What do people think about cultured meat?
A review of some recent consumer surveys.
Full disclosure: I’m vegan; I also subscribe to a “harm reduction” model; and I also would very much like to see widespread reduction of meat consumption.
Many people (including myself) like the taste of meat. Meat also has a lot of cultural significance for people. It’s tied to many culinary traditions, at both the level of individual families or communities (e.g., a family pot-roast) and societies more generally (e.g., a classic staple of a cuisine).
But 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. To me, these are all good reasons to reduce meat consumption1, particularly meat from animals raised in factory farms.
The problem is many people really don’t want to give up the taste and texture of meat. In some cases, plant-based meats (like the Beyond Burger) might be a good alternative; but despite amazing improvements in recent years, these substitutes don’t quite match the real thing2. This is why I’m interested in cultured meat––meat produced by in vitro cell cultures of animal cells.
The goal of this article is to review recent research on this topic: how people feel about it, what they don’t like, and what might convince them to start substituting meat derived from living animals raised on a farm with meat derived from cell cultures3.
The argument from economics
Right now, cultured meat is far too expensive for most people to afford.
But the standard economic argument is that widespread adoption is all about relative prices. Assuming the quality of cultured meat is on par with meat derived from living animals, people will start substituting the former for the latter once it reaches a competitive price.
I think this argument makes a lot of sense. This is why, in my opinion, one of the best ways to support reduction of animal-derived meat is to support policies that invest in R&D for cultured meats, or to support institutes that conduct that research (as well as the regulatory hurdles involved in getting it to market). Building economies of scale that produce cultured meat at a reasonable price is probably the most effective strategy4.
That said, people aren’t purely rational economic machines. Even if cultured meat were much cheaper, many people might feel uncomfortable about the prospect of eating meat “grown in a lab”, perhaps because they don’t understand the process or because it’s new and they’ve never encountered it before. Depending on how strong this initial resistance is, it could delay widespread adoption for quite some time. To my mind, there are a couple main concerns about this delay:
A delay in widespread adoption signals (obviously) lower demand for the product; thus, in the absence of some kind of state investment plan, there’ll presumably be lower investment in large-scale production of cultured meat than we’d otherwise see. If cultured meat products still aren’t competing with their animal-derived counterparts despite being $0.50 cheaper on average, let’s say, then companies have to work even harder to cut costs.
In contrast, a delay of reduced demand for animal-derived meat continues to signal to those producers that they should keep making that product––which in this case involves factory farming that leads to large-scale suffering and greenhouse gas emissions.
I find (2) in particular concerning. Every day of delay is a cost, both for animal suffering and environmental health. Estimates vary, but according to the Humane League, roughly 25 million animals are slaughtered for food every day in the United States alone (and 200 million around the world).
I think that’s a strong case to try to understand the shape of that adoption curve, and the best way to start that process is to understand what people think about cultured meat right now.
What do people think?
This is not (yet) my research area, so I decided to conduct a brief literature review. To start out, I looked for reviews and meta-analyses––summaries of the existing research.
I found this paper from 2018 surveying the relevant research on consumer acceptance of cultured meat. I also found a couple of useful-looking papers on individual-level predictors of cultured meat acceptance (this one and this one). I’ll review each of them briefly below.
Bryant & Barnett (2018): review
This is a review paper, which means the authors did the hard work of finding relevant research in a principled way (e.g., with specific search terms agreed upon ahead of time, criteria for determining which papers to exclude, etc.). They ultimately included 14 papers in their review.
The selected articles were published between 2014-2018, and samples were drawn from a range of different countries, including France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, New Zealand, the UK, Belgium, Portugal, and the USA. The papers also used a pretty diverse set of study designs: some were explicitly experimental, others were based on surveys, and still others involved analyses of online comment sections on news articles.
Consumer Acceptance
It looks like there’s substantial variance across the papers. One paper found that 65.3% of people said they would try cultured meat, while another found that only 5%-11% would try it.
As the authors note, this variance could be due to differences in how cultured meat was described (e.g., “cultured meat” vs. “in vitro meat” vs. “lab grown meat”), as well as differences in the precise question participants were asked (e.g., whether participants chose between conventional vs. alternative meat options, vs. whether they were asked if they would pay more for cultured meat, etc.).
Consumer acceptance also varied as a function of identity and framing. For example, Wilks & Phillips (2017) found differences in consumer acceptance as a function of reported gender (men were more receptive than women) and political affiliation (liberals were more receptive than conservatives). Further, Siegrist et al. (2018) found that people responded more positively (i.e., were more accepting) when cultured meat was described in less technical ways, i.e., the descriptions did not include words like “biotechnology”5.
Objections
The most common objection to cultured meat was that it was “unnatural”. Certainly, this is highlighted by the fact that it’s not a prototypical kind of meat––we call it “cultured meat”, whereas if we call something “meat”, the assumption is (probably) that it was derived from a slaughtered animal. A corollary to this is that people were worried about safety6.
Another two major dimensions of concern were, predictably, price and tastiness. Price is of course a function of the engineering and production capacity of cultured meat manufacturers, so I won’t go into detail about that too. Tastiness is similar, but presumably more influenced by framing––expectation can have big effects on taste, at least in my experience, and so even if someone couldn’t distinguish between cultured and conventional slices of meat, that same person might think the cultured meat tasted worse once they were told about it.
Some key takeaways
Broad demographic variability in acceptance of cultured meat, some of which (e.g., gender) is apparently consistent with trends regarding sentiment about GMOs; see also Wilks & Phillips (2017) below.
Concerns about naturalness and safety will be important to bear in mind if or when cultured meat becomes more available.
Wilks & Phillips (2017)
I described the key results of this one above, so I won’t discuss it in too much detail here.
The main takeaways, to my mind, are as follows:
It’s a survey of 673 USA participants, conducted on MTurk. Cultured meat was described as in vitro meat (IVM).
Most participants (>60%) said they’d be at least probably willing to try cultured meat, though fewer (~30%) said they’d be at least probably willing to eat it on a regular basis.
Men were more receptive than women. On average, their responses were closer to “yes” for statements such as “willing to try IVM” and “willing to eat IVM regularly”.
Liberals were also more receptive than conservatives. They were more likely to be willing to try IVM, and also more likely to say that IVM was ethical and a viable alternative to farmed meat. In contrast, conservatives were more likely to say that IVM was unnatural and disrespectful to nature, and that it would reduce the number of happy animals on earth.
Predictably, eating habits were also predictive: people who reported eating less meat were more likely to perceive IVM as ethical (relative to those who reported eating more meat). In contrast, people who ate more meat were less likely to think that IVM would reduce carbon emissions.
Income was also predictive: people with higher incomes were more likely to see IVM as less ethical and were less likely to try IVM.
Note that I wasn’t sure from having (quickly) read the paper whether these effects were all independent––i.e., whether the researchers adjusted for the effect of political affiliation, say, when analyzing the effect of income. It’s possible it’s mentioned in the paper but I just didn’t see it. Of course, descriptively, it doesn’t really matter: the correlations are there regardless. I’m just wondering with respect to whether there’s evidence of a more robust and possibly causal relationship. (The paper below does explicitly use multiple regression to identify independent correlates of willingness to eat cultured meat.)
Wilks et al. (2019)
This study was interested in going beyond demographic predictors of cultured meat acceptance. More specifically: what kinds of psychological variables (and thus, possible psychological mechanisms) underlie acceptance vs. opposition to cultured meat?
The authors adopted what they call an attitude roots model, which was originally proposed to understand resistance to scientific innovations. In this metaphor, “surface attitudes” are what people express to others explicitly, i.e., publicly professed attitudes, while “attitude roots” are the underlying motivations for these attitudes, i.e., the psychological propensities that make someone want to accept or reject a claim in the first place. The goal, it seems, is a more mechanistic understanding of how exactly these beliefs come to be formed in the first place.
The authors were interested in several kinds of “root attitudes” and their relationship to acceptance of cultured meat:
Conspiratorial ideation: a predisposition towards believing in conspiracy theories. This was measured using a scale developed by past work, which asked participants to rate their endorsement of statements like “The U.S. Government allowed the 9–11 attacks to take place so that it would have an excuse to achieve foreign and domestic goals that had been determined prior to the attacks”.
Fears and phobias: in particular, food neophobia and disgust sensitivity. Food neophobia was also measured using an existing scale, in which participants rated their agreement with statements like “I am constantly sampling new and different foods”. Disgust sensitivity was measured using a combination of 4 questions from past scales, such as “I never let any part of my body touch the toilet seat in restrooms”.
Worldviews: political and social attitudes, such as naturalism, speciesism, and whether someone is politically liberal or conservative. Again, all of these were measured using previously developed scales that asked participants to rate their agreement of various propositions: for example, the speciesism scale included questions like “Morally, animals always count for less than humans”.
Outcome measures included: willingness to eat cultured meat (1 - 5), perceptions of benefits of cultured meat (1 - 5 for various outcomes, such as “healthy”, etc.), and what they call “absolute” opposition to cultured meat (Agree/disagree with “This should be prohibited no matter how great the risks and benefits are from allowing it”).
The authors built a big correlation matrix of all these factors (see Table 3 in the paper), but more importantly (at least to me), they conducted regression analyses investigating each of the dependent variables they were interested in. The idea here was to control for previously-identified demographic factors (like gender) while asking about the role of psychological factors like food neophobia.
Key takeaways:
After excluding participants who failed an attention check, final N was 1193 participants. Demographic representativeness of the USA was pretty good, though highly educated participants were over-represented.
Descriptively, roughly 30% of participants indicated “absolute opposition” to cultured meat––i.e., they agreed that cultured meat should never be produced or eaten. This was a surprisingly high number to me, and I wonder just how much it could be pushed around.
The full regression model investigating willingness to eat cultured meat replicated the independent effect of specific demographic variables like gender (men were more willing than women). Of the psychological variables, food neophobia and political conservatism were the only significant predictors: higher neophobia predicted lower willingness, as did higher political conservatism.
The analysis of perceived benefits of cultured meat yielded similar results. Gender was still predictive, as were political conservatism and food neophobia (all in the expected direction). This time, distrust in science was also a significant predictor: higher distrust in science was correlated with lower perceived benefits.
Finally, absolute opposition was highest among: older participants, female participants, those with high conspiratorial ideation, those with high food neophobia, and those with high disgust sensitivity.
Across all analyses, the biggest psychological predictor was food neophobia (which seems obvious but good to know), followed by political conservatism. The authors note that the latter is surprising, given that cultured meat is not embroiled in “culture wars”; this paper was written in 2019, so maybe that was true then, though I think it has become a much more politically polarized issue by 2022. Interestingly, a naturalness bias was not a significant predictor in any of the analyses, contrary to past work (and assumptions).
What have we learned?
This was my first foray into the literature on consumer attitudes about cultured meat. Diving into a new research topic is always difficult, especially if you don’t have an expert in the field to consult with––you’re effectively at the mercy of whatever search terms you enter into Google Scholar. That being said, I learned a couple things from this (admittedly limited) literature review.
First, there seems to be a pretty robust correlation across studies between gender and acceptance of cultured meat. Frankly, I haven’t seen a particularly convincing explanation of this correlation, but it’s robust enough that it’s preserved even when adjusting for other demographic factors like age and income, as well as attitudes like political beliefs or food neophobia. The fact that this correlation is apparently consistent with research on opposition to GMOs and food additives suggests there’s maybe some common mechanism at play here.
Second, there are also very strong and seemingly robust psychological predictors, such as political leaning7 and food neophobia. I'm an outsider to these fields of research, but my assumption is that both variables––as with many psychological variables––are probably somewhat "innate" and somewhat shaped by experience. To that end, I wonder whether something like food neophobia can be shaped by different kinds of input (to the extent that this is a desirable goal).
Finally, there’s (possibly) a gap in the literature: I haven’t managed to find something that quantifies, precisely, the relationship between some price differential (i.e., the relative cost of “real” meat vs. cultured meat) and willingness to buy. Specifically, what I’d like to see is a graph that looks something like this:
That is, as the relative cost of “real” meat vs. cultured meat gets larger and larger, what is the shape of the curve describing people’s willingness to buy it?
The reason I’m interested in this particular curve is I think it’s a useful baseline to start with––it’s a characterization of some neutral economic function relating price to purchasing behavior. But presumably, different people with different demographic and psychological characteristics will have different curves––perhaps someone with very high food neophobia will always show low willingness to buy cultured meat, regardless of how cheap it is. And further, perhaps different ways of framing cultured meat––different emphases, different metaphors, etc.––might push around that curve as well. However, it’s hard to understand exactly how these individual-level characteristics or framings affect global willingness to buy in the absence of something like the curve I’ve illustrated above.
Egg-laying hens also have very low quality of life, and there’s an argument that dairy cows do too. I’m focusing on meat here because it’s a big part of people’s diets and because I think it’s important to narrow the scope of an article like this.
Though I’d argue they do make an excellent, pretty-much-indistinguishable replacement for lower-quality burgers, which incidentally, are eaten at higher volume anyway.
There’s a whole fascinating question about what “meat” means, semantically and legally. Currently, the implication of saying “plant-based meat” is, of course, that it isn’t really meat, or at least prototypical meat; this is in principle possible to defend by saying that “meat”, prototypically, refers to a food product derived from animal tissue. But that dividing line becomes much fuzzier when we start discussing cultured meats––where the conceptual distinction is really about the developmental trajectory of that tissue and whether an animal had to be slaughtered to obtain it. A topic for another post, perhaps.
Of course, there are some people who argue that cultured meat will never reach a competitive price point with animal-derived meat; I’ll leave that topic for another discussion.
I’m a little curious about the specific mechanisms behind this effect. The authors suggest it’s about perceived naturalness, which I think makes intuitive sense. But I wonder how much of this is driven by specific lexical items (e.g., “biotechnology”) vs. whether the details of the manufacturing process are described at all. (Based on the differences between the two primary descriptions, it seems like it could be the former?) In this respect, I’m also curious about whether you’d observe similar effects of something like “level of detail” for conventional meat. The description the authors used is quite short, but just intuitively, I think that very in-depth descriptions of how animals are raised on factory farms tend to be quite harrowing.
Interestingly, the extent to which this showed up as a major concern was somewhat mediated by the medium itself: in surveys, people tended to rate cultured meat as relatively safe; whereas in online discussion forums and focus groups, the issue was more salient. I’m not exactly sure how to interpret this, and which to give more weight to––if either.
Notably, these studies were conducted between 2017-2019––before, as the authors say, cultured meat was perhaps as prevalent in “culture war” fights. I wonder whether this effect has gotten bigger in the meantime.
Thanks, Sean! Really interesting post. Have you thought much about what kind of interventions might influence people’s attitudes and what kind of experiments you might be able to run to test them?