Lab-grown "meat" doesn't really exist. All scientists have managed to do is grow slurries of animal cells for use as ultra-process food ingredients. The "bloody secret" is those cells need animal blood to grow, specifically "fetal bovine serum," extracted from the beating hearts of live fetuses pulled from their slaughtered mothers. This isn't just unethical and not vegetarian, it's dangerous! Fetal bovine serum can contaminate lab-grown "meat" with mad cow disease! It's also expensive. Fetal bovine serum can cost more than $1,000 per liter, limiting the profitability of lab-grown animal cells to a retail price of $200,000 per pound. The lab-grown meat people claim to be saving the planet, but the stuff uses 4 to 25 times the energy of real meat. And, while growth hormones are banned from hogs and poultry raised on farms, lab-grown cells require genetically engineered growth hormones to grow. Antibiotics are also necessary, but their use leaves behind endotoxin, an unexplored health risk of lab-grown food ingredients that can cause "fever, chills, nausea, hypotension, tissue damage, sepsis, and death."
With all these problems and more, the scariest thing is that no one's regulating this! Just like it did with GMOs, the Food & Drug Administration has let lab-grown animal cells slip into our food through the “generally recognized as safe” loophole that lets companies escape the safety testing required by Congress’s 1958 food additives law.
Health & Human Services Secretary Kennedy has said he wants to end the GRAS loophole—but he hasn’t done anything about it yet.
Meanwhile, his Food & Drug Administration has issued "no questions letters" acknowledging the self-affirmed GRAS status of three new lab-grown "meats": Mission Barns' “pork,” WildType's “salmon,” and Believer Meats' “chicken."
TAKE ACTION: Tell Sec. Kennedy: Lab-Grown Meat Isn't Safe
Lab-grown meat should have been regulated under Congress’s 1958 food additives law. This would have required each new lab-grown meat to go through a rigorous premarket review to be approved or rejected based on scientific evidence, but in 1992, the George H.W. Bush Administration gave genetically modified organisms (GMOs) a blanket “generally recognized as safe” exemption. This clip from Marie-Monique Robin's 2008 documentary The World According to Monsanto explains how Monsanto made that happen.
The GRAS loophole is something Health & Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., has vowed to take on as part of his Make America Health Again initiative. On March 10, 2025, he promised to close this loophole that allows dangerous food additives to enter the marketplace without premarket safety testing.
We thought that might mean GMOs, lab-grown meat, and nanotech would finally be safety tested as food additives, but, so far, Sec. Kennedy hasn't done anything about the GRAS loophole. Instead, his Food & Drug Administration has let three new lab-grown meat companies take advantage of it!
GRAS isn't an approval process. According to the FDA, it's a "pre-market consultation."
GRAS doesn't result in an FDA determination of safety. Instead, the FDA finishes its "consultation" by simply stating that it "has no questions at this time" about a company's conclusion that its new Frankenfood "is as safe as comparable foods produced by other methods."
GRAS leaves the people who eat lab-grown "meat" completely in the dark as to what they're actually consuming--and what the risks are.
People who plan on eating Mission Barns "pork" should read "Mission Barns Cultivated Animal Fat Cells (Pork) Complete Consultation Data Package," while noting that the document on the FDA website is the "public version," so it raises more questions than it answers.
It does clear one thing up: Will this new lab-grown meat look, feel, and taste just like a cut of real meat? No, the technology isn't there yet. All they can do so far is cultivate a slurry of fat cells. With that, they plan on making something that approximates bacon, sausages, and meatballs, using lots of other ingredients and ulta-processed food techniques. So, these new alternatives are going to look, feel, and taste pretty much the same as what's currently on the market--only with this weird new ingredient.
How do they cultivate the fat cells? They're not telling the public that. They just say "the cells are fed a proprietary media inside a proprietary cultivator." They admit that not all of the raw materials used in the proprietary media are GRAS food ingredients or approved food additives, but they claim that they have performed their own safety assessment of these "substances warranting a more detailed safety evaluation":
"Mission Barns established “worst-case” estimated daily intakes (EDIs) based on the highest concentrations of these components in the final cell culture media or harvest solution and it is further assumed conservatively that 100% of the conventional pork fat in the US will be replaced by the cultivated pork fat cells manufactured by Mission Barns. These theoretical EDIs are then compared to appropriate safety threshold levels identified through public literature to demonstrate that the very low theoretical residual levels of these substances in the cultivated pork fat cells do not pose any human safety concerns."
Another thing they're super dodgy about are the "processing reagents" involved. They don't say what they are, but they admit they're not always food-grade. They say they use "food-grade (when available), high-quality chemical or pharmaceutical grades, or the highest-quality material that is commercially available."
Because of the use of the mystery "proprietary media" and "processing reagents," Mission Barns tests its fat slurry for cadmium, lead, arsenic, and mercury, and claims it came in under 10 parts per billion (ppb) for each. That shouldn't impress us too much. The EPA has said that cadmium levels in drinking water should be below 5 ppb (although it only enforces 10 ppb). The EPA doesn't allow lead above 5 ppm in bottled water. For mercury, it's even lower, 2 ppb for drinking water.
For anyone hoping to avoid the animal drugs used on factory farms, know that Mission Barns' "cultivated pork fat ingredient" is doused with "a combination of antimicrobial reagents including antibiotics and antifungals." That's necessary "to prevent microbial contamination" in the lab. According to Mission Barns:
The primary hazards identified with the use of animal-derived materials used in Mission Barns’ cell isolation, cell line establishment, or cell bank establishment activities are the potential risks of propagation and/or transmission of microorganisms such as bacteria, viruses, or, in the case of bovine-derived components, prions, which are the cause of transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSE), such as bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) in cows and Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD) in humans.
They're talking about Mad Cow Disease, but they don't test for it! Instead, they say they source their fetal bovine serum from countries that are "low risk".
Another unexplored health risk of lab-grown animal cells is endotoxin contamination. Mission Barns says it uses antibiotics to get bacteria levels down below 10 colony forming units per milliliter. The problem is that when the bacteria gets destroyed, endoxins are released--and even cooking won't get rid of them. Knowing this is an unintented consequence of laboratory sterilization, the FDA regulates the acceptable level of endotoxin contamination on medical devices, but hadn't yet done the same for pharmaceuticals, vaccines--or food. Researchers working for vaccine manufacturer BioNTech, recently published a paper on contaminants in the mRNA vaccines, including endotoxin, writing, "Endotoxin is extremely potent, where even amounts as low as 0.1–0.5 ng/kg can lead to cytokine release, and dose-dependent side effects such as fever, chills, nausea, hypotension, tissue damage, sepsis, and death might occur."
How can Sec. Kennedy continue to let dangerous lab-grown animal cell ingredients slip through the "generally recognized as safe" loophole? He must require them to go through the rigorous food additive review process.
TAKE ACTION: Tell Sec. Kennedy: Lab-Grown Frankenfoods Aren't Safe