Article in Nature: Food culture and cell-culture

In a world with mounting pressures on natural resources, rising global protein demands, and an urgent need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the way we produce food is under the microscope—literally. Is it possible to have meat without slaughtering, or milk proteins produced without a single cow in sight? Some rapidly evolving technologies, such as cell-based food production and precision fermentation, hold potential to transform the boundaries of what's possible in agrifood systems. However, as many other new technologies do, cell-based food production has some key areas that can benefit from further (and possibly substantial) improvement, so that they can eventually be able to offer options to help produce sufficient amount of food with necessary nutrients, to be not just safe but more ethical and sustainable.

An article by FAO authors and collaborators has been published in Nature on the need for socio-economical and cross-cultural research on cell-based food production. The article entitled “Food culture and cell-culture: technical, ethical and social frontiers”, co-authored by Sghaier Chriki, William Hallman, Jean-Francois Hocquette, Marie-Pierre Ellies-Oury and Masami Takeuchi of FAO’s Agrifood Systems and Food Safety Division, provides insights on the follow-up on the food safety considerations of this newly established food production system.

The authors highlighted that as FAO/WHO has completed the rigorous identification of food safety hazards of cell-based food, filling the remaining research gaps, particularly in economic and social sciences, is needed to better meet the expectations of cell-based food production.

While UNEP concluded in their study that there is strong potential for reduced environmental impacts, cell-based food production still needs to address several technical challenges, and in particular, scalability is important to be achieved to validate the sustainability claims and enhance their affordability. Meanwhile, understanding the levels of consumer acceptance remain challenging due to minimum consumer exposure to commercially available cell-based food.  In addition to food safety and environmental issues, religious and cultural questions may need to be addressed in some regulatory jurisdictions, reflecting national, regional and social contexts. 

There is a strong need for collecting cross-cultural social science studies from various different parts of the world. It is important that such studies are unbiased and comparable, so that the overall analysis could properly elucidate consumer perspectives and expectations for cell-based food products and their potential roles in the future.

Read the full article at https://doi.org/10.1038/s41538-025-00417-8

Read more about FAO’s work on food safety aspects of cell-based foods

Reference

Chriki, S., Hallman, W., Hocquette, JF., Ellies-Oury, MP. And Takeuchi, M. Food culture and cell-culture: technical, ethical and social frontiers. npj Sci Food 9, 49 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41538-025-00417-8