Cultivated It's common that people have a multifaceted reason for making or at least maintaining their dietary change. to do this.’ And so, it’s common that people have a multifaceted reason for making or at least maintaining their dietary change. unhealthy elements in it, like antibiot-ics that come from animal agriculture. But [another] interesting motivation is: People who are foodies and base a lot of their identity around food culture, and being progressive, open minded and seeking new experiences; at least for now, cultured meat is this new, cool, trendy thing. So, people who want to be at the forefront of innovation are incen-tivized personally to eat cultured meat, because maybe it’s a status symbol, or a symbol of your psychological openness. less interested than meat eaters are in trying cultured meat. You would think, perhaps, that for vegetarians who are opposed to traditional meat, this cul-tured meat is great. It’s not ‘real meat,’ so vegetarians can enjoy meat now too. And they’re just like, ‘No, I don’t want that.’ And the reason why is many veg-etarians lose their taste for meat and just don’t want the meat taste. But more than just the taste, it’s a psychological component where mo-rality comes into play, where if you’re a vegetarian or vegan for animal ethics reasons, when you look at a slab of meat or any kind of meat, it’s hard to dissociate. It’s hard to dissociate the meat from the fact that it resembles this slaughtered animal part. And so, it immediately conjures up the uneasy feelings about animal suffering that are morally unsettling to them. So, I think cultured meat — and this is not a conscious thought, it’s more of Alt-Meat: Various surveys have been published, over the years, that suggest mixed consumer sentiments about eating cultivated meat. What has your research found? ROSENFELD: People are pretty mixed on their attitudes toward cul-tured meat, and we know that the main reasons why people would want to try it are pretty similar to the reasons they’d have for eating plant-based diets — be-cause they think it’s better for the envi-ronment and reduces animal suffering. Whether it’s healthier, that seems to be a bit of a less prominent motivation because it is still animal-based meat, so it’s pretty comparable in its nutritional composition. But there are some per-ceptions that people are intrigued by where maybe it’s ‘cleaner’ or has fewer Alt-Meat: And what about consum-ers who are not interested? ROSENFELD: The reason why people are not interested in cultured meat [is] really the health argument, which sep-arates it from why people choose plant-based diets. Because cultured meat is an actual, real meat, it’s so different in what kind of consumer base it might attract. I’ve done some research that’s found that vegetarians are actually 34 Alt-Meat May 2025
Alt-Meat May 2025: Page 34
