Lab Grown Exotic Meats Are Here. Is That A Good Thing?

Would you try a tiger steak, or a lion burger? Yilmaz Bora, co-founder of food tech brand Primeval Foods is betting you will, as his startup works to create lab grown exotic meats modeled on the real thing. Exotic meats have been explored before. Hippo steaks apparently were one vote away from being legal in the US (and more than just a joke from The Office). Imagining the branding opportunities around new products like tiger steak or elephant meat is enough to make any marketer salivate.

The team behind Primeval Foods, of course, insists that their “sexy” lab grown meat actually helps animal conservation and saves the planet. Critics, however, are afraid that popularizing these products may end up backfiring and create more demand for the real thing. What happens when lion steak aficionados start to demand real organic lion meat instead? It’s a hard question to answer, but a perfect example of exactly the sort of thing we should challenge more ambitious entrepreneurs to consider. As Jeff Goldblum once said, just because they can create these doesn’t mean they should.