Around 70% of medically relevant antibiotics are fed to farm animals, not to treat sickness but to prevent death in crowded conditions. The UK government calls the resulting antimicrobial resistance a more certain threat to humanity than climate change, risking the end of modern medicine.
Voters overwhelmingly pass animal welfare laws, yet sales of humanely raised products remain low. This highlights a split between deliberative "System 2" ethical thinking when voting and impulsive "System 1" consumer choices driven by price and convenience, a concept from psychologist Daniel Kahneman.
While campaigns to convince people to eat less meat have not changed the upward global consumption trajectory, they inspired the founders of companies like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods. Activism's primary impact was not changing consumer behavior, but creating the talent pool for technological innovation.
The cultivated meat sector, founded by tissue engineers, naturally developed specialized B2B suppliers for key inputs like bioreactors and cell media. In contrast, the plant-based field, emerging from the food industry, lacked this, forcing every company to be inefficiently vertically integrated.
Even the most efficient animal at converting crops to meat, the chicken, has a 9-to-1 calorie-in to calorie-out ratio. This is analogous to taking nine plates of pasta from the fridge, eating one, and throwing the other eight in the trash, contributing significantly to global hunger.
Counter to the popular focus on wild animal markets, a UN-backed report by leading zoonotic disease specialists listed increased meat consumption and industrial animal farming as the top two of seven likely causes for the next global pandemic, as every additional animal is a potential vector.
Contrary to assumptions, the target market for cultivated meat is not people who dislike meat, but those who love it. Enthusiastic carnivores are excited by a cleaner, safer version of the same product, while vegetarians often have the strongest "ick" reaction to the concept of lab-grown meat.
After the success of Impossible and Beyond, a wave of venture-backed startups emerged. However, most lacked chief science officers or R&D budgets, instead marketing themselves as "the next Impossible." This failure to invest in core science led to inferior products and a subsequent market downturn.
One of the clearest trends in economics is that as incomes rise, people eat more meat. This near-perfect correlation suggests that moral persuasion to reduce consumption is unlikely to succeed against rising global prosperity, making technological alternatives like cultivated meat essential.