Where's The Beef?, by Erin Somers

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September 2026 Issue

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Where’s The Beef?

The lab-grown-meat revolution that wasn’t

by Erin Somers ,

Photo illustrations by Justin Poulsen

[Report]

Where’s The Beef?

The lab-grown-meat revolution that wasn’t

by Erin Somers ,

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On August 5, 2013, a man and a woman ate a burger. Not just any burger: a world-historical burger, made from cattle cells grown in a lab by Mark Post, a professor of vascular physiology at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. The burger had taken two years to produce and cost $330,000, money furnished by the Google co-founder Sergey Brin. Now it was being tasted in public for the first time at Riverside Studios in London, at an event attended by two hundred members of the press and livestreamed to thousands.

To make this particular burger, Post had extracted stem cells from the shoulder muscle of a living cow, then cultivated them in plastic containers filled with a nutrient-rich supplement called fetal bovine serum, which is derived from cow fetuses. The cells eventually became twenty thousand strands of tissue, which in turn became a single, five-ounce patty. Post believed that beef produced this way had the potential to dramatically reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and slow climate change. Raising cattle for consumption requires massive amounts of land and water—and massive amounts of feed grown at a high environmental cost. He projected that global demand for meat would soon outstrip our ability to produce it the old-fashioned way, at which point our food systems would become unsustainable. But that didn’t have to mean a mass recalibration of our consumption habits or a global shift away from red meat. Post and his team had found another way.

Standing at a blond-wood island on an otherwise empty soundstage, Post lifted the kind of stainless-steel cloche usually found on a room-service cart to reveal his creation. The raw patty sat in a petri dish on a bare plate, where it shone wetly under the studio lights. With the ITV London anchor Nina Hossain presiding, a Cornish chef named Richard McGeown pan-fried the burger in sunflower oil and butter for two volunteer tasters: Josh Schonwald, the Chicago-based author of The Taste of Tomorrow: Dispatches from the Future of Food, and Hanni Rützler, an Austrian nutrition scientist. So precious was this meat that they were given just the one burger to share between them. It was served deconstructed, alongside a sesame-seed bun, lettuce, and tomato—showmanship to sell the burger a bit, give it context. The patty itself was reddish brown, flat, and perfectly circular. When Schonwald and Rützler cut it, the burger did not bleed.

The two of them ate with forks and knives, passing the plate, sawing off thoughtful bites. Chewing slowly. Afterward they rendered their verdicts. “I would say it is somewhere on the spectrum between a Boca Burger and McDonald’s,” Schonwald told a reporter from NBC. “The absence of fat makes a big difference. It has the texture, which I was not expecting. It was like an animal-protein cake.” Rützler noted the burger’s blandness to a reporter from Science. “There is room for improvement here,” she said. At the end of the event, roughly $150,000 worth of burger remained uneaten. But none of this stopped Post from predicting that meat cultivated in a lab would become a consumer product within the decade.

The event—the theatrical reveal, the PR spectacle—triggered a kind of gold rush. One hundred and forty companies sprang up in six continents, trying to replicate what Post had done with beef across a range of other species: chicken, pork, fish, even quail. Investment to the tune of $3 billion flooded into the sector. True believers claimed that cellular agriculture would not only fight climate change and global food insecurity but also slow the spread of zoonotic disease and antibiotic resistance. A company called Upside Foods touted its plans to “set the new standard for meat” and to “make meat a force of good in the world.” A company called Vow created an enormous woolly-mammoth meatball, though no one was allowed to eat it, since the DNA came from a fossil and the company didn’t know whether it was actually fit for human consumption. The think tank RethinkX predicted that cultivated meat would decimate the U.S. beef industry by 2030, reducing demand for the conventional variety by a whopping 70 percent. As the organization wrote, “We are already on the cusp of the deepest, fastest, most consequential disruption in food and agricultural production since the first domestication of plants and animals 10,000 years ago.”

And yet, despite the frenzy, the meat itself never arrived. The challenges were numerous. There was the exorbitant up-front cost of building manufacturing facilities and the daunting amounts of energy required to run them. There was the difficulty of producing sufficient quantities of the stuff, at a price point low...