Thanks so much for your note, Pablo. Here are a few quick thoughts in response to your thoughts— 

Is contamination something that could win consumers? (assuming price/taste parity)

I like your motorbike analogy, especially as someone who rides motorcycles when given the opportunity and who rides my bike and electric scooters very frequently, despite a string of injuries.

But here’s where I think the analogy may point in the other direction: If I could get all the joys of those activities without the risk, I would. Similarly, people love meat. If we could give them what they love about meat (i.e., taste, texture, familiarity, affordability) without the contamination risk, why wouldn’t many of them switch?

I don’t think we can really test that until products exist at taste and price parity. But for cultivated meat, at least, I’d be surprised if the answer turned out to be “no.” Plant-based meat may be different, since many consumers still see animal meat as nutritionally superior or more “real,” but even there, current penetration seems far below the plausible ceiling.

Is cruelty something that could motivate consumers? (assuming price/taste parity)

For cultivated meat, I’d extend the motorcycle analogy: Imagine some other harm that comes from riding motorcycles that we know people care about, but they just love riding motorcycles so much, so they don’t think about it. 

Now, they are thinking about it, and they have a friction-free option. Why wouldn't many of them shift, if they do care about the issue that's been solved for? 

For plant-based meat, this might not be enough for a huge shift, but even the worst polling hits 21% for people’s enthusiasm to shift (and I discuss why I think that’s a soft number in the book). Recall that right now, the best plant-based beef products cost 2x conventional beef at retail, and the best plant-based chicken products cost 4x. 

If the products were identical in eating experience to meat-eaters and costs were equivalent,  I’ll bet we could get to 20% penetration for plant-based meat and much higher for cultivated. And perhaps with the socialization would come more and more adoption. 

The Industry Incentive w/r/t both contamination and cruelty:

There’s also the industry-side incentive. The meat industry has every reason to want a less fragile production system: fewer contamination scares, fewer disease risks, fewer supply-chain shocks, fewer reputational headaches. Once cultivated meat reaches taste and price parity, I suspect that is simply how a lot of industrial meat will be made. Incumbents will have overwhelming incentives to shift, and to sell that shift to consumers. This point is probably much stronger for cultivated meat than for plant-based meat, for obvious reasons. 

On economics, food security, and national security: 

I think this is where the case is already landing. It’s why Singapore and Israel were early adopters (funding their startups from the very beginning); why we went from zero governments funding open-access alternative protein science six years ago to more than 30 today; and 8 of the 20 most active recent patent holders are in China.

I’d also point to the CSIS report, the letter from 11 Republicans to the Directors of Homeland Security and National Intelligence, the support from the UK, Indian, Israeli, and South Korean governments, and the fact that my book’s foreword was written by someone from the foreign policy establishment. 

The issue remains totally bipartisan outside the US and fairly bipartisan inside the US because of the economic and food/water security benefits. 

I just read the full piece—fascinating. Here are some thoughts for your consideration: 

The economics of alt meats + the need for government (or similar) investment:

In Meat, I dive into the economics of conventional chicken production as compared to cultivated chicken production and come out optimistic that cultivated meat can (hypothetically—i.e., the science and engineering can work) get to parity, though I also make clear that getting there is going to be incredibly hard and capital intensive, and that it’s going to require a lot of government support. 

(Another alternative would be for Elon Musk or Dario Amodei or Sam Altman or Jeff Bezos to decide, “hey, eliminating industrial animal farming—THAT would be a cool legacy.” I think that with focused effort, one billionaire entrepreneur, or Google DeepMind, Anthropic’s new life sciences endeavor, or similar, could also do it.)

The big obstacle: Scale. The solution: Lots of government support. 

The huge obstacle is going to be raising the money required to scale sufficiently, which will require significant government support (or a deep-pocketed person like Dario/Elon or a company like Google or Anthropic). 

Just six years ago, there was no government support to speak of (I recently listened to a July 2020 podcast, and at that point, the only government support was for start-ups and it was in Singapore and Israel; that was it). Now there’s quite a lot, though still not nearly enough, and not for CapEx, which is where that support is going to be really essential. 

I’m more optimistic than you are w/r/t both 1) whether we can do it with chicken and also 2) timeframes, b/c I am more optimistic than you appear to be w/r/t incentives for governments. 

On 1 (the likelihood of broad adoption of cultivated chicken and pork): In reply to me on another comment, you agree with me that the best we can do with cultivated meat (CM) vs. conventional chicken will be 3x lower cost for CM; I guess you just see that as many decades down the line and an incredibly slow process. I agree with you that on our current trajectory, that’s way, way, way far away. But I think the incentives for governments to get us there are sufficiently robust that it could happen, if we can convince governments (especially China and S. Korea) to lean in (more on this below). 

On 2 (timeframes): I imagine our disagreement here aligns pretty perfectly to our disagreement w/r/t whether chicken displacement will happen. I see the case for governments to make it happen as sufficiently robust that if we can convince them to understand that case, significant displacement could happen pretty quickly. More on this below, too. 

China could do it, and the incentives align:

As with solar and EVs, our best hope may rest with China (and there’s reason to be optimistic there, which I cover in chapter 10). 

The short version is food self-sufficiency, economic competitiveness, and a government that knows how to scale technologies once it decides they matter. China imports more food than any country in the world, and as Chinese consumers have gotten wealthier, demand for meat and animal feed imports has surged (its food self-sufficiency fell from 94% to 66% between 2000 and 2020 as meat demand exploded after it joined the WTO and economic growth went on a tear).

That’s a strategic vulnerability, and President Xi knows it. Alternative proteins offer a way to produce meat with a fraction of the land, water, feed crops, and supply-chain fragility required by conventional meat. They also make animal disease irrelevant to meat production, which is no small thing for a country that has repeatedly been rocked by African swine fever, bird flu, and other livestock diseases. 

That's why cultivated meat made it into China's 2021 five-year agricultural plan and plant-based meat into its first-ever bioeconomy plan, and why eight of the world's twenty most active cultivated meat patent holders from 2020 to 2024 were Chinese, most of them public universities. China did exactly this with solar and EV batteries, where it now controls roughly 80% and 75% of global production respectively. 

It could do the same thing here, and there’s a lot of incentive for it to do so; if China sees alt meats as a way to improve protein security, dominate a strategically important bioeconomy sector, and avoid another solar/EV-style opportunity going to someone else, I think it’s very plausible that they lean in hard. 

Consumer motivation 1: Cleaner meat

Re: your suggestion that “cultivated meat will have a hard time because there is no pressing problem that mainstream people perceive…”:

In addition to what you named (AMR, pandemic risk, climate, cruelty to animals—I am dubious that any of those are going to be nearly sufficient until the products are at taste and price parity; I think you agree with me on that), there are also: 1) food contamination and 2) drug residues in meat. This is especially important for cultivated meat, since it is actual animal meat but produced without intestines, feces, slaughter, or the need to keep animals alive in crowded industrial facilities. That should mean dramatically lower risk of bacterial contamination, far less need for antibiotics and other drugs, and, for seafood, no mercury, dioxins, or microplastics. 

Salmonella and campylobacter come overwhelmingly from poultry, and the USDA's contamination thresholds are shockingly lax; they don't intervene on salmonella until something like 10% of whole chickens or 25% of ground chicken test positive. On top of that, USDA regulations permit more than a hundred different drugs in meat so long as they stay under an "Acceptable Daily Intake," including ractopamine, ivermectin, and various other drugs. And even those lax limits aren't reliably enforced: A 2024 USDA audit found that 20% of meat labeled "raised without antibiotics" was contaminated with antibiotics. 

I don’t think any of this is going to be a primary issue for governments, but for consumers, “same meat, less likely to make you sick” or contain drug residues or mercury seems like it could be a pretty compelling message. Again, this only really kicks in once there’s a price + taste competitive comparator (certainly cultivated meat, maybe plant-based meat). 

Consumer Motivation 2: animal suffering

I also think that the cruelty point is stronger than most people give it credit for: As everyone reading this entry will know, when farm animal protection measures land on state ballots, they pass by wide margins, even in conservative states like Arizona and Florida. And Faunalytics and Oklahoma State polling found broad support for banning slaughterhouses, which is mind blowing (people would obviously not actually vote to ban slaughterhouses, but that does show an underlying discomfort with the fact that meat comes from slaughtered animals).

The catch, though, is that the farm animal cruelty discomfort lives in what Daniel Kahneman called system two thinking (our considered moral reasoning) while food choices live in system one (fast and visceral), where taste and price rule (this is the heart of chapter 5). That's the whole disconnect: People say they care, and mean it, and then order the chicken sandwich. 

My strong suspicion is that if a non-cruel option actually matched meat on taste/price/nutrition, you'd see meaningful adoption from people who'd be relieved to stop participating in something they already dislike but currently can't escape, for all the reasons we know. This is (of course) going to be more true for cultivated meat than for plant-based meat. 

Plant-based meat has failed because almost no one understood the assignment: 

Re: “initial plant-based hopes have yielded rather disappointing results, at least compared to the expectations in 2021”: 

On the disappointing plant-based trajectory since 2021: I talk a lot about this in chapter 7 of the book, which is all about plant-based meat and why progress has been slow on taste improvement and basically non-existent on cost improvement. The 2021 predictions assumed parity would come fast (Impossible and Beyond were such a leap beyond anything that came before that scaling/cost seemed like the easy part). 

Two things went wrong: First, most companies didn't follow Impossible's lead; instead of investing in the science of taste parity, they ran the failed health-food playbook of the past fifty years (lupine and lentils, low fat, clean labels), which guarantees a product that costs more and tastes nothing like meat. They weren't the next Impossible; they were the next Gardenburger. 

Second, scaling turns out to be brutally hard, so prices didn’t fall much if at all. The result is that the best products still cost at least twice as much and only a handful are genuinely good. When 90% of what's on the shelf is not appealing to meat consumers, it's awfully hard to reset the public's verdict that plant-based meat doesn't really taste like the thing they actually want. And that’s the product they want: animal meat, or something indistinguishable from it.

Aside: The book is clear-eyed about this conundrum. To scale, we need sales, and for sales, we need scale. What to do? I lean in on blends (animal meat with soy protein or mycoprotein) as one potential way to solve for this. But that’s a discussion for another time. 

Convincing the public and governments to support alt meats: GDP + food security (nature/climate, AMR, and pandemic risk are secondary, at best):

Re: “it will be an uphill battle, unless we convince the public and governments that supporting alternative proteins is a good idea”: 

For governments, I agree with you that the climate/environment, AMR, and pandemic arguments (chapters 2, 3, and 4, respectively) are all strong, but I think you miss the much stronger arguments that can really move policymakers: GDP and food security, which are my focus in chapters 9 and 10, respectively (chapter 10 walks through the incentives for China, India, the US, Brazil, Europe, and small tech forward countries (Japan, S. Korea, Israel, Singapore). 

The economic case is straightforward: The US built its dominance in pharma, agriculture, and tech through exactly this kind of public investment in early-stage science and scale-up, and alternative proteins are the same play for a meat and seafood market worth around $2 trillion globally. 

This is why I was so pleased that Caitlin Welsh agreed to write my foreword. She is now at CSIS, focused on global food and water security, and previously worked on food security at the State Department and the National Security Council under Presidents Obama and Trump. That’s exactly the frame governments need to be using: Food security is national security. Matt Spence, who endorsed the book and helped push my thinking on this, came to the same issue from his time at the Defense Department and National Security Council (also under Obama). His core point is that the countries that can feed themselves, and help feed others, have strategic power. Alternative proteins can be a major part of that story.

Conclusion: Not easy, but if it does not happen, that will (probably) be b/c we didn’t bring the will.

Thanks again for writing such a thoughtful piece. I think we agree on a core point: None of this is self-executing. The scientific challenges are real, the scaling challenges will almost certainly be even harder, and the current level of funding and institutional support is nowhere close to what success will require.

That’s why I think the next phase has to be about building a much deeper scientific ecosystem: lots more scientists and engineers working on the hardest problems in a serious and sustained way. To do that, we’re going to need a lot more government support. That’s why GFI’s global battle cry and focus, all over the world, is helping governments to understand the self-interest of winning the alt meats science + engineering competition.

We also need far more engagement from environmental scientists, global health experts, food security researchers, development economists, and national security thinkers. Alternative proteins should be treated as a mandate for these folks in the same way that renewable energy is treated as a mandate by climate scientists. That’s the focus of the book’s conclusion, which offers a bunch of thoughts about how people can help bring this home. 

I’m (largely) optimistic, but not because I think any of this will be easy. I’m (largely) optimistic because the prize is enormous, the early science is promising, the world has solved very hard problems before when enough people decided to actually try, and the trajectory of scientists and government support is going in the right direction. 

We could still fail, though, and that’s a key theme of the book; if we do, it’ll (probably) be b/c we didn’t bring the will, not because the science and engineering were impossible. 

Thanks Pablo, this all sounds right to me, including (and especially) your conclusion, that there may be a cost floor for cultivated meat around 1/3 the cost of chicken meat. 

I have heard some scientists argue that media recycling might allow us to bring that number down even more and also that we don't know what we don't know, but yes, your analysis does make sense to me. 

Obviously, getting to that is going to be incredibly hard. In the book, I argue that if we can convince governments to go all-in, price parity (and even better) for cultivated meat will likely: 

1. cost a lot less than what's been required to get us where we are now w/r/t to solar and EVs (both the r&d and the CapEx costs); and
2. have some huge advantages that governments care about, e.g., GDP growth and food security (this is chapters 9 and 10 of the book). 

I have a few other thoughts on your post that I'll try to share later today, re: government incentives to make this happen faster than 10-20 years. 

Thanks for engaging, 

Bruce

I look forward to reading this full piece, but for now, I just wanted to reply to the reference to me and see if I'm missing something w/r/t your discussion of FCR. 

As you rightly note, I often cite the FCR of chicken as 9:1. This is the factory farming FCR; for organic or heritage breed farming, the FCR is far worse, according to WRI. 

It seems like you're challenging this number, so I just wanted to check in. In my new book Meat (MeatBook.org), I address the 3:1 ratio that the poultry industry sometimes cites by referring to WRI's analysis, which argues that these ratios are misleading for two reasons: 

First, they are mass ratios, so you’re comparing animal feed, which is 10–15% water, to chicken meat, which is 65–70% water. If you compare energy (calories), the best a chicken can do is about 9 to 1, according to WRI. 

Second, they often use live weight, which includes blood, bones, feathers, and other inedible bits. 

I'm guessing that if there's a paper that lands on 2:1, it must be doing both--comparing mass instead of energy and comparing live weight instead of edible meat. 

A 2:1 or 3:1 calorie conversion would mean a chicken could turn feed into edible meat while losing surprisingly little energy to metabolism and building the bones, organs, and feathers that don’t become meat. I'm not a biologist, but that feels pretty unlikely to me.

Curious what you think. Thanks. 

What about the argument that cultivated meat would be so much cleaner? None of the bacterial contamination that sickens and kills so many people (e.g., campylobacter, salmonella, E. Coli, listeria), and none of the drug residues (in the U.S., USDA + FDA allow 100 different veterinary drugs in meat at trace amounts)? That feels to me like a strong value proposition, no? Much cleaner, healthier, and safer meat--curious what you think. 

Aside: I talk about this in my new book, Meat, see meatbook.org.

btw, this does not appear to be updated? 

Thank you very much for your kind reply. 

I agree entirely with this: "we should use everything we can to bring about the change we want to see." So yes, I am 100% in favor of activism/moral suasion focused on a moral revolution. 

I'm working very hard to make that easier (by taking the cognitive dissonance of meat consumption off the table).

This review of the book tackles the question we're discussing head on: https://www.facebook.com/tracey.n.glover/posts/pfbid022kRFtjm2CnsLEhz3WZK1vAHUkHPdGXoAfStgha23VgYdpJzQTdQxUabJ92ApspoMl?comment_id=1631160018025772&reply_comment_id=1418693136049003

Thanks for this, but just to be clear: 
- I am a huge fan of animal welfare campaigns, and my wife and I give significantly to groups working on them. 
- I don't recall saying anything that could be interpreted as "we’re fighting an impossible battle.” If I did say something that could be interpreted that way, I apologize. I've never felt that way, so I'm surprised and disappointed that I've said something you interpret that way. 
- I am a huge fan of both activism and moral suasion, both of which have done tremendous good, and I remain deeply involved in both.  
- I don't think activism and moral suasion on their own will lead to a decrease in meat consumption (progress will be outweighed by growth in per capita meat consumption + population growth), and I would be surprised if anyone on this forum disagreed with that (I don't think I've ever heard anyone in EA suggest otherwise).

Thanks for all you're doing to create a compassionate world. 

Thank you so much for the kind review, Chris. I welcome feedback on the book from anyone who reads it! 

Folks might be interested in this 2-page spread in the Guardian, too: 
https://tinyurl.com/bdzn2ywr

this is a very helpful post - thank you! I just wanted to make sure you've seen that that Bezos Earth Fund's $100 million AI grand challenge includes alternative proteins as one of three focus areas. 

See here for details: https://www.bezosearthfund.org/news-and-insights/bezos-earth-fund-announces-100-million-ai-solutions-climate-change-nature-loss