RFK Jr Says Cultivated Meat Will ‘Have to Get Through A Lot of Scepticism’ from FDA

US health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr has aired his “amplified concern” about cultivated meat, promising that these proteins would have to undergo strict FDA oversight.

2025 was a milestone year for cultivated meat in the US, with three new products obtaining regulatory approval. But the road ahead may not be as smooth.

Robert F Kennedy Jr, head of the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), has long been a critic of cultivated meat. And this week, he made his first statement against the innovation as the health secretary.

At a Senate Appropriations subcommittee hearing, South Dakota Senator Mike Rounds asked RFK Jr about his stance on cultivated meat. In response, the former Democrat hinted that regulatory clearance for these products may be even more complicated moving forward.

“We’re going to exercise [the] FDA’s oversight of them. They’re going to have to get through a lot of scepticism to show that they’re safe,” Kennedy said.

RFK Jr’s cultivated meat concerns go back years

At the hearing, Rounds pointed to RFK Jr’s promise to Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) and drive to “eat real food”. “South Dakota farmers and ranchers work tirelessly to produce some of the safest and highest-quality products in the world. I have concerns regarding lab-grown cells or cell-cultivated products trying to enter the US food system posing as meat,” he said.

“One example of these experiments takes pork fat cells grown in a lab and combines them with plant protein. This product is sold to consumers at the grocery store as a meatball,” he said, referring to a hybrid pork meatball commercialised by Californian startup Mission Barns last year.

“Do you share my concerns with these ultra-processed, lab-grown, fake meat products. And with your prioritisation of real food, how is HHS, through the FDA, monitoring and evaluating the health and safety of these particular types of products?” Rounds asked the health secretary.

In response, RFK Jr said: “I share your concern, Senator. I probably have amplified concern.”

For anyone following Kennedy’s position on food tech innovations for the last few years, this wouldn’t come as a surprise.

In October 2021, he shared a story from Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine disinformation organisation he chaired until April 2023, that claimed cultivated meat was a money-making scheme for corporations and billionaires.

In 2022, he reposted stories suggesting that scientists had “serious concerns” about the safety of cultivated meat, questioning its safety and climate benefits (“Lab-grown meat is a pipe dream,” he quoted the piece), and positioning “fake meat” as “just another name for ultra-processed food, full of GE and pesticide-laden ingredients”.

He has particularly been vocal against UPFs, having previously pledged to remove them from school lunches. He recently said the FDA “will act” on a petition calling for the revocation of the GRAS status of certain UPFs.

Cultivated meat approvals coincide with state-level bans

Despite rumours on social media, RFK Jr has never publicly called for a ban on cultivated meat. And an ally close to the health secretary told journalist Michael Grunwald last year that such a move on a federal level is unlikely.

At the same time, they said Kennedy’s appointment as the HHS head was likely to make things much more complicated for startups pursuing FDA approval for cultivated meat.

And his latest comments to the Senate Appropriations subcommittee confirm that this may be the case. Notably, he was responding to a senator who has previously floated legislation to ban the use of cultivated meat in school lunches, despite these products only being confined to high-end restaurants, pop-ups, and limited grocery runs.

Rounds’s state, South Dakota, also became the eighth state to ban the sale of cultivated meat last month, joining the likes of Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Montana, Indiana, Nebraska and Texas.

Five of these bills were passed last year, just as Wildtype, Mission Barns, and the now-defunct Believer Meats received federal approval to sell cultivated meat in the US. Californian firms Upside Foods and Eat Just were the first to earn the green light, back in 2023.

RFK Jr did not elaborate on how the FDA would monitor this space more closely, but it remains to be seen how this fits into his agenda to Make American Biotech Accelerate by “clearing the path to transform great science into real cures, at lower costs, and better health for the American people” and trying to “dismantle the barriers to biotech development and approval”.

His comments came days after researchers at Bezos Earth Fund‘s Center for Sustainable Protein in North Carolina published findings from interviews of stakeholders in the future food sector, who expressed uncertainty around how the policy landscape for these foods may shift under the Trump administration and raised concerns about political division over alternative proteins.

These experts identified tariffs on international trade, additional bans on cultivated proteins, and an increased focus on ultra-processed foods (UPFs) as potential areas of uncertainty for alternative proteins under the new government.