26 March 2024. Cultivated meat | ‘Populism’
The end of the promise of cultivated meat // Calling the far right and the hard right by its name [#555]
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1: The end of the promise of cultivated meat
I’ve been following the ‘cultivated meat’ sector for a while now, and it’s pretty clear that it is in deep trouble. The best week-to-week source on this information is AgFunder, which puts out a weekly newsletter and an annual report; but the New York Times also ran a long piece by Joe Fassler, outside of its paywall that explained what the issue is. In short—the sums don’t add up.
There’s probably a second problem here as well: even if the sums did add up, the sector is trying to solve the wrong problem. (TL:DR: this is where Joe Fassler ends up: the whole sector is part of a set of techno-boondoggles—silver bullets, if I’m being politer here—that are designed to pretend that we can address climate change and biodiversity crises through tech without changing anything else.)
But let’s go back to AgFunder first.
In a piece in AgFunder News last November Elaine Watson—who overs the sector closely—nailed both the promise of cultivated meat, and the problem. Here’s the promise:
On paper, cultivated meat might seem like a no-brainer. Unlike plant-based options, which still don’t quite hit the spot for many consumers , it promises the allure of ‘real’ meat without the ethical and environmental baggage that comes with plundering our oceans and raising billions of sentient land animals for food.
But here’s the problem:
In practice, however, there’s no playbook for biomanufacturing meat at scale. The funding environment has changed dramatically... Articles about innovations in the space now compete with headlines about cancerous cells , greenwashing , vaporware , and business failures , against a backdrop of grim quarterly results from plant-based meat brand Beyond Meat .
(Upside Foods manufacturing facility, 2021. Photo: Steve Jurvetson, CC BY 2.0)
We’re talking here about companies like Eat Just and Upside Foods, which are the most prominent in a longer list. Watson interviewed a lot of the cultivated meat entrepreneurs for her article, and every one points to reasons (usually slightly different reasons) why they will be able to drive down costs through innovation.
She also talks to industry critic Dr Dave Humbird, who says , pretty much, that they’re all whistling in the dark to keep themselves cheerful: you’ll need huge scale to gets costs low enough. The industry has a classic ‘chicken-and-egg’ problem: you need scale to drive down costs, but you can’t scale without bringing costs down enormously:
“The price of individual amino acids and growth factors is going to be a strict function of the market volume,” he tells AgFunderNews. “None of this stuff makes any commercial sense until everyone’s eating it. The emperor has no clothes.”
(For the sake of fairness, Watson’s article also has commentary from industry players that explain possible reasons why Humbird might be wrong. Then again, as the distinguished documentary producer Jerry Kuehl once said to me, “You always need to ask yourself: why is this person telling me this?”).
The outcome of all of this is collapsing investment: venture capitalists are often dedicated followers of industry fashions, but they’re not completely stupid.
In general, according to AgFunder news 2024 report, investment in the whole sector declined sharply in 2023, outside of specific areas. In fact, there’s been a 50% decline year on year in sector funding, with both fewer deals and smaller deals:
There’s no way to sugarcoat this: investment in agrifoodtech startups is at its lowest point in six years. Not only is it lower than those pre/earlyCovid, crazy-VC-inflated-valuations years between 2018 and 2021 but it also declined as an overall portion of the global venture capital landscape. In 2023, agrifoodtech represented just 5.5% of all venture capital sector dollars, down from 6.7% in 2022 and 7.6% in 2021.
In truth, it’s not the best report I’ve ever read—lots of data, largely without context, little analysis—but this five year chart of investment funding is definitely telling us something:
(Source: Global Agrifoodtech Investment Report 2024. Agfunder.com).
The only area that’s heading upwards, from a low base, is farm robotics: the only area that’s heading downwards faster than ‘innovative food’ (the light green line) is ‘cloud retail infrastructure’ (the purple line)—which is basically online food distribution plays of different kinds.
Joe Fassi’s NYT piece is long and well-written, and it sheds some light on what’s happening here. It doesn’t spare some of the largest players, one of which is described elsewhere as a “house of cards built on one individual’s ability to separate people from their money”.
Fassi seems to have seen some of those VC pitches when he describes the promise of ‘cultivated meat’:
Meat without killing is the central promise of what’s come to be known as cultivated meat. This isn’t a new plant-based alternative. It is, at least in theory, a few animal cells, nurtured with the right nutrients and hormones, finished with sophisticated processing techniques... It’s a vision of hedonism — but altruism, too. A way to save water, free up vast tracts of land, drastically cut planet-warming emissions, protect vulnerable species.
And over six years, from 2016 to 2022, investors put US$3 billion into companies making some version of this promise. One investor in one of these companies acknowledged to Fassi that
“There were no real numbers to pull from that allowed anyone to say, ‘Wait a second, this is either going to not work — or, if it does work, take a really long time.’ Without that data,” he said, someone could give you a tiny sample of something, “And you’re like, ‘Holy crap, this is the future.’”
Not any more: Josh Tetrick, the CEO of Eat Just, one of the most persuasive of the cultivated meat entrepreneurs, told Fassi when he was interviewed for the article:
The truth, Mr. Tetrick said, is that the economics of cultivated meat won’t work for anyone until factories can be built for a fraction of their current cost, and he doesn’t know how to solve that... the man who once spoke so optimistically about the revolution told me, “I don’t know if we, the industry, will be able to figure it out in a way that we need to in our lifetime.”
Fassi spoke to a industry biotechnology specialist, Joel Stone, asking him about the likelihood that cultivated meats would scale to at least early adopter levels in the foreseeable future, and got a similar answer:
I asked him how likely it was that within my lifetime even 10 percent of U.S. meat supply will be cultivated. “If I was going to put odds on it, the odds would be zero,” he said, flatly.
Fassi got the chance to try Eat Just’s product during the visit he made to do the interview. His verdict on the slides of cultivated chicken he was served: flavourful, but still tasted more like tofu than chicken:
“This cost $10,000,” one of the chefs joked.
Actually, they may not have been joking.
There’s several issues here.
The first is just about how broken the venture capital sector was in the later 2010s, when it was sitting on a huge glut of money chasing returns in a low interest world. As the FT’s John Plender said a decade ago, “We know what happens when too much capital is chasing returns. People grow uncritical, and bubbles form quickly.” I’m sitting here thinking about all of the better ways in which $3 billion of capital could have been allocated than VCs gambling on a largely imaginary technology.
The second is that if we want to solve the actual problem here—that meat production has an over-sized impact on climate change and biodiversity—then there are quicker ways than waiting decades to prove a technology that might never work. As any vegetarian, vegan, or even flexitarian can tell you.
And, third, people who like eating meat eat it because they like eating meat, and not just for reasons of culinary preference. Shifting this group away from that choice is probably a process of generational change, and maybe also involves some choice editing.
But the fourth thing here is that cultivated meat is another of those silver bullet technologies that pretends that we can carry on living just the way we have, at least in the richer world, while getting to grips with our planetary boundaries. It looks backwards, not forwards. Fassi concludes:
(C)limate change is an invitation — to reinvent our economies, to rethink consumption, to redraw our relationships to nature and to one another. Cultivated meat was an excuse to shirk that hard, necessary work. The idea sounded futuristic, but its appeal was all about nostalgia, a way to pretend that things will go on as they always have, that nothing really needs to change.
2: Calling the far right and the hard right by its name
The Conversation has a recent article by two University of Bath academics that suggests that we should stop using the phrase ‘populism’ when we mean what they call ‘far right politics’, but I think their description includes ‘hard right’ parties such as Reform UK. There are is a good academic reason for this, but there are also political reasons.
(Source: Aurelion Mondon and Alex Yates. CC BY)
The good academic reasons first: research has concluded that the notion of ‘populism’ has little explanatory power here. There are apparently two competing schools, and they
broadly disagree on whether populism is a thin ideology which involves a moralistic element (by pitting a “pure” people against “corrupt” elite) or whether it is simply a discourse that constructs a people as being against an elite, without any further specificity attached to those two groups. Crucially, though, both agree that the populist element of any given movement comes second to politics and ideology.
But the political reasons are just as important. The researchers, Aurelion Mondon and Alex Yates, say that there are four of these. (These are their headings).
It masks the threat posed by the far right
Many far-right politicians, from France’s Jean-Marie Le Pen, to Italy’s Matteo Salvini , have embraced the term “populism”. Even when it is used by their opponents as an insult, far-right politicians prefer the term to more accurate, but also more stigmatising terms, such as “extremist” or “racist”... These terms are not only more precise, but make the threat they pose far clearer than the murky “populism”.
As they say later in the piece, the fact that these politicians embrace the ‘populist’ label with such enthusiasm means that they realise the value it has to them politically. Those of us who are opposed to their politics shouldn’t be helping them.
2. It exaggerates the strength of the far right
By using the word ‘populist’ we are—at least in English—making a link between ‘populist’ and ‘the people’, which is exactly the connection that members of hard-right and far-right parties want you to make. But using the label misrepresents the political base of these parties:
The myth is further entrenched by the perception that the rise of “populism” is the result of choices made by people at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder – whether they are defined as the “ white working class ”, the “ left behind ” or the “losers of globalisation”. This ignores analysis which shows that much of the support for reactionary politics comes predominantly from affluent groups .
3. It legitimises far-right politics
The blurring of ‘populist’ and ‘people’ also creates a political blur, in which the demands of hard-right and far-right parties are given a kind of democratic authenticity.
It is therefore now common to see mainstream parties absorbing the politics of the far right on the flawed assumption that these ideas are “what the people want”.
Mondon and Yates don’t spell this out, but they imply—as Open Democracy has identified—that in practice quite a lot of the finance here comes from agenda-driven dark money.
(Far right politicians hanging out together. Isac Nóbrega/PR, via Wikipedia. CC BY 2.0)
4. It blocks democratic progress by distracting us
This elision of ‘populist’ and ‘people’ has another consequence, in that the word ‘populist’ is used, at the same time, to convey an antipathy towards the ‘people’.
Populist hype is generally accompanied by a rise of anti-populist discourse, which portrays “populism” as an existential threat to liberal democracy... By blaming “the people” for the problems in our democracies, elites are absolved from having to interrogate their own role in facilitating the crisis.
All of this, they say, means that we end up with a political discourse which isn’t honest about the conditions that have led to the rise of far-right and hard right parties.
If the mainstream does not take responsibility, it has no chance of defeating the monster that it has helped to create.
But obviously, defeating hard right politics is going to take more than linguistics. It might require some actual politics. In a short piece at Project Syndicate (republished free here), the economist Diane Coyle suggests briefly what this might look like.
She notes that some of the politics here are driven by an urban-rural split, and quotes the economist Andrés Rodríguez-Pose as saying that anti-globalisation can be thought of as the revenge of “the places that don’t matter”.
Structural shifts in national and international economies have made urban areas richer (I wrote about this at length here) and, conversely, non-urban areas poorer.
People living in “places that don’t matter” have seen quality jobs disappear, public services eroded, and their economic prospects rapidly diminish. Seen in this light, today’s populist backlash is hardly surprising, especially when many politicians are part of the thriving urban elite.
Coyle has argued elsewhere that one route to deal with this is to improve the access of everyone to public services, through something she and colleagues call “Universal basic infrastructure”. But this is not a form of “retail politics”. It is intended to do two things.
First, it is to create a new sense of universalism:
(T)his must be part of a broader national effort that unites citizens from all segments of society around the common cause of enhancing collective well-being.
Second, it is to create a sense of optimism about the future. One of the problems of the long neoliberal phase has been that publicly-owned infrastructure has been sold off or run down, and privately-owned infrastructure has been treated as a cash cow, with increasing charges and declining maintenance and service:
This has contributed to a widespread sense that broad social and economic progress stopped in the late twentieth century. Given the corrosive effect of this narrative, it is crucial to reinvest in the future.
One of the things this reminded me of is that both 2016 Trump voters and 2017 Brexit voters were more likely to believe that their children were likely to be worse off than they were. We can argue about what “worse off” means here, but in general they had internalised a story about decline. Finding a way to invest in infrastructure is likely to produce both political and economic returns:
Still, there is an economic case to be made for investing in public services and the infrastructure that sustains them. By recognizing that a shared sense of optimism and a basic faith in the possibility of social mobility fuel economic growth, we can repair the economic damage of the past two decades. A country that overlooks “places that don’t matter” risks becoming irrelevant itself.
OTHER WRITING: Film
I wrote a short piece looking at Alan Parker’s 1980 film Fame on my Around The Edges blog. Here’s an extract:
The film has a big ensemble cast, and the lives of the characters outside of the school are a kind of write-it-by-numbers—this truly must have been the dullest set of story development cards ever assembled on a screenwriter’s wall.
I also discussed the film’s social and cultural context, in 1980 New York City. But you can also skip all of that, and just enjoy the big set-piece numbers, which are the best bits of the film.
j2t#555
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