheese puffs. Moreover, little in our food system is more unnatural than industrially farmed meat. Animals live in profoundly artificial conditions, prevented from foraging and dustbathing. They’re biologically engineered, bred through artificial insemination (and sometimes cloning), and often fed copious hormones and antibiotics.
Is cultivated meat unhealthy? Not remotely as unhealthy as highly processed meats like hotdogs or cured meats, which are associated with various cancers. Produced in sterile facilities, cultivated meat’s risk of bacterial infection—from E. coli or Salmonella—is almost zero. But it’s not as though unhealthiness is a sufficient reason for banning a consumer product anyway. This principle would eliminate most snack foods from our grocery stores.
Cultivated meat is a singular technological innovation. The arguments against it are paper-thin, and the arguments in favor of allowing it are overwhelming.
The main benefit of growing meat in labs instead of on farms is animal welfare. Eventually, we might no longer subject hundreds of billions of animals to extreme confinement, routine suffering, and painful deaths. Imagine keeping a pet in a tiny cage, neglecting its welfare, and then cutting its youthful life short. Multiply that by a thousand, then multiply that figure by a thousand again and again until you reach a trillion. That’s roughly how many animals could be spared over a single decade.
Preventing this immense suffering is reason enough to speed the development of cultivated meat, but there are other benefits too. We could slash greenhouse gas emissions—so long as bioreactors are powered by green energy. We could also free up vast swaths of land used for animal farming, redirecting feed crops from livestock to people, and returning some of that land to nature.
The public health benefits are also vast. Intensive animal farming is a breeding ground for viruses that jump to humans: cultivated meat might prevent the next pandemic. Ending the confinement of animals in warehouses and the routine use of antibiotics would slow the evolution of zoonotic diseases and antibiotic-resistant bacteria. And cultivated meat might even be tuned for better nutritional profiles. Future archaeologists might notice the differences in our remains.
But even if the technology keeps advancing, this bright future might never see the light of day.
Factory-farmed meat is kept absurdly cheap. In some places, you can buy a burger for under a dollar. That’s because livestock producers don’t pay for their industry’s externalities—costs to the environment and public health—and because they enjoy generous federal subsidies.
So even if the technology scales, people may lack an economic incentive to choose cultivated meat over the conventional variety. And for political as well as cultural reasons, traditionalists on both the left and the right may resist meat that comes from a vat.
If consumers won’t automatically embrace cultivated meat, then new technology is no substitute for moral and political change. People must come to believe, with the force of moral conviction, that factory farming is seriously wrong—not just an unfortunate necessity, but a moral tragedy.
Why don’t they already? Most people regard the abuse of household pets as criminal behavior. The difference is that meat and other animal products are often delicious, nutrient-dense, and bound up with meaningful traditions, which makes people accept flimsy rationalizations. They downplay the cognitive capacities of farm animals or imagine that they’re treated humanely. Classic motivated reasoning.
Yet cultivated meat promises to short-circuit this process. As early adopters discover that it’s just as tasty as farmed meat, their behavior will start to change but so will their moral attitudes. No longer motivated to believe in spurious differences between farming practices and household-pet abuse, they’ll start to oppose factory farming much as previous generations turned on child labor and slavery—practices that some once believed were just as fundamental to our society as hot dogs on the Fourth of July. And as in any moral revolution, convictions will spread: friends and family will try cultivated meat, find it tasty, and flimsy rationalizations will fade.
Technology has fostered similar moral progress in countless other cases. Once recycling infrastructure became widespread, throwing everything away began to feel morally negligent. Likewise, kerosene helped fuel opposition to whaling; birth control bred sexual liberation; electric cars powered climate conviction. In each case, a new technology undercut complacency with the status quo, providing breathing room for moral considerations to change hearts and minds.
For too long, our appetites have kept our consciences caged—like the animals who’ve become victims of the industrial revolution. Cultivated meat offers a chance to free them both.
Note: This piece was co-authored with my friend, Victor Kumar. Check out his excellent Substack, Open Questions.
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I learned so many things from this essay! Loved all the factual & historical detail. Glad I didn't spend hundreds of thousands on one of the first lab-grown patties -- though hopefully someday I can enjoy one at a reasonable price.