The chicken before me had neither lived nor died, but it did look really tasty.
Five stories up, in a sunny event space tucked away in New York City's Little Italy earlier this month, chefs had been busy preparing chicken lo mein noodles, empanadas, and shawarma. But the poultry that went into these dishes hadn't come from a farm — it was grown from animal cells in a lab. Local restaurateurs and chefs mingling around the room had been invited to sample the dishes by Upside Foods, a leading brand in the lab-grown meat business. This was essentially a big pitch meeting: Upside Foods is working on launching a new product called "shreds" — similar to boneless, skinless, shredded chicken meat — and hoping to convince restaurants to buy it once it hits the market.
A few attendees, according to Upside Foods Chief Operating Officer Amy Chen, confessed they were nervous to try the lab-grown chicken, which is genetically identical to regular chicken but grown in a bioreactor. "I think for consumers, the idea of cultivated meat is quite different," Chen said, using another term for lab-grown protein. "And it takes a minute for you to wrap your head around it. But I came from the food world, and I know that tasting is believing."
And what tasting Upside Foods' chicken will have you believe is that it is honest-to-god chicken. The chicken shawarma I tried was juicy and tender, with a taste and texture that were basically indistinguishable from the real thing. This could cut both ways: The breaded chicken strips atop the lo mein noodles tasted like, well, regular chicken tenders — totally average.
Upside Foods hopes its products will be the future of eating meat. But for all the company's bullish messaging, an inconvenient detail hung over the showcase: Upside Foods has not yet received federal approval to sell its shredded chicken. And because President Donald Trump has nominated Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — a vocal critic of lab-grown meat — to lead the agency that oversees the Food and Drug Administration, no one knows what will happen to that clearance process now.
Kennedy has openly questioned the safety of lab-grown meat on X, formerly Twitter, calling it "ultra-processed." Although he has not been confirmed to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, his nomination has been worrying for the U.S. lab-grown meat industry, which has yet to sell its goods in American supermarkets.
But experts say there may be a number of opportunities for lab-grown meat under a second Trump administration. Industry leaders argue that cultivated meat is good for business, consumers, and even national security — and certain high-profile Republicans agree.
The promise of lab-grown meat is that it would reduce our reliance on growing animals in factory-farming conditions, which pollute the air and waterways on top of emitting lots of greenhouse gases. Agriculture, by some estimates, accounts for up to a third of global greenhouse gas emissions. Within the agriculture category, livestock is the leading source of emissions. Scientists say it will be impossible to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) without reducing the emissions — particularly methane — that stem from industrial animal agriculture.
The problem is that studies suggest that today's methods of producing cultivated meat have a higher environmental impact than that of beef. Advocates of cultivated meat say that the industry simply needs more investment to scale up and become energy-efficient.
Lab-grown meat falls into the "alternative protein" category, which includes plant-based burgers that bleed like real beef and has gotten heaps of attention from investors, nonprofits, and policymakers in recent years. That attention hasn't always been good. Pitting lab-grown meat against farmers and the beef industry, Florida and Alabama preemptively banned the sale of cultivated meat last year. (Upside Foods sued the state of Florida in response, arguing its measure is unconstitutional.)
But industry leaders say they're working on a feat of bioengineering that will put the United States ahead of other countries trying to grow their cultivated meat industries, such as Israel and Singapore.
"That's something that I spend a lot of time talking about now: the economic potential of cultivated meat. How many jobs can we create?" said Suzi Gerber, head of the Association for Meat, Poultry, and Seafood Innovation, a cultured meat trade group. She noted that growing meat under laboratory conditions pulls in resources and workers from other fields: It requires agricultural and manufacturing expertise, and it will employ engineers and rely on farmers. (The cells used to grow Upside Foods' chicken, for example, come from fertilized chicken eggs, after all.) Investing in lab-grown meat ensures "that American ingenuity is the front, that the American economy keeps evolving, and that we don't fall behind the rest of the world and their bio-economies," Gerber said.
These arguments have helped lab-grown meat attract supporters from areas not usually associated with vegan-friendly fares. Vivek Ramaswamy, the former Republican presidential candidate and Trump supporter, has come out in support of cultivated meat, saying it should ultimately be up to consumers to decide what they want to eat. Kimbal Musk, brother of Elon, is also an investor in Upside Foods. (He has called himself a centrist Democrat who occasionally votes Republican and made many posts on X about how he hates Trump — but he's also been described as Elon's "close confidante" and is on the board of Tesla.)
Upside Foods went through the FDA's pre-market consultation process for its original proof-of-concept product — a simple chicken filet — under Trump's first term. (The process of making the chicken "shreds" is different enough that it requires additional clearance.) Upside Foods got clearance to sell its product from the FDA in 2022 as well as a thumbs-up from the Department of Agriculture in 2023. But the company has been very slow to bring the filets to market. For a time, the filets were only available at Bar Crenn, a fine-dining restaurant in the Bay Area, although that partnership ended recently. Still, going through that process taught the company valuable lessons, said Eric Schulze, a veteran of the cultivated meat space who led Upside Foods' regulatory strategy then.
"I worked with the first Trump administration and found it to be actually a very fruitful relationship," said Schulze, who worked as an FDA regulator under the Obama administration for six years before coming to Upside. He left Upside in 2023 and now advises cultivated meat companies as an independent consultant.
According to Schulze, a number of factors worked in Upside Foods' favor — and could potentially help other cultivated meat companies, too. Schulze said that when Upside Foods was working with the FDA, his team emphasized the pro-business argument for fake meat. "If you have a better product, you know, may it beat us fairly on the playing field of capitalism," he said.
Schulze also noted that cultivated meat wasn't necessarily as politicized under the last Trump administration as you might expect fake meat options to be. According to Schulze, both the Department of Agriculture and the FDA under Trump seemed to think that "food should be nonpartisan to the extent possible, and to the extent it couldn't be nonpartisan, it should at least be bipartisan." Two agency heads appointed by Trump — Scott Gottlieb, who led the FDA from 2017 to 2019, and Sonny Perdue, the former agricultural secretary — were behind the decision to jointly regulate cell-cultured food products. The move indicated a willingness to embrace innovation in the creation of alternative proteins, rather than avoid or ignore them.
The question is whether a noted skeptic like Kennedy could come around to endorsing meat that's been grown from cells, or if he might make it so hard for the companies to see approvals that their products never see the light of day. Chen described Upside Foods' first review process with the FDA as "incredibly thorough," adding "we have every reason to believe that that's going to be the case in the future."
Although the regulatory process ultimately determines which products can be sold in the U.S., cultivated meat companies can find support at the state level, and through certain federal grant programs. For example, tech startups can access funding through the federal Small Business Innovation Research program. Maille O'Donnell, a senior policy specialist at the Good Food Institute, a think tank that supports alternative proteins, said the federal program has been an invaluable resource for the companies she works with — and could be immune to partisan squabbles. "This administration has every incentive to continue the SBIR program to help bring down food prices, return manufacturing jobs to the United States, and create new opportunities for farmers," said O'Donnell.
A handful of states have programs that support faux meat, such as Illinois, which launched its Alternative Protein Innovation Task Force last year. Massachusetts also allocated $10 million as part of a recent economic development bill to the state's burgeoning alt protein sector. And in 2022, California supplied $5 billion to support research at three state universities, as part of its state budget.
At the federal level, the Biden administration opened up a variety of funding streams for alternative protein companies through the Department of Energy, with the goal of decarbonizing the agricultural industry. And Schulze said the Department of Defense, which has a long history of supporting technological research and development, "absolutely" has interest in investing in alternative proteins.
But the Pentagon has also faced blowback for engaging with the cultivated meat industry. In March 2023, the Defense Department gave more than $500 million in funding to BioMADE, a public-private partnership borne out of the department's manufacturing technology arm, money that would go in part to "biomanufactured proteins." Two months later, BioMADE put out a call for proposals that used technology, including cell cultivation, to make sustainable food rations for the military. The livestock industry seized on the announcement and chastised the Defense Department for trying to "feed our heroes like lab rats," as the National Cattlemen's Beef Association put it. After that, the Defense Department publicly denied funding the manufacture of cultivated meat.
Still, there are signs of government interest in supporting innovations in alternative proteins. Last year, the Defense Department invested in a company working on using precision fermentation to make alt protein out of fungi. However, it's too soon to gauge any one federal agency's interest in supporting cultivated meat, according to Gerber, the head of the cultivated meat trade group. The future of the industry may get even more muddled after Trump attempted to put an end to federal grant programs this week.
Cultivated meat companies are bulking up their lobbying efforts and also exploring whether there's any way the upcoming Farm Bill could include some money for them. But Republicans in Congress have vowed to fight against that this year.
If nothing else, how the second Trump administration responds to the growing pains of the cultivated meat industry will offer insight into an age-old question: Can someone change their mind about something as intimate and personal as what food they like? Chen, from Upside Foods, said the most common reaction she's heard among people trying lab-grown chicken for the first time is something like, "It's chicken!" She joked that it's the most unremarkable piece of chicken you'll ever eat in your life.
Asked if Kennedy might be someday convinced by the science and data supporting the safety of such products, Schulze was optimistic. "I do believe that given RFK Jr.'s background and his training" from law school, said Schulze, "that he would at least be open to the evidence and the arguments."
But as for what Trump's nominee to run the health department might do, Schulze was quick to add: "Unless you're RFK Jr., you don't know."
This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/food-and-agriculture/lab-grown-meat-rebrands-itself-to-woo-trump-and-rfk-jr/.
Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org
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