The impact of framing on acceptance of cultured meat

Cultured meat can be produced from growing animal cells in vitro rather than as part of a living animal. This technology has the potential to address several of the major ethical, environmental, and public health concerns associated with conventional meat production. However, research has highlighted some consumer uncertainty regarding the concept. In a new study published in the journal Frontiers in Nutrition, researchers found that consumers presented with images of cultured meat framed as high-tech innovation felt more negatively about it than consumers who were presented with images and text highlighting the meat’s societal benefits or its equivalent taste and nutrition.

Researchers separated the 480 consumers surveyed into three groups, presenting cultured meat to each group through a slightly different lens. The three different frames were “high-tech,” which showed the meat in a lab spilling out of a petri dish, “societal benefits,” which showed cows in a field with a sentence about helping animals and reducing environmental harms, and “same meat,” which showed a meatball sizzling in a pan with text highlighting equivalent taste and nutrition.

The researchers observed that the group of consumers who experienced the high-tech frame were significantly less likely to want to try cultured meat as compared to the two other groups. Worryingly, this has been a very dominant frame in early media coverage of cultured meat, according to researchers. “Whilst this is arguably inevitable, since its technologically advanced nature is what makes it newsworthy, we argue that this high-tech framing may be causing consumers to develop more negative attitudes toward cultured meat than they otherwise might,” wrote the researchers.

Study