Is cultivated meat ‘real meat’? Does it pose any benefits? Is it an inevitable, necessary marker of change to the food system?

If you were reading the coverage of the US Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) approval of Upside Foods and Eat Just’s cultivated chicken products in summer 2023, the answer to all of these questions would likely have been yes.

In the two years since, however, the narrative has shifted dramatically, as misinformation-fuelled attempts to ban cultivated meat flood the US legislature… How the media frames a story has wide-ranging implications for policy and public opinion….This media framing issue is true for cultivated meat, too, and the many other terms it is known by.

“The discussion of the policy debates and contentious political meanings surrounding cell-cultivated products may imply a precarious outlook for the future of cellular agriculture,” the study [from Tufts University] states, adding that for some people, the discourse about cultivated meat products has become “confounded with preexisting political identities”.

This is an excerpt. Read the original post here