Editorial: The social implications of cellular agriculture and the future of food

In April 2022, members of the editorial team launched this collection at a workshop entitled The Social Implications of Cellular Agriculture and the Future of Food, held on the traditional and unceded lands of the Katzie Nation in western Canada. The event convened researchers, NGOs, Indigenous elders, and cellular agriculture technology developers to examine the potential benefits and risks of this emerging technology to discuss the tension between its transformative potential and its entrenchment within existing harmful paradigms behind dominant approaches to food production. The theme is an underlying thread connecting the eight articles in this collection. et al. (2023) provide a framework for identifying the potential trajectories along the dimensions of centralization, access, and integration. Their framework maps different possible futures for the cellular agriculture industry. For example, they find that stakeholders hold varying perspectives on the extent to which venture capital investment and consolidation is a 'good' thing and/or necessary direction for cellular agriculture. This suggests that future industry pathways will require negotiation, likely fraught with tension across competing worldviews. Hibino et al. (2023) andPowell et al. (2023) explore consumer attitudes toward cellular agriculture products in Japan and Canada, respectively. Hibino et al. ( 2023) identified a mix of enthusiasm and skepticism toward cultured meat, with concerns about "unnaturalness," food safety, and transparency tempering optimism about its ethical and environmental benefits. Powell et al. (2023) analyzed attitudes toward yeast-derived dairy, finding that while some consumers appreciate its potential advantages, concerns about food processing and corporate control remain concerns. These studies suggest that consumer acceptance depends on several factors, including concerns about transparency, regulation, safety, and cultural values about food.Beyond consumer attitudes, the economic implications of cellular agriculture for existing food producers deserve attention. Manning et al. (2023) examined UK farmers' perspectives on cultured meat, identifying widespread concerns about corporate control, land-use displacement, and rural marginalization. Farmers largely perceive cellular agriculture as a corporate-driven approach to food production, and fear that small mid-scale producers will be excluded from its economic benefits. To address these risks, the cellular agriculture industry must be developed in a way that prioritizes equity. Rao et al. ( 2023) argue for a "just transition" approach, emphasizing the need for community engagement, interdisciplinary collaboration, and transparent governance mechanisms. Without such measures, they caution that cellular agriculture risks reinforcing existing patterns of exclusion.Other contributors provide structural critiques of cellular agriculture's position within the broader food system. Jiménez Rodríguez (2023) draw on vegan queer ecofeminist theory to critique the capitalist and patriarchal structures that shape the industry, arguing that these structures limit its transformative potential. They also highlight the industry's reliance on animal-derived inputs, such as fetal bovine serum. Similarly, Hedberg (2023) critiques the narratives used to justify cellular agriculture's development, particularly the "bad animal narrative," which blames livestock for environmental degradation while overlooking systemic failures in industrial agriculture. Through a review of life cycle assessments (LCAs), Hedberg shows how techno-fix approaches often obscure the complexities of sustainable food systems and risk reinforcing existing power asymmetries. Finally, Poirier (2022) offers a historical perspective, arguing that cellular agriculture is less of a departure from industrial animal agriculture than its proponents claim. He highlights the industry's close ties with conventional meat corporations, questioning whether its primary objective is to serve the public good or to extend existing agribusiness models into biotechnology.Taken together, these studies highlight the competing forces that can shape the future of cellular agriculture. While some argue that this technology holds the potential to mitigate ethical and environmental harms associated with industrial animal-based food production, others caution that its trajectory may simply reproduce (and perhaps even exacerbate) many of the current environmental and social justice issues associated with the food system. Although many questions remain unanswered and new ones continue to emerge from the papers in this collection, two key directions for future research stand out.First, as suggested by Rao et al., (2023), future research on cellular agriculture should adopt a "just transition" perspective (Moritz et al., 2024), ensuring that its development does not reproduce existing inequities but instead fosters more inclusive and democratic food systems. This means centering the needs of potentially affected communities, ensuring accountability in research and development, and preventing the continued consolidation of power among dominant actors.Second, in line with arguments made by Jiménez Rodríguez, Hedberg, and Poirier, there is a need to interrogate the deep cultural assumptions and perceived entitlements underpinning the growing interest in cellular agriculture. This raises fundamental questions about the viability of indefinite economic expansion on a finite planet, the long-term sustainability of globalized industrial food production, and the limits of technological solutions to systemic food and ecosystem crises. Rather than looking to how new food technologies will sustain "business as usual, but greener" (Baskin, 2019, cited in Stein, 2024), scholars and policymakers must confront the reality that food production operates within real biophysical and geopolitical constraints. These constraints demand urgent analysis on the gap between hopes for ecological modernization and the actual pathways to bring human societies in line with the boundaries for Earth system's integrity (Rockström et al., 2023).The trajectory of cellular agriculture remains uncertain. Its development raises a fundamental question: Will this technology disrupt the social and ecological harms embedded in industrial food systems, or will it replicate them?

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