Cultivated Meat and the Livestock Industry

Dr. Nicole Tichenor Blackstone is is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Agriculture, Food, and Environment at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University. Dr. Blackstone’s research focuses on developing and evaluating strategies to improve food system sustainability. Her work fuses industrial ecology, nutrition, and social science methods. Dr. Blackstone currently leads projects on sustainable diets (The LASTING Project) and cellular agriculture. For the latter, she is PI on a project developing sustainable animal-free scaffolds and Co-PI on a large, interdisciplinary project funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, leading the project’s environmental assessment team. She has experience in food policy spanning the local to national levels, through previous positions with the Douglas County Food Policy Council in Kansas and National Family Farm Coalition. 

As the lead PI on this project. Dr. Blackstone will estimate the potential future social impacts of the development of cell-cultivated meat on beef producers and supply chains by 1) developing a prospective social life cycle assessment (prospective S-LCA) methodology for new food and agriculture technologies and 2) applying prospective S-LCA to the case example of cell cultivated beef in the US. 

Dr. Alex Blanchette is an Associate Professor of Anthropology & Environmental Studies at Tufts University, whose ethnographic research examines issues at the intersection of labor, capitalism, and environment in the United States. He is particularly interested in the growth of industrial systems of animal production, their effect on livelihoods and ecologies in rural America, and sensing underacknowledged ties between conditions of labor and animal well-being. His 2020 book, Porkopolis: American Animality, Standardized Life, and the Factory Farm was based on 27 months of research across some of the world’s largest hog production facilities. He is currently researching a series of distinct book-length projects on workers’ and others’ efforts to quit capitalist animal systems, on American universities’ role in disproportionately shaping certain agro-ecologies, and the remains of urban slaughter in Chicago. 

For this project, Dr. Blanchette will conduct interviews with beef meatpacking workers and cow-calf producers in Nebraska and Tennessee to begin understanding workers' and labor unions' perceptions of cultivated meat. Elicited data from these interviews will inform Dr. Blackstone's social life cycle assessment work and Dr. Cash's consumer surveys.

Dr. Sean Cash is an economist with the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University. His research focuses on how food, nutrition, and environmental interventions and policies affect both producers and consumers.  Ongoing and recent projects in this area include the efficacy of food label and price interventions as public health and environmental tools, including linkages to disease incidence; children’s food choices in commercial and school environments; consumer interest in cellular agriculture; food labeling of ethical attributes of food production; online food retailing; and how point-of-sale health messaging impacts consumers’ demand for food.  He also conducts research in the areas of environmental impacts in food production, including projects on climate change and coffee tea production and invasive species management.

For this project, Dr. Cash will conduct a survey with beef consumers that includes an attribute-ranking exercise to assess the concordance between consumers' preferences and producers’ assessment of the new technology.   

Dr. Katherine Fuller is an agricultural economist at Oregon State University whose research focuses on examining individuals' behavior toward novel food products and the labeling of sustainable products. 

For this project, she will conduct surveys to explore beef producers' attitudes toward cell-cultivated meat, their perception of the potential impacts on their livelihoods, and identify the behavioral factors influencing their views on this technology. Dr. Fuller will also investigate consumer perceptions of the potential implications of cell-cultivated meat on beef producers' livelihoods and will conduct structured interviews with representatives from cell-cultivated meat companies

Dr. Karen L. DeLong is an Associate Professor and a 2024-2025 Athletics Professor of Excellence at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UTK), in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics. She has a Ph.D. in Business Administration (Agribusiness) from the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University, a Master of Science in Agriculture, Food and Resource Economics from Michigan State University, and a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics and Economics from Western Michigan University. She has authored 62 peer-reviewed academic journal articles and has received over $4 million in grant funding. Her current research interests include agricultural and food policy, livestock and sugar economics, and experiential economics. 

Dr. DeLong serves as an external consultant for this project, assisting the research team on survey design and livestock economics.