History of cultivated meat

Long before cultivated meat became a scientific reality, visionaries, writers, and scientists speculated about the possibility of producing meat without raising and slaughtering animals. These early ideas ranged from science fiction literature to bold predictions from scientists and politicians, reflecting a long-standing fascination with food technology. In 1894, French chemist Pierre Eugène Marcellin Berthelot envisioned a future where meat, milk, and eggs could be synthesized in factories by the year 2000. Just a few years later, in 1897, the science fiction novel Auf Zwei Planeten introduced a similar concept, imagining advanced civilizations with engineered food production. By the early 20th century, political and scientific figures were making even more precise predictions. In 1930, British Secretary of State for India Frederick Smith speculated about the emergence of “self-replicating steaks”, where “a piece of meat of any size and juiciness could be grown from a ‘mother’ steak.” A year later, Winston Churchill, in his article Fifty Years Hence (The Strand Magazine, 1931), proposed that instead of growing an entire chicken just to eat a specific part, we could grow only the desired pieces in a suitable medium. He wrote, “We shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium. Synthetic food will, of course, also be used in the future.” These futuristic visions were popularized in science fiction, where authors imagined bioreactors producing meat in space colonies and advanced societies. Books such as The Space Merchants (1952), The Martian Way (1952), and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) introduced the concept of growing meat in bioreactors, a notion that, at the time, seemed like pure fantasy but is now becoming a reality.

The development of tissue engineering from the 1950s to the 1970s played a significant role in the groundwork for cultivated meat, although the field’s initial focus was on medical applications. During this period, scientists primarily explored ways to grow and manipulate living tissues for regenerative medicine, organ transplantation, and wound healing. They conducted research to understand how cells grow, differentiate, and interact with their environment, with the goal of developing techniques to regrow damaged tissues and organs using scaffolds, growth factors, and controlled environments that mimic the body’s natural conditions. Key breakthroughs in cell cultivation techniques, bioreactors, and synthetic scaffolds enabled the expansion and differentiation of cells outside the human body. Although these innovations were originally intended for medical purposes, they established fundamental principles that would later be applied in the food industry. The ability to cultivate and expand cells in a controlled environment became a key technological foundation for cultivated meat production, as it demonstrated that muscle and fat cells could be grown outside a living organism. While the idea of using tissue engineering for food was still decades away from commercial realization, these early scientific efforts proved that cultivating animal cells was possible. Without the pioneering research in medicine and biotechnology, the concept of cultivated meat would have remained purely theoretical.

The late 20th century saw the first practical steps toward the development of alternative proteins and cultivated meat. These years marked the transition from speculative ideas to real-world innovation and early research. In 1982, the first vegan burger was introduced in the UK by Gregory Simms. While this was not cultivated meat, it represented an important shift toward meat alternatives and demonstrated growing consumer interest in ethical and sustainable food options. By the 1990s, the idea of cultivated meat took a step closer to reality. In 1995, NASA received approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to research the feasibility of producing cultivated meat as a food source for long-duration space missions. This was a pivotal moment, as it marked the first institutional research into cultivated meat as a potential food source, bringing the concept from fiction into the realm of experimental science. NASA successfully cultivated muscle tissue from the common goldfish (Carassius auratus) in Petri dishes, with samples ranging from 3 to 10 cm in length. In 1999, Willem van Eelen became the first person to fill patents that laid the groundwork for what is now known as cultivated meat. Since van Eelen’s pioneering work, many attempts to cultivate meat have followed. Researchers, institutions, and private companies have expanded on his vision, refining cell culture techniques, optimizing growth conditions, and developing scalable production methods. His early efforts are widely recognized as the foundation for the modern cultivated meat industry, which continues to grow and evolve today.

After the first laboratory experiments, research on cultivated meat gradually expanded to universities worldwide. Some of the first academic institutions to explore this field included Maastricht University, Harvard, and Tufts University, where scientists investigated various approaches to tissue engineering and cell growth optimization. The first startups emerged during the early 2010s, bringing new investments and innovations. However, despite the promising technology, development was slowed by financial and technological barriers. The production process was expensive, scalable manufacturing solutions were lacking, and tissue cultivating in lab conditions still faced significant technical challenges. As early as 2001, NASA experimented with cultivated turkey meat as a potential food source for astronauts on long-duration space missions. The work of NASA paved the way for further studies, and in 2002, the NRC/Tauro Applied Bioscience Research Consortium also developed cultivated goldfish meat, marking another milestone in the exploration of commercial cell-based meat production. In 2003, the world witnessed the first public tasting of cultivated meat as part of an art project rather than a scientific or commercial initiative. Artists and researchers Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr presented their project, “Disembodied Cuisine,” at the L’Art Biotech exhibition in France (see Figure 2.). The project aimed to explore the possibility of growing meat without animal sacrifice through cell cultivation. As part of their experiment, they biopsied skeletal muscle cells from a frog and grew them on biopolymer scaffolds. Throughout the exhibition, live frogs remained on display as part of the artistic statement. On the final day of the show, the cultivated frog meat was cooked and eaten during a dinner at a museum in Nantes, while four live frogs were released into a local pond. This artistic experiment was the first time people ate cultivated meat, which started conversations about the ethics and technology behind it.