Tell your state leaders to give clean meat a chance!

Startup Mission Barns is now selling bacon, meatballs, sausage, and pepperoni made from plant-based proteins flavored with cell-cultivated pork fat, based on fat cells from a small tissue sample taken from a still-alive pig and then cultivated in bioreactors! Their cruelty-free clean meats have been fully FDA and USDA approved and are now for sale at a grocery store in Berkeley and the Italian restaurant Fiorella in San Francisco.

Mission Barns pork fat is made by taking a biopsy from a living pig, then growing the fat cells in the growth medium of their custom-designed bioreactor. The possibilities for future expansion of this cellular agriculture technology are extraordinary! Plans are already afoot to expand their lower-emissions pork products into restaurants and retail, and in their fat cell cultivation technology could work for beef and chicken as well. By changing what the cells eat in the bioreactor, Mission Barns can tweak the nutrient profile of the eventual pork fat in potential future products, potentially adding more heart-healthy omega-3 fats or brewing a more intense flavor to provide the delicious taste with less total fat. In addition to making more and more customized products, Mission Barns is also planning to sell their pork fat as an ingredient to other companies, allowing many more culinary innovators to launch cruelty-free recipes.

Cellular agriculture is a burgeoning new American industry just beginning to move towards its full potential. A first-ever cell-cultivated salmon was approved by the FDA in summer 2025, and more and more innovation is happening in the space!

Yet cruelty-free meat is already the target of a relentless attack from the industrialized factory-farmed meat industry (a sector also known for its widespread abuses of workers). Shamefully, seven U.S. state legislatures (Nebraska, Montana, Indiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, and Texas) have already passed senseless laws banning or temporarily banning the sale of cell-cultivated meats!

This is outrageously un-American: these politicians are punishing innovation and denying consumer choice by strangling a promising new technology in its crib to maintain the monopoly of existing industrial slaughterhouses. This could very quickly end up letting China (which recently built a new cell-cultivated meat research hub) take the lead on even more new industries. Not only is this anti-innovation and anti-national security, it also flies in the face of the free-market principles that many of these same politicians claim to uphold!

Americans deserve a chance to try cruelty-free sustainable proteins and decide for themselves what they think about clean meat.

State governors and state legislators must keep an open playing field for new meat innovations, and fight ongoing industry attempts to unfairly hobble the growth of America’s brand-new cell-cultivated clean meat industry and restrict consumer freedom for the narrow benefit of a cruel monopoly.

Tell your state leaders to give clean meat a chance!