Cultivated meat

Cultivated meat is grown from animal cells in bioreactors, without raising and slaughtering animals. For people who want to keep eating meat, it could be one of the most important alternatives of all. The Good Food Institute and New Harvest have good primers.

Where it stands (October 2026)

• Singapore was first, approving GOOD Meat (Eat Just) chicken in 2020, then Vow’s quail in 2024 and Parima’s chicken and duck in 2025 (Parima formed when Gourmey bought Vital Meat that year) (Green Queen).
• Israel approved Aleph Farms’ beef in 2024, and Singapore approved it in 2026 (vegconomist).
• The US approved Upside Foods and GOOD Meat chicken in 2023, then Wildtype’s salmon and Mission Barns’ pork fat in 2025 (Food Processing).
• Australia and New Zealand approved Vow’s quail in 2025 (FSANZ).
• The UK has approved it for pet food (Meatly, 2024), and the Food Standards Agency’s sandbox is working through the first applications for people, from companies including Parima, Mosa Meat and Aleph Farms (FoodNavigator).
• Bans: Italy and several US states, including Florida and Texas, have banned its sale (Perkins Coie).

It’s a hard business: Believer Meats closed in December 2025 despite having US approval (Green Queen).

Open questions

• Cost and scale: the growth medium is expensive, and nobody has yet produced at the scale of meat.
• Footprint: it depends on the medium and the energy. With pharmaceutical-grade medium one study puts it above beef (Feedstuffs, on UC Davis research); with food-grade medium and renewable energy it is projected to be lower.

We aren’t working on cultivated meat ourselves: it needs sterile cell culture, expensive media and large investment, which suit well-funded companies better than a small open source community.