Johnathan Hladik was on his phone, calling one butcher after another, desperate to find a slaughterhouse that had space for a few of the Berkshire hogs that he raises on his family farm in eastern Nebraska. It was spring 2020, the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, and the coronavirus was rolling through the country’s massive slaughterhouses, where employees worked in crowded, indoor spaces at a time when protective gear like face masks was scarce.

Scientists from Osaka University have manufactured the world’s first 3D-printed Wagyu beef by using stem cells isolated from Japanese cattle, according to a press release. The product looks like a realistic steak piece containing muscle, fat, and blood vessels.

Customers are choosing plant-based meat for the environment and for their health. Would a meat tax help scale the industry even further?

Exclusive: Meat companies are routinely underreporting emissions, undermining climate science and casting doubt on plant-based alternatives, an investigation claims.

Eat like ancient Great Plains hunters with this simple recipe.

A sow, two cows and a one-legged chicken are the stars of Victor Kossakovsky’s unique documentary, which Hollywood’s most famous vegan, Joaquin Phoenix, has helped to get the audience it deserves. When Victor Kossakovsky was four, his parents sent him from St Petersburg to stay with his uncle’s family in the countryside. “It was a cold winter,” he says, brrr-ing over Zoom. “Minus 30 degrees.”

New research shows that consumers are more likely to choose a plant-based meat option if they're informed of their social benefits – or the environmental costs of beef consumption.

More than 70 percent of men in Australia say they’d rather cut their life expectancy by up to 10 years than ditch meat. The data, commissioned by No Meat May, also found that 47 percent saw eating meat as a ‘masculine undertaking’.

People’s love of processed meat might come back to bite them in the long run, new research from the UK suggests. The study found a link between greater consumption of processed meat and higher rates of Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia. At the same time, it also found a possible link between eating unprocessed meats and a lower risk of dementia.

This week, Israel-based startup Aleph Farms unveiled the world’s first ribeye steak cultivated in a lab setting. The steak features all of the structures common to the ribeye cut, including muscle, fat, and a vascular-like system, but does not come from the raising and slaughtering a cow.

Israeli company Redefine Meat attracted 600 customers to a small village in Israel with its innovative vegan Alt-Meat, which will soon be available at local butcher shops and restaurants thanks to a partnership with meat distributor Best Meister. 

Currently, farms around the world produce chicken for sale by raising fast-growing chicken breeds in batches of tens of thousands, tightly packed in warehouses that are a public health hazard, a fire hazard, a worker safety hazard, and a hazard to the well-being of the chickens themselves.

A PhD in genetics might seem like an unusual requirement for the role of head chef. It makes more sense when the man running the kitchen is not just in charge of frying your chicken burger – he created the meat himself. “This burger takes something between two to three days to grow,” says Tomer Halevy as he chops red onions, iceberg lettuce and avocado. He proceeds to batter what appears to be a strip of raw chicken before dipping it in breadcrumbs.

The meat and dairy industry continues to fight against plant-based companies using terms such as burgers, milk, or sausage on product labels in both the U.S. and U.K. Now, the U.K. members of the European Union Parliament have rejected an amendment that would ban terms such as “burgers” and “sausages” on products that don't contain meat.

A few years ago, the concept of cell-based meat, sometimes dubbed lab-grown meat, was introduced to the world for the first time, promising environmental and animal welfare benefits that could produce a revolution in food. But as exciting as cell-based meat was and still is, the issue of commercialisation remains a challenge.

A male nurse has traded in a diet of quinoa and vegan sausages for beef fat and uncooked lamb’s brain – claiming raw meat has made him mighty. When a year of being vegan made him “fat and sluggish”, instead of giving him the trim physique he wanted, Jason Carter, 34, slowly reintroduced meat and dairy – then going to the opposite extreme at the start of 2020, by devouring nothing but raw meat.

'The double whammy of low prices and aggressive messaging is having a tremendous influence on consumers in this country'

One study found that sitting in a discussion section on the ethics of meat led students to lower their meat consumption.

When I ate meat, if someone were to have asked me if I loved animals, I would have said an enthusiastic ‘yes!’ After all, I adored playing with dogs and cats I would come across, enjoyed feeding squirrels and birds with my grandmother and liked watching wildlife documentaries with my father.

The remarkable inside story of one journalist’s quest to uncover the true costs of industrial farming to the environment, people & animals