Cultivated an instinctive way that we’ve evolved to experience emotions — is, for a lot of veg-etarians and vegans, really unappealing. And people are also concerned about the environmental impact of it too, whether there are unsustainable aspects of that. And of course, a population of meat eaters is morally concerned about the economic implications of eating cul-tured meat, where it can — if it were to be widely accepted — do economic harm to the traditional meat industry or the employment sector. That, of course, can be complicated by whether these tradi-tional meat companies adopt cultured meat as part of their company structure. social norm aspect. If more and more people start to eat it, other people will start to eat it, too. But beyond that, you’re going to have to have schools, big industries, companies and organi-zations incorporating cultured meat into their food ecosystem. When you have the endorsement of big industries, corporations and social systems that normalize cultured meat as part of a food that people in our society eat — that’s going to be important, having it get taken up by social structures. And then, from that, the more people that can eat it, the more it snowballs. There’s a natural tendency for people to be skeptical of novel food technolo-gy. So, it does take effective marketing and social norm changes for that to succeed. One thing that was interesting: We know for conventional meat, men tend to eat more meat than women, have more pro-meat sentiments and are less inclined to be vegan; for plant-based alternatives, it tends to be women are more open to that than men. There is a shift where for cultured meat, it’s actually men who are more open to trying cultured meat than women. That’s an interesting thing where cultured meat might have a bit of a different consumer image than plant-based alternatives for a variety of reasons. It’s not like the new Impossible Burger 2.0, for example, or it’s not just a next step from that. I think cultured meat, when you’re looking at, psychologically, the consum-er perceptions and interest, it’s quite different from the plant-based alterna-tives. I wouldn’t even put it in the same category. You have your conventional meats, your plant-based alternative and then cultured meat as three totally different categories. Alt-Meat May 2025 Alt-Meat: And finally, where do con-ventional meat eaters stand? ROSENFELD: Why meat eaters, the main consumer base, are skeptical of cultured meat is generally that it just seems unnatural to them. We know that ideas about naturalness are a big factor in our food choices, and people don’t want to eat foods they view as artificial or unnatural. And the reason for that is it conjures up ideas about safety. So, people are concerned that foods they perceive as unnatural are also unsafe. That’s a big barrier. People are also concerned about health effects, and whether cultured meat is less healthy for some reason than conventional meat. They’re also concerned about whether it will taste as good, whether it’ll be affordable. Alt-Meat: When it comes to accep-tance of cultivated meat — and the big asterisk there, of course, is a world where it’s widely available — what would some of those factors might be that would have to change for accep-tance to grow for the product? ROSENFELD: The biggest factor for cultured meat is going to just be the 35
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