Since the 1970s, eating meat has become a more and more hotly debated topic.

For some time, Americans have been reducing their meat intake, sometimes entirely cutting meat from their diets. Nutritional reasons often cited for limiting meats are that eating too much meat can increase cholesterol levels and the risk of death from heart disease and cancers. 

Often, people also avoid meat for ethical reasons in an attempt to “prevent animal cruelty” and “save the planet.” The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, for example, lists the fact that “cows have complex feelings” in the top 10 reasons not to eat beef on its website.

A modern alternative to the vegetarian diet is “lab-grown” or “cultivated” meat. Lab-grown meat is “edible animal protein grown from cells.” It is not meat harvested from a cloned animal, but rather protein grown from animal stem cells and fed with nutrients. This provides a substitute for meat rather than its elimination. Scientists are able to adjust cholesterol levels in lab-grown meat, which may reduce the health risks vegetarians fear. Additionally, lab-grown meat does not involve slaughtering animals, easing the minds of those avoiding meat for ethical reasons.

Other advantages of lab-grown meat are that it could be produced on a mass scale without the amount of land and resources needed to raise animals. Supposedly, this could decrease the environmental impact of raising and slaughtering animals as well as the rates of human hunger by making meat more accessible to people in poverty around the world.

Upper-class Americans such as Bill Gates and Richard Branson have promoted this trend by investing in meat production companies. Gates went so far as to state that he thinks wealthy countries should “move to 100% synthetic beef” to decrease carbon emissions. However, the men funding this project seem to have overlooked the downsides of lab-grown meat.

While cholesterol levels may be decreased in the creation of lab-grown meat, a study done by the FAO and WHO indicated that the molecules used for cell cultivation pose harm to the metabolism and have been connected with cancer development, the very effect being avoided.

The claim that lab-grown meat would help save the environment also carries little weight, for the CO2 emissions of the bioreactors needed to produce cultured meat are over twice as high as the emissions of raising livestock.

Although lab-grown meat may be mass-produced on a greater scale than livestock, this does not guarantee a decrease in hunger in impoverished areas. Currently, the average cost of a homemade cheeseburger is around $2.56 in the U.S. The cost of creating a lab-grown hamburger, on the other hand, was $325,000 in 2012, and while it is predicted to cost $11 in 2030, that price is still more than 4 times as much as livestock meat. With such a spike in meat prices, the odds are that impoverished areas will be able to afford less meat, which would increase hunger rates.

While lab-grown meat does not necessitate immediate slaughter of an animal, it requires regular biopsies to be performed on an animal sedated with some sort of anesthesia and contained in a cage. The animal then undergoes a recovery period after the biopsy.

As far as cows having complex feelings, it seems that animal rights activists should consider whether it is more pleasant for a cow to have constant extractions of stem cells throughout its life, only to be slaughtered in the end anyway, or to spend the majority of its life as a healthy animal grazing fields before it is slaughtered. 

The potential benefits of shifting meat production to the laboratory are far too minimal to justify the health risks, price increase, and drawn-out harvest of the animal. Furthermore, there have been several instances in the past where foods pushed as substitutes for animal products turn out to be worse for health than the animal products themselves. For example, margarine and vegetable oils have been encouraged as substitutes for butter and have both been discovered to increase the risk of disease. Lab-grown meat presents the same issue occurring again.

 It seems unreasonable to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in the name of the environment, health, and the poor, when the funds could be used to make the natural growth and development of livestock more efficient and accessible to impoverished areas.