Cultured meat and the problem of "naturalness"
How perceived naturalness impacts attitudes towards cultured meat.
As I’ve written before, “conventional” meat as currently produced has a number of problems:
…meat––and particularly beef––is a big source of greenhouse gas emissions. Additionally, animals raised on factory farms suffer greatly, and some factory farming practices could encourage zoonotic spillover and antibiotic resistance.
But it’s hard to convince people to simply reduce their meat intake. Meat tastes good, it’s an important part of many cultures and cuisines, and it’s also an easy source of protein.
Hence my ongoing interest in cultured (alternatively, “lab-grown” or “clean”) meat. If we can grow meat––rather than raise animals for slaughter––at scale and at a reasonable price, and if people are comfortable consuming cultured meat, then we can eliminate or at least reduce many of the problems conventional meat poses, while still giving people the opportunity to consume something they enjoy.
There are more than a few challenges with this proposition. Some are technical (e.g., developing a suitable scaffold for tissue growth), some are economic (e.g., lowering production costs), some are health-related (e.g., making sure the resulting product is suitable for consumption and doesn’t have unintended consequences on health), and some are psychological (e.g., whether people have mental barriers to consuming cultured meat).
My focus here is on the psychological dimension for two reasons:
I’m simply not equipped to comment intelligently on the other dimensions, and people with much more expertise than me are already communicating that information.
Demand is important to drive large-scale production, and people’s perceptions of cultured meat will (in my view) go a long way to determining their demand for the product.
In the current post, I’ll look at a particular psychological barrier to the acceptance or consumption of cultured meat: whether or not it is seen as natural.
The problem of naturalness
A potential obstacle to widespread adoption of cultured meat is the perception that it’s unnatural.
For example, in this literature review of consumer attitudes about cultured meat, “naturalness” was among the most common objections. People often refer, unprompted, to cultured meat as being somehow unnatural; this contrast is also drawn by the use of terms like “real” meat to refer to conventional meat, and “fake” meat to refer to cultured meat.
This qualitative review of comments on news articles about cultured meat found many allusions to dystopian science fiction, as well as the use of terms like “Frankenfood”. As the authors note, the term “Frankenfood” has also been used in the past by activists––successfully, in some cases––trying to prevent the adoption of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) for food. Some commenters even expressed a concern with cannibalism and mentioned the film Soylent Green.
Further evidence comes from evidence that both disgust sensitivity (one’s predisposition to feeling disgusted) and food neophobia (one’s fear of or disgust with new foods) are correlated with the perceived unnaturalness of cultured meat, as well as negative attitudes towards cultured meat more generally.
But what do we mean by “natural”?
Notably, the term “natural” is a little vague, and might reflect different kinds of concerns that people have. As this article argues, some people might worry that the new technology will have unintended and harmful consequences for human health––thus, when they say "that it’s “unnatural”, what they really mean is “it’s a new and untested technology”. Others might define “naturalness” as a lack of human intervention, and view disruption to the natural order as somehow unethical.
To be clear, there is a certain sense in which cultured meat is “unnatural”. At minimum, it is very different from how meat tissue has been produced in the past. And it’s also understandable to be concerned about the introduction of any new technology into our lives. (Of course, people typically underestimate how unnatural conventional meat is as well, but I’ll discuss that in more detail later.)
This 2021 study (Wilks et al.) attempted to understand in more detail exactly what people found unnatural about cultured meat. Among other things, the authors of the study asked participants––862 U.S. citizens––to consider the different component processes involved in creating cultured meat. This includes:
Extracting the cells.
Growing the cells.
Allowing the cells to develop into muscle fibres.
Layering the fibres together.
Grinding them into meat.
Participants rated each process on a scale from 1 (very unnatural) to 5 (very natural). Interestingly, the component process they found least natural on average was (5), “grinding these muscles fibres to create ground meat such as chicken nuggets or a hamburger patty”. The most natural was (1), “extracting cells from an animal through a harmless biopsy”. As the authors point out:
the part of the process that was considered least natural - grinding muscle fibers to create ground meat - is the only item that reflects traditional meat production practices.
The authors suggest that this is likely because step (5) is most clearly related to eating.
It is revealing that the part of the process that is considered least natural was not a process conducted in the laboratory, but rather the part of the process in which cultured meat was turned into food. This suggests that it is the thought of eating cultured meat – rather than the process of creating it – that elicits the feeling that it is “unnatural”.
Again, this reinforces the idea that “natural” is somewhat under-specified in meaning, and that perhaps what people are really tapping into when they express naturalness concerns is a kind of predicted disgust response––the worry that they will be consuming something bad for them.
It also suggests that overcoming the naturalness concern might take more than making arguments grounded in empirical data and analytical reasoning; as other psychologists have argued, much of what we take to be moral reasoning is in fact a kind of post-hoc rationalization of more instinctive, gut-level responses to stimuli––like a disgust response.
I’d be curious to know how participants would respond if these component processes were replaced with those required to produce, say, a chicken nugget from conventionally raised meat. Is there something inherently strange or unnatural about that process of grinding meat fibres––regardless of where the meat came from––or is it about connecting the “artificial” process of culturing meat tissue with the meat production pipeline? Alternatively, would people find conventional meat even more unnatural if they knew more about what went into the process of making their chicken nuggets?
That last point––the relative “naturalness” of cultured vs. conventional meat––is where some research published by the animal advocacy group Faunalytics comes in.
Conventional meat is unnatural, too
A recent study by Faunalytics1 investigated whether it was possible to overcome concerns about the naturalness of cultured meat.
They recruited a census-balanced sample of U.S. adults (final N = 1,185). In addition to answering some basic demographic questions (e.g., income, gender, age, etc.), participants were randomly assigned to different experimental conditions. The key manipulation was exactly how cultured meat was described. In particular, each passage attempted to address the naturalness concern in a different way.
The clean meat is natural condition argued that the process of growing meat in the lab is, in fact, quite natural:
Clean meat products are made using a natural process very similar to the way yogurt and beer are fermented. This is a method which has been used in food manufacturing for thousands of years. The development of clean meat resembles how muscles naturally grow within an animal very closely. In fact, this process of cell growth is present in all natural life.
The conventional meat is unnatural condition focused more on the relative “unnaturalness” of conventional (or slaughtered) meat:
Production of conventional meat today is far from natural. Animals are fed antibiotics and hormones so that they grow much faster and larger than they would in nature. Unsanitary farming conditions increase the risk of contamination from feces, as well as viruses and bacteria. The meat also contains additives, artificial coloring, and preservatives, and is often treated with radiation.
The challenging the appeal to nature condition challenged the premise that “natural = good” and “unnatural = bad”:
You might think that clean meat is unnatural, but naturalness does not necessarily mean goodness. Indeed, most modern food (including rice, tomatoes, milk, and – yes – meat) has been manipulated by people to make it suit our needs, and it is tastier and more nutritious as a result. On the other hand, some plants (like many types of poisonous mushroom) are completely natural but can easily kill you.
Finally, the control condition simply described the motivations for eating cultured meat:
There are many reasons to eat clean meat: It requires much less water to produce and will cause far less climate change than conventionally produced meat; it doesn’t require animals to suffer or die; it can feed far more people from the same amount of land; and it has the same or better nutritional content as conventionally-produced meat.
Participants then answered a series of questions assessing their willingness to try cultured meat, how much they’d be willing to pay for cultured meat, as well as their views about whether either cultured or conventional meat is unnatural. There were a few key findings.
First, participants who read a passage about how conventional meat is unnatural were more likely to agree with the statement that conventional meat is, in fact, unnatural (relative to participants assigned to the other conditions). While this is not particularly surprising, it is an important proof-of-concept that the manipulation worked. After all, it could’ve been the case that people’s beliefs about conventional meat were so strong that they were entirely uninfluenced by the passage.
And in fact, that’s what happened with the other two experimental passages. Participants assigned to either the cultured meat is natural or the challenging the appeal to nature conditions did not show significantly greater acceptance of cultured meat than the control condition. In other words, it’s pretty hard to convince someone either that cultured meat is natural, or that naturalness doesn’t matter.
Finally, participants assigned to the conventional meat is unnatural condition did indicate a greater willingness to pay for cultured meat (as opposed to conventional meat). That is, reminding people that conventional meat is unnatural too convinced them that they might be willing to pay a premium for cultured or “clean” meat.
An obvious caveat with that final point is that what someone says they’d do in a survey is sometimes very different from how they’d act in practice. As the authors themselves note, people aren’t always the best predictors of how they’ll behave. They might also be encouraged to respond this way because of social desirability bias. That being said, it’s promising that this experimental manipulation can actually have impact on what people say they’ll pay for.
Where we stand, and looking forward
There are a few key takeaways thus far:
One obstacle to acceptance of cultured meat is the concern that it’s unnatural.
This concern is higher among people with a stronger predisposition towards disgust.
It’s pretty hard to convince people that cultured meat is natural, or that naturalness doesn’t matter.
However, reminding them that conventional meat is also unnatural may increase their support for cultured meat.
One interpretation of these results is that advocates of cultured meat should emphasize the relative unnaturalness of conventional meat. That’s roughly the strategy adopted in articles like this one, with the headline “The meat you eat is already fake”.
I think this interpretation makes sense. At the same time, as the authors point out, this could alienate potential allies who work in conventional meat:
That being said, such an approach would represent a fairly aggressive stance towards conventional meat producers, which may not be an optimal strategy for advancing clean meat. Several conventional meat producers are already backing clean meat technology, so encouraging others to do so as well may be a better strategy than fighting them with legal challenges or marketing.
I suspect that one’s view on this question may come down in part to temperament: are you a coalition-minded pragmatist or someone who doesn’t mind alienating potential allies for the sake of expressing your convictions? Personally I’m more of the former, but people (and situations) differ and I’m quite sympathetic to the latter view.
It may also depend on context and one’s position: perhaps journalists or op-ed writers can safely express the view that “conventional meat is unnatural” given that they’re not attempting to form a partnership with conventional meat companies, but someone working in cultured meat ought to be more circumspect.
It also depends who you’re talking to. A lifelong meat-eater may be susceptible to different arguments than a wavering “flexitarian”.
On the topic of individual differences, past work has found that resistance to cultured meat is correlated with certain psychological (e.g., disgust sensitivity), social (e.g., political affiliation), and demographic factors (e.g., gender). Moving forward, I’m curious how these trait-level differences interact with the different argumentative strategies taken here. For example, perhaps people high in disgust sensitivity are resistant to claims that cultured meat is natural, but are quite influenced by the claim that conventional meat is unnatural; in contrast, perhaps people lower in food neophobia are quicker to agree with the claim that what’s natural is not always what’s good.
It’s also worth noting that everything I’ve discussed so far is in the realm of written text. That is, which description of cultured or conventional meat pushes people’s decisions around? But people are, of course, also influenced by things such as pictures; for example, this recent summary by Faunalytics suggests that consumers’ attitudes about cultured meat can be shaped by how it’s presented in the visual medium. Although many news articles associate cultured meat with images of scientific laboratories, consumers have more positive attitudes when pictures of cultured meat depict it as food (which it obviously is):
The study’s headline finding is that attitudes towards cultured meat are more positive when consumers are presented with food-based images than lab-based ones.
Finally, I think the social component of attitudes about cultured and conventional is very important. Moral reasoning is in part (or perhaps mostly) a product of social reasoning––tapping into the prevailing social norms of our in-group and identifying (and imitating) the behaviors that are more likely to lead to acceptance than exclusion. This is a hard topic to research, but it does also suggest a course of action for individuals: model the kinds of behavior you’d like to see propagated.
The authors were Jo Anderson and Chris Bryant.