The bid to get more cultured meat onto people’s plates faces a battle for hearts and minds—and now a new study reveals that consumers’ notions of purity may be its biggest stumbling block yet.
In their new study published in the journal Appetite, the researchers note that the whole premise of eating cultured meat “rests…on a moral foundation”: its key selling point is that it’s better for animal welfare and the environment than conventional meat. Whether consumers actually buy into this reasoning is surprisingly unknown—and yet that is increasingly crucial information, with cultured meat companies currently facing tapering funding as investors get cold feet.
So, the researchers on the new study set out to discover what makes consumers want to buy cultured meat, and what makes them shy away. To do this, they surveyed the responses of almost 2,000 German and American participants, and asked them to complete a questionnaire that measured two things: their moral values, and their attitudes to cultured meat.
Their moral values were measured using a metric called the Moral Foundations Theory that considers five dimensions of moral value—including, most importantly for this study, notions of purity/sanctity, and harm/care.
Then attitudes to cultured meat were determined by asking participants to rank their responses on four questions: their willingness to eat cultured meat, the perceived goodness of cultured meat, the perceived unnaturalness of cultured meat, and their absolute opposition to cultured meat.
The survey included a variety of diets, with participants being meat-eaters, vegetarians, pescatarians, and vegans too.
Across the survey data, a pattern of beliefs began to emerge. The researchers found that the participants who said they believed strongly in the importance of purity as a moral guiding star, were simultaneously less willing to eat cultured meat, and ranked low on questions relating to its perceived goodness and naturalness, and also had higher outright opposition to the unconventional protein. This pattern was strongest in participants from the US, compared to Germany.
In some ways these findings are unsurprising, since ideas of purity are entwined with safety and health in food, and so the importance of purity may be amplified in this domain. For people for whom purity is important, the ‘unnaturalness’ of cultured meat might therefore be a red flag.
More surprising to the researchers, was that participants who said that harm/care was an important moral factor in their decision-making did not show more enthusiasm for cultured meat: in fact the two were not significantly correlated in any scenario.
This went against the researchers’ predictions that lab-cultured meat would be an attractive prospect to people who believe it’s morally important to minimize harm.
The reasons for this disconnect are unclear, and likewise the observation on purity and rejection of cultured meat needs more investigation in order to be useful, the researchers say. For example, they wonder, could this be driven by a sense of disgust? Or is something else at play?
For now, the main takeaway for companies who might want to improve the uptake of their products, is to not underestimate “the role of emotion in the rejection of cultured meat,” they write. “These findings demonstrate the need for a more nuanced discussion about, and understanding of, consumer concerns around cultured meat and the values that underpin them.”
Wilks et. al. “Meat and morality: The moral foundation of purity, but not harm, predicts attitudes toward cultured meat.” Appetite. 2024.
Image: © Anthropocene
