Uncovering the Social Impacts of a Cultivated Meat Boom

A new research project aims to understand how the growth of the cell-cultured meat industry could impact farmers and workers in the conventional beef supply chain

Cultivated meat aims to provide meat products in a more sustainable way, without slaughtering animals. Those working in the cellular agriculture space—growing new meat products, testing flavors, and determining how to scale up their technologies—hold hope that their new food products could penetrate the market and feed a sizeable number of meat eaters. 

But the current livestock industry involves hundreds of thousands of farmers, meatpacking workers, and other employees, each with their own families and communities. How, exactly, might the growth of a new kind of meat production impact these people?

That’s the subject of a new research project, led by Nicole Tichenor Blackstone, assistant professor of agriculture, food, and the environment at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and PolicyAlex Blanchette, associate professor of anthropology in the School of Arts and SciencesSean Cash, associate professor of global nutrition at the Friedman School, and Katherine Fuller, an assistant professor of economics at Oregon State University. The project is funded by a grant from the United States Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture

The project focuses on workers and communities that may be affected by an expansion of cultivated meat production, with particular interest in understanding how a boom in cultivated meat could impact meatpacking workers and cow-calf producers (that is, farmers who raise calves from birth to weaning). 

Blackstone, Blanchette, and Meera Zassenhaus, head of communications at the Tufts University Center for Cellular Agriculture (TUCCA) discussed the new project during a panel at the university’s third annual Cellular Agriculture Innovation Day, hosted by TUCCA on January 9.

Determining Disruptions

In alternative protein spaces, there is often talk about “‘ending industrial animal agriculture,’” Blackstone said during the panel discussion. “I don’t think that language is helpful. Rather, let’s ask the question from an empirical standpoint: What might actually happen during this kind of a transition?”

Talk of cultivated meat putting farmers out of business has popped up in the media and spurred Florida to instate the nation’s first ban on the manufacture and sale of cultivated meat. “But all of that discourse—both the criticisms being levied against cultivated meat and the rebuttals by the industry itself—have been speculative,” said Zassenhaus. “There’s no research or data mapping out the impacts that this technology might have.”

The research team plans to fill that gap, starting with travel to Nebraska and Tennessee, which are home to large beef plants and smaller cow-calf operations. There, the researchers will conduct interviews with meatpacking workers and cow-calf producers, asking questions about current working conditions and perceptions of cultivated meat. Information gathered in the interviews will help to refine questions for larger, national surveys of beef producers’ and consumers’ perceptions of cultivated meat.

The goal is to determine what positive or negative impacts might occur to workers and their communities as cultivated meat enters the market. The research team hopes to learn what the concerns of those working in the livestock industry are. As one example, offered by Blanchette during the panel discussion: “Do meatpacking workers or small beef producers actually see cultivated meat as a threat to their livelihoods?”

Understanding those concerns could eventually help to minimize the impacts of a cultivated meat boom on marginalized farmworkers and smallholder farms, Blackstone and Blanchette said. Zassenhaus called this a “just transition” to cellular agriculture—one that, much like a just transition in the clean energy sector, would take the livelihoods of workers into account.

“We often don’t think of farmers as being marginalized, but livestock production, specifically running cow-calf operations, is a top livelihood strategy for Black producers, for Indigenous producers, and for Hispanic producers in this country—folks who have been in many cases actively discriminated against,” Blackstone said. “If we’re going to talk about a transition, we have to be bringing that up.”

“People who are classed as manual laborers in the animal production industries have viewpoints, they have expertise,” said Blanchette. “We really need to pay attention to the people who are oftentimes most marginalized but also most integral to these operations.”

Blackstone also sees the project as an opportunity to connect those working in conventional agriculture with those working in cellular agriculture. The two don’t often interact and may not be familiar with one another’s work. But both groups have a lot to learn from one another, she said.

The Social Life Cycle

Scientists often study the environmental impacts of new technologies via a Life Cycle Assessment, which attempts to summarize the effects of a product over its entire life, from collecting the raw materials for the product, to its manufacturing, to its eventual end-of-life.

This research team plans to apply the Life Cycle Assessment framework to their study, completing what they call a Social Life Cycle Assessment (S-LCA). The idea of a S-LCA is to evaluate how things like working conditions, the treatment of animals, business viability, or farmer livelihoods vary throughout the supply chain of a product.

While there are international standards that give structure to environmental Life Cycle Assessments, S-LCA is a much newer method than a typical environmental LCA, Blackstone said. That means researchers are still figuring out how to do it, but Blackstone hopes that the S-LCA methodology that she and the team develop will be helpful to other researchers assessing the potential social impacts of other new food technologies.

“Where might there be benefits and where might there be costs, and how do we create potential solutions in advance of that?” Blackstone asked.

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