Last month, the cultivated meat industry reached a historical turning point: UPSIDE Foods, the California-based cultivated meat company, became the first in the world to receive a "No Questions" letter from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) signaling that its cultivated chicken is safe to eat.
This monumental approval opens the gates for this new food technology to reach US consumers' dinner tables in the not-far-future, changing the landscape of the meat market.
Advocates of cultivated meat - meat grown from animal cells- recognize its enormous potential and positive impact on the environment, public health, and animals. For example, cultivated meat could help climate change, the most urgent global environmental problem, in a very significant way. The food system is responsible for about a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions, and raising animals for food accounts for most of it.
Cultivated meat companies highlight the benefits of this new food technology, especially in relation to energy and land use, green-house gas emissions, misuse of antibiotics and hormones in meat production, water pollution, and mistreatment of workers and animals, among others.
On the other side, skeptics point to the inaccessible cost of cultivated meat for most people (at least for now), the lack of information about the actual footprint of cultivated meat, and the potential long-term unknown effects on human health that it may have.
So, what do consumers do? How do they sift through the vast amount of information available? And most importantly, how do they make informed decisions?
We at the Educated Choices Program believe that consumers have the right to full transparency, to accessible, up-to-date, unbiased information that follows the science, to make informed decisions, and to be their best advocate.
This is why we created WhatIsCultivatedMeat.com designed to be the most comprehensive central channel for disseminating a clear understanding of the science surrounding cultivated meat and providing a continually updated source of news, technology advancements, new products, distribution timelines, regulatory and legal milestones, and educational/shareable graphics.
We are committed to providing information that gives an honest, unbiased, reliable, and thorough picture of the science behind cultivated meat. Most importantly, its positive or negative effects on Earth and its inhabitants.
Therefore, we invite you to follow us on this site, our social media channels, and our publications. Together, we can make our food system healthier, more sustainable, more compassionate, and more transparent.
In support of informed consumers,
Lorena Mucke (she/her)
CEO and Founder
A preview of ECP's free, educational presentation: Future of Food