Lab-grown meat is not vegan by most definitions of the word. It is real animal tissue, grown from cells that were taken from a living or slaughtered animal. While no animal needs to be killed for every batch, the process still depends on animal cells as its starting material, and in many cases, animal-derived ingredients are used to feed those cells as they grow. The answer gets more nuanced when you look at the details.
How the Cells Are Collected
Cultivated meat starts with animal cells. The most common method is a tissue biopsy, where a small sample of muscle is taken from a living cow, chicken, fish, or other animal. This is similar to a medical biopsy in humans and doesn’t require killing the animal. Cells can also be collected from animals after slaughter or from embryos, which raises its own ethical concerns.
Once harvested, these starter cells are placed in a nutrient-rich liquid and encouraged to multiply. Over time, they grow into muscle and fat tissue that resembles conventional meat at a cellular level. The key point for vegans: no matter how the process is refined, it begins with material taken from an animal’s body. A single biopsy can theoretically supply cells for many production runs, but the biological origin remains animal tissue.
The Fetal Bovine Serum Problem
The nutrient liquid used to grow these cells has been one of the biggest ethical sticking points. Historically, cell culture relies on fetal bovine serum (FBS), a substance collected from the fetuses of pregnant cows found during slaughter. More than two million bovine fetuses are used globally each year to produce roughly 800,000 liters of this serum. It is, by any measure, a product of the slaughter industry.
This creates an obvious contradiction for a product marketed as more humane. Scientific societies called on cell biologists to stop using FBS back in 2013, and renewed that call in 2018. Many cultivated meat companies now claim to use serum-free or serum-reduced growth media, substituting plant-derived protein isolates from sources like rapeseed, chlorella, and spirulina along with synthetic growth factors. Researchers have shown, for example, that a combination of plant proteins and defined nutrients can sustain fish cell growth through more than 30 doublings over 55 days with dramatically reduced serum.
The catch is transparency. Many companies have announced progress toward eliminating FBS, but specific details about their production formulas are rarely disclosed. A consumer buying cultivated meat today has no easy way to verify whether their product was grown entirely without animal-derived ingredients.
Where Major Animal Rights Groups Stand
PETA has publicly endorsed cultivated meat, arguing it could end animal agriculture and spare billions of animals from cruelty. But that support comes with conditions: companies must not test on animals unless explicitly required by law, and PETA has warned that there is no guarantee animal cells have been collected without slaughter. Their position is essentially pragmatic. Cultivated meat is not technically vegan, but if it dramatically reduces animal suffering at scale, that outcome matters more than the label.
This reflects a broader split in the vegan and animal rights community. Ethical vegans who define their practice around reducing harm may see cultivated meat as a massive net positive, even if it isn’t perfectly animal-free. Vegans who draw a hard line at any use of animal-derived materials will likely reject it entirely.
How It Compares to Plant-Based Meat
If you’re choosing between cultivated meat and plant-based alternatives purely on ethical grounds, plant-based products involve no animal cells or animal-derived growth media at any stage. They are straightforwardly vegan.
The environmental picture is more complex than many people expect. Plant-based meat substitutes produce roughly 2 to 22 kilograms of CO2 equivalent per kilogram of protein. Current estimates for cultivated meat land around 56 kilograms of CO2 equivalent per kilogram of protein, largely because of the energy-intensive bioreactors needed to grow cells. That makes cultivated meat’s carbon footprint significantly higher than plant-based options and even higher than poultry and pork in some models, though still about 75% lower than beef. Cultivated meat does use less land than any conventional livestock product.
For someone motivated by both animal welfare and environmental impact, plant-based proteins currently win on both counts. Cultivated meat’s environmental profile could improve as production scales up and shifts to renewable energy, but right now the gap is substantial.
What You Can Actually Buy Today
Cultivated meat is not widely available. In the United States, the FDA completed its first pre-market safety consultation for a cultivated meat product in November 2022, and both the FDA and USDA share oversight of these products. The FDA handles everything through the cell growth phase, and the USDA takes over at harvesting, processing, and labeling. All labeling must be pre-approved by the USDA.
Most manufacturers are still working on scaling production to bring prices down to competitive levels. Commercial imports of cultivated meat into the U.S. are currently not allowed. When these products do reach store shelves more broadly, labeling requirements should distinguish them from both conventional meat and plant-based alternatives, though the specific terminology is still being finalized.
The Short Answer for Vegans
Cultivated meat is real animal meat grown outside an animal’s body. It requires animal cells to start and, in many current production methods, animal-derived serum to grow. It is not vegan in the traditional sense. Whether it aligns with your personal ethics depends on why you went vegan. If your goal is zero animal involvement in your food, cultivated meat doesn’t meet that standard. If your goal is to dramatically reduce animal suffering and slaughter, it represents a significant step in that direction, with important caveats about transparency and production methods that haven’t been fully resolved.