What if plant-based and lab-grown meat fail?

The objection

“Lab-grown meat is pre-commercial hype and plant-based brands keep stumbling. It’ll all collapse and we’ll keep farming animals anyway.”

The answer

The objection reads the market fairly well, and some of the hype around new meats earned the scepticism it got. Where it goes wrong is the conclusion, because the case for eating fewer animal products rests on beans, grains, vegetables and nuts that farmers already grow.

Are plant-based and lab-grown meat failing?

Plant-based meat is losing customers in the US and lab-grown meat is barely on sale anywhere, so the objection starts from real numbers. US sales of plant-based meat and seafood fell by 10% in value in 2025, and the share of US households buying any dropped from 20% in 2021 to 11%, according to retail data from the market research firm SPINS commissioned by the Good Food Institute, a non-profit that promotes alternative proteins, and the Plant Based Foods Association, an industry group [1]. In 2026 the institute says lab-grown meat has been approved for sale in only a few places, describes its availability as “still limited in geography and production volume”, and notes that some of the companies cleared to sell it are no longer operating [2].

Does eating less meat depend on new food technology?

It doesn’t, because the biggest environmental gains in the research come from replacing animal products with ordinary plant foods. Pooling data from about 38,700 farms in 119 countries, Poore and Nemecek (2018) found that moving from current diets to diets without animal products would cut food’s land use by 76%, or 3.1 billion hectares, including 19% less arable land, and food’s greenhouse gas emissions by 49% [3]. They assumed the extra plant protein would be grown with the footprints of existing farms, so the calculation needs no bioreactor or any other new technology [3]. Even the lowest-impact animal products typically do more environmental damage than the vegetable proteins that could replace them, which is the core of the environmental case for a vegan diet [3].

Can farming carry on as it is?

Not if the world is to meet its climate targets, according to a 2020 study in Science. Clark and colleagues found that even if fossil fuel emissions stopped immediately, current trends in the global food system would on their own put the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C limit out of reach and, by the end of the century, threaten the 2°C limit [4]. Animal products carry much of that load: meat, farmed fish, eggs and dairy use about 83% of the world’s farmland and produce 56 to 58% of food’s various emissions, while supplying 37% of its protein and 18% of its calories (Poore and Nemecek, 2018) [3]. The 2025 EAT–Lancet Commission, which updated the 2019 report, found food to be the single largest cause of humanity’s breaches of the planetary boundaries, the safe limits for the Earth system [5][6], with food systems behind nearly 30% of greenhouse gas emissions [6]. The diet it recommends is set on the health evidence alone. It allows about 15 g of beef, pork or lamb a day, roughly one portion a week, alongside modest daily amounts of other animal foods (about 250 g of dairy, 30 g each of poultry and fish, and 15 g of eggs), and the commission points to evidence suggesting that adopting it would reduce the environmental impact of most current diets [6].