Cultivated meat grows animal muscle cells outside the animal, potentially providing familiar foods without the welfare costs of livestock farming. Understanding its potential and challenges matters for welfare advocates.
Cultivated meat represents a potentially transformative technology for animal welfare. If it achieves commercial scale at competitive prices, it could provide consumers with familiar animal products without the welfare costs of confining, managing, and slaughtering billions of farmed animals. Current production requires fetal bovine serum — extracted from fetuses found in slaughtered pregnant cows — as a cell growth medium, creating a welfare concern that the industry is actively working to eliminate through serum-free growth media development. The broader trajectory of the technology is clearly welfare-positive: each incremental improvement in cost and scale brings closer a future where demand for conventional animal products could be substantially reduced.