Over the past two decades, researchers have sought to understand consumer attitudes towards cellular agriculture products; the most prominent of which is cultivated meat (also called lab-grown or in vitro meat).

These studies have mainly focused on public acceptance through questions of price, taste, awareness and perceptions of safety. They have generated important insights, but have tended to frame the public as passive recipients of these novel food technologies.

At present, the discourse around cultivated meat is being shaped by scientists, biotechnology companies, investors and policymakers, but decisions about how these products are developed, regulated and introduced into food systems are not only technical matters. They raise broader questions about power, accountability and public trust.

Cultivated meat has emerged at a time of growing concern about the environmental and social consequences of industrial agriculture. Intensive farming practices contribute significantly to greenhouse gas emissions, soil degradation and animal welfare concerns, and food systems are increasingly marked by inequalities in access to healthy diets and by the concentration of corporate power. In response, cellular agriculture has been promoted as a way of producing meat and fish through in vitro processes such as tissue engineering and precision fermentation, reducing reliance on land, oceans and animal slaughter.

What counts as meat?

At the same time, debates about cultivated meat reveal that what counts as “meat” is not simply a scientific question. Around the world, disagreements over the meaning and legitimacy of cultivated meat have shaped whether these products are approved for sale or prohibited. Italy and Hungary have banned its sale, while Singapore, Australia and some states in the US have approved cultivated meat products. These developments highlight the socio-cultural and political significance of meat, and the ways in which language, regulation and market interests shape what is recognised as culturally acceptable food.

Additionally, the various actors leading the cultivated meat discourse are vying to define cultivated meat in ways that may serve their specific interests, govern consumer behaviour and structure markets. Thus:

  • Agricultural discourse: meat = animal flesh from slaughtered livestock.
  • Biomedical/biotech discourse: meat = cellular animal tissue, encompassing non-livestock production methods.
  • Regulatory discourse: meat = that which meets specific legal criteria (species, process, composition).
  • Environmental/sustainability discourse: meat = a category tied to ecological impact and production ethics.
  • Consumer/marketing discourse: meat = a sensory, cultural, and identity-based product.

As part of the EPSRC-funded Cellular Agriculture Manufacturing Hub (CARMA), our report, Cultivating Debate: Citizen Insights on a Future with Cultivated Meat, introduces a deliberative approach to public engagement – the CARMA Citizen Forum. The Forum moves away from framing members of the public as passive recipients of novel food technologies, to people who have agency in shaping the conception, development, and potential deployment of cultivated meat into the UK’s food system and beyond.

The Forum captures the socio-cultural and political importance of ‘meat’ in people’s everyday lives. The most striking finding of Citizen Forum presented in the Cultivating Debate report was not opposition or enthusiasm for cultivated meat, but conditional consent. The eighteen citizens engaged in a year‑long conversation with scientists about cultivated meat did not unanimously say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to its development and introduction into the UK food system. They said it depends on governance, power, who is in control of the technology, who benefits, and who bears the risks.

Food safety is not a neutral question 

Public health dominated citizen concerns, but not in the way regulators might expect. Forum members acknowledge the robustness of the UK’s food safety regulatory framework, particularly the role played by the Food Standards Agency (FSA). Yet they insisted this is not enough. Ongoing monitoring, time‑limited production licences, and scrutiny over what may be perceived as ultra‑processed foods were demanded as conditions for acceptability. One participant had this to say, “…you know, your diet doesn’t change in a week, and we don’t know what impact [cultivated meat] could have over a year, or when people get, you know, older in life, if it impacts their health.”

This is not technophobia. It is a refusal to accept regulatory minimalism, that is, the idea that if a product clears an initial safety bar, it is politically legitimate to roll it out at scale without further safeguards. Relationships between the FSA, and key players in cultivated meat manufacturing were viewed as a potential window where power could be exercised to undermine trust in the food system.

Citizens worried not only about whether cultivated meat is safe today, but about how it may reshape dietary norms, health outcomes, and food-related vulnerabilities decades from now. They asked who gets to decide when evidence is “enough,” and who lives with the consequences. But they also demonstrated support within strict regulatory guidelines, with one saying “…despite some doubts, it can be a useful addition to the food world and can help food security if produced following strict guidelines….”

Trust is about checking power imbalances, not just messaging 

Industry narratives often frame public acceptance as a communications challenge. In other words, there is an assumption that if scientists explain the science, regulators label clearly, and researchers educate consumers, then consumers will accept the product. The Citizen Forum exposed the limits of this logic. That is, a view of members of the public as merely consumers – passive recipients of technology or knowledge, with little or no agency in deciphering the conception, deployment and development of the technology itself.

Distrust, where it exists, is not born of ignorance but of anticipated power concentration and the scars of past food system scandals. Participants consistently raised concerns about corporate control of supply chains, intellectual property monopolies, opaque financing, and the capture of food futures by big corporate actors. They called for a non-commercial governing body to oversee the development of the technology, strict limits on vertical integration, and time‑bounded patents. 

These insights into how knowledge/power shapes perceptions of legitimacy are crucial for trust and transparency in the development and deployment of these novel food technologies. At a time of crises in the trust of ‘experts’, researchers and developers of the technology must recognise that expertise does not always stand apart from power. In many ways, it helps produce and legitimate it. With their conditions, citizens are not rejecting science; they are concerned about a political economy in which scientific authority is mobilised to normalise private control over essential food systems. Transparency, in this framing, is not a label on a packet. It is about how institutions and actors behave in relation to publics. 

The market is not a moral arbiter 

Perhaps the most politically revealing aspect of the report was concerns around market inevitability. While citizens generally agreed that the technology would progress, they were concerned about the underlying asymmetries this may cause within the food system. They worried cultivated meat could become a premium product for the wealthy, or a cheap processed protein for the poor, deepening dietary inequalities that already exist in today’s food system. As one citizen put it: “For me [equality of access] takes, you know, large multinational organisations to have some sort of control and regulation … and not entirely just left to market forces where the developed world has already got 51 out of the 52 cards.”

Citizens also raised concerns about the displacement of farmers, rural livelihoods, and food cultures and the reinforcement of Global North–South asymmetries where benefits accrue to already‑dominant economies. They called for schemes for farmers and sustained analysis of food equality before market entry. This is a direct challenge to the centrality of profit-making within a food system that is dominated by corporate power: the belief that markets should govern how food is produced was significantly challenged during forum discussions. In many ways, the Forum re‑politicised what markets seek to depoliticise. Food is not just a commodity; it is a determinant of life chances, food cultures and rural livelihoods. 

Ethics beyond purity 

Public debate about cultivated meat often swings between utopian promises of “cruelty‑free” meat and absolutist rejection of meat without cows. The Citizen Forum occupies neither extreme. Members expressed discomfort with embryonic cell use, moral unease about genetic engineering, and scepticism toward “animal‑free” narratives. Yet they also supported pragmatic harm reduction, such as using adult cells sourced from already slaughtered livestock. The nuances introduced by ethical reasoning among Forum participants resist moral discourses that obscure complexity by presenting them as universal truths. Rather than demanding ethical purity, citizens asked whether cultivated meat represents a net improvement under contemporary food system activities and conditions.  

Additionally, citizens strongly supported environmental goals, but they resisted simplistic environmental claims in the absence of reliable and comparative data. Greenhouse gas emissions matter, they insisted, but so do water use, toxicity, labour impacts, animal welfare, and other social outcomes. Just as importantly, citizens demanded comparisons with existing agricultural systems to understand the impact of these novel technologies on greenhouse gas emissions and the environment.

By insisting on a comprehensive life cycle assessment of the production of cultivated meat, one which reflects or compares with current meat production systems, they argue that environmental legitimacy cannot be claimed through selective accounting. 

Public trust must be earned and re‑earned 

The most prominent proposition in the report may be its treatment of public trust as conditional and revocable. Citizens propose time‑limited production licences and ongoing review, rejecting the assumption that technological approval is permanent. The Forum demanded that democratic reflexivity be embedded in the development, deployment and regulation of these technologies. 

Here, citizens resisted the idea that once approved, a technology should automatically remain accepted forever. They are asserting a right not only to consent, but for regulators and the sector at large to revisit that consent as evidence and circumstances change in the future.

What this means for policy 

Cultivating Debate does not argue against cultivated meat. It argues against governing it as a benign food technology. The citizens who comprised the first year of the CARMA Citizen Forum were open to innovation, but not to innovation that recentralises power, narrows accountability, and treats social consequences as afterthoughts. 

Cultivated meat will not fail because the public is fearful of science. It will fail if researchers, investors and policymakers insist on governing a profound food system shift with the tools of market clearance, PR and technical approval alone. Trust, as the Forum makes clear, is not solely manufactured through labels or outreach campaigns. It is produced slowly, conditionally through institutions that act transparently, distribute power fairly and remain open to scrutiny. 

The future of food will not just be made on the lab bench. It is in the democratic choices we make about who gets to govern food and nature in the name of progress and who gets to say no, not just once, but time and again. 

  • Dr Atenchong Talleh Nkobou, is a senior lecturer in International Rural Development at the Royal Agricultural University. He is a critical development scholar with interests in questions around equity, fairness, and justice within food production systems. He leads the Public and Policy Engagement Work Package of the CARMA project.
  • Dr James Riley is a Research Fellow at the Royal Agricultural University, specialising in public engagement and the social dimensions of emerging technologies. He helps lead the CARMA Citizen Forum, an initiative to engage the public  upstream of developments and governance in cellular agriculture.
  • Download Cultivating Debate: Citizen Insights on a Future with Cultivated Meat
  • Image: Lab Grown Meatball by Ivy Foods via Upsplash