Is cultivated meat vegan? It depends what you think a cow owes its cells

The chicken nugget GOOD Meat sold in Singapore in December 2020, the first cultivated meat product ever sold anywhere, came from cells taken from a single bird. That bird did not have to die for the nugget, or for the next one, or for the millions after it. A company can, in principle, take one biopsy from one living animal and feed a factory for years. That fact alone convinces some vegans that cultivated meat is the least compromised meat that has ever existed. It convinces others of almost nothing, because the food is still, cell for cell, an animal's body grown outside it, and veganism was never only about the moment of death.

Animal cells grown outside a body do not spontaneously multiply. Since the 1950s, the standard way to keep them dividing has been to bathe them in fetal bovine serum, a liquid drawn from the blood of calf fetuses found inside pregnant cows sent to slaughter. FBS is loaded with the growth factors, hormones and transport proteins a fetus needs to build itself, and it happens to be extraordinarily good at telling other mammalian cells to keep growing too. That made it the default nutrient bath for medical cell culture for seventy years, and when cultivated meat companies started scaling up in the 2010s, they used what was already on the shelf.

For a food industry, FBS was never going to work. A 2023 cost analysis published in Food Research International put serum at up to 60% of the cost of the culture medium itself, and the medium is the single largest cost in the entire production process. At the prices research labs pay for it, a pound of cultivated beef made with FBS would have cost thousands of dollars, and every batch depended on a fetus taken from a slaughtered cow, the exact outcome the food was supposed to avoid.

This is the part that most explainers still get wrong by repeating the framing from 2019. Mosa Meat, the Dutch company that unveiled the world's first cultivated beef burger in 2013 using FBS, published a peer-reviewed paper in Nature Food in January 2022 showing it had replaced serum with an animal-component-free medium that activates the same growth receptors a cell would normally get from serum. Separately, the company has said an earlier animal-free proliferation medium cut that ingredient's cost by roughly 80 fold. GOOD Meat went further and made it regulatory: on January 18, 2023, the Singapore Food Agency approved the company's serum-free production process, the first time any regulator anywhere had signed off on a food-grade animal-free growth medium for cultivated meat at commercial scale.

The generic version of this trick, not specific to any one company, replaces serum with a defined cocktail of recombinant growth factors, the same class of lab-made proteins used in vaccine and biologic drug manufacturing, plus plant or algae-derived protein hydrolysates that supply amino acids without an animal source. The Good Food Institute, the industry's own research nonprofit, states plainly that serum-free and even protein-free culture media have existed for decades in biomedical research and that serum-free production is now the norm for cultivated meat rather than the exception.

Removing the serum removes one objection but not the one underneath it. Every cultivated meat product still starts with cells taken from an animal, and there are three routes. A biopsy from a living animal under local anesthesia, the least contested route, since the animal is not harmed beyond the procedure and can supply cells indefinitely. Tissue from an animal already slaughtered for conventional meat, which some vegans treat as no better than eating the slaughtered animal by another route. And an immortalized cell line, a population of cells that can divide forever without a fresh biopsy, either through genetic modification, commonly by switching on the genes for telomerase and a protein called CDK4, or through spontaneous immortalization with no genetic modification at all, which is the route GOOD Meat's chicken line took. That line traces back to cells banked in 1996, decades before the company existed.

An immortalized line changes the practical math, since one original donation can theoretically supply a whole industry forever without touching another animal, but it does not settle the philosophical question. The Vegan Society's argument is that the cells still originated in an act of taking from an animal for human use, and that a technology built on animal tissue cannot be vegan regardless of how efficiently that tissue is reused afterward.

The Vegan Society, the UK organization that coined the word "vegan" in 1944 and owns the Vegan Trademark used on food packaging worldwide, has stated its position in a research briefing without much hedging: cultured meat is not vegan, and the organization says it may never be able to certify it as such, because the process depends on cells and often growth compounds taken from an animal, which conflicts with its definition of veganism as excluding animal exploitation as far as is possible and practicable. The Society has also flagged a separate concern that is more political than technical, that cultivated meat's biggest financial backers include conventional meat companies such as Cargill and Tyson Foods, whose main business would be untouched by a niche cultivated product while their slaughter operations continue at scale.

No major vegan certification scheme, in the UK, the US or the EU, currently certifies a cultivated meat product as vegan. That is a statement about certification rules, not a scientific verdict, and it can change if a certifier decides a fully synthetic, animal-free medium and a permanently self-renewing cell line satisfy its standard. As of 2026, none has made that call.

The strongest argument for cultivated meat inside vegan ethics is not about purity, it is about arithmetic. Roughly 80 billion land animals are slaughtered for food each year worldwide, according to United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization data. If cultivated meat displaces even a modest share of that at scale, sourced from cell lines that require no further biopsies, the animals spared dwarf the ethical residue of the original donor cells. Chris Bryant, a social scientist who has published research on cultivated meat acceptance and has worked with the Vegan Society on this exact question, has argued publicly that reducing suffering at scale should outweigh a commitment to categorical purity when the two genuinely conflict. This is a harm-reduction position, not a rights position, and it is the same logic that leads some vegans to support welfare reforms on farms they would rather see closed entirely.

The rights-based objection does not turn on how much suffering is averted. It holds that using an animal's body as raw material, even painlessly, even from a single willing-in-name-only donor, treats that animal as a resource rather than a being with its own interests, which is the exact framing veganism exists to reject. On this view, a cell line that never causes another death is still descended from an act of taking, the same way a photograph of a person copied a billion times is still a picture of a person who did not necessarily consent to the first copy. The Vegan Society's briefing leans on this logic directly: near-total absence of the donor animal from marketing and discussion does not mean the animal's claim disappears, it means the industry has stopped talking about it.

Underneath both positions sits a plainer problem for the industry: a large share of its stated audience does not want the product regardless of how it is made. A 2024 survey of 750,000 users of Veggly, a vegan dating app, found 47% of vegan respondents supported cultivated meat's development in principle but said they would not eat it themselves, with 29% opposed to the category outright. People who have spent years building a diet around not eating animal flesh, and who often report losing any craving for the taste and texture of meat within a year or two of quitting it, are not a natural market for a product engineered to taste exactly like the thing they left behind. Cultivated meat's actual target customer was never the vegan aisle. It is the meat eater who will not switch to plant-based but might switch to a product that looks, cooks and tastes the same and did not require killing anything, which is a different argument for a different guide.

The category is far smaller and slower than its 2021 headlines suggested. Five cultivated products have cleared US federal review as of 2025: chicken from UPSIDE Foods and GOOD Meat, salmon from Wildtype, pork fat from Mission Barns, and poultry from Believer Meats, though Believer shut down in December 2025 despite its approval. Singapore, the first country to approve any cultivated product in 2020, has since cleared additional companies including Vow and Parima. Eight US states, led by Florida in 2024 and followed by Alabama, Mississippi, Indiana, Montana, Nebraska, Texas and, in 2026, South Dakota, have passed laws banning or imposing a multi-year moratorium on the manufacture or sale of cultivated meat within their borders, mostly framed around protecting conventional ranching rather than food safety. Indiana's and South Dakota's measures are time-limited moratoria rather than permanent bans. The full approval record, company by company and date by date, lives on the cultivated meat timeline, and the live fights over new approvals and state bans are tracked on cultivated meat approvals and cultivated meat state bans.

Readers often conflate cultivated meat with the plant-based burger next to it in the freezer case, but they are different technologies solving the same problem. Plant-based meat is textured soy, pea or wheat protein extruded and flavored to resemble muscle fiber, a process closer to industrial food science than to biology, with no animal cells at any stage, and it is covered separately on how vegan meat is made. Cultivated meat is animal cells grown in a bioreactor from a starting population taken from an actual animal, which is a different thing entirely.

By the definition the word's own founding organization uses, no, not yet, and the Vegan Society has said it may never qualify regardless of how the technology develops. By a harm-reduction standard that many vegans also hold, quite possibly yes, if it ever displaces slaughter at meaningful scale rather than sitting beside it as a novelty. Both positions are internally consistent, which is why this is one of the few genuinely open questions inside a movement that has settled most others. The general framework for reasoning through cases like this one, animal-derived origin against animal-free outcome, is laid out on where vegans draw the line.