In the fall of 2024, a group of 11 Republican members of Congress led by Reps. Andrew Garbarino and Dan Newhouse wrote to the director of homeland security at the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the director of national intelligence to warn that China’s aggressive investment in alternative meats “could fundamentally alter food supply dynamics worldwide.”

That threat, they noted, “has only been compounded by recent Chinese activity in the innovative protein market, most notably by the inclusion of cultivated [lab-grown] meat research and development in China’s five-year agricultural plan.” The letter concluded: “We seek your recommendations on strategic measures the United States should consider to ensure continued leadership and resilience in this critical sector.”

A geopolitical case for meat made without livestock may sound improbable. It isn’t.

To be clear, these members of Congress were not concerned with the diets of individual consumers. They were concerned about what happens if China takes control of the global meat supply—and the strategic advantages that can accrue from the United States dominating global agricultural innovation.

They were right to be worried: Chinese leader Xi Jinping has positioned food technology generally and alternative meats specifically as linchpins of China’s food self-sufficiency goals. Imagine what happens if China begins exporting alternative protein technology to food-insecure nations the way it exports infrastructure: with strings attached.

These lawmakers understand something the foreign-policy establishment has not yet grasped: The race to lead in alternative meat is also a race to control the supply chains and strategic industries that will shape the global food system of the 21st century.

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Make no mistake: Growing crops to feed them to animals so that humans can eat meat is extremely inefficient. According to an analysis by the World Resources Institute, between eight and 11 calories of feed crops are required to produce just one calorie of chicken, pork, or farmed fish. And the chain of inefficiency doesn’t stop with feed. Once the crops are grown, they must be shipped to mills, processed into animal feed, and transported to industrial farms. Then the animals must be raised, shipped to slaughterhouses, and processed, and the meat refrigerated and shipped once more to warehouses and stores.

These inefficiencies aren’t just environmental problems; they also point to significant economic opportunity. The corporations and governments that figure out how to make the meat that consumers love, but without all the wasted calories and extra stages of production, will take the lion’s share of a $2 trillion economic opportunity represented by global meat and seafood production.

And it’s an opportunity that is growing: The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization has been tracking meat and seafood consumption since 1961, and every year, total consumption has risen. The world is expected to consume 50 percent more meat and seafood in 2050—that’s 560 million metric tons of meat and 250 million metric tons of seafood.

All those extra stages of production also represent strategic vulnerabilities. Every link in that sprawling feed-to-farm-to-slaughter supply chain depends on land, water, fertilizer, fuel, refrigeration, and transport—and every link is vulnerable to drought, disease, war, trade disruptions, price spikes, and even deliberate sabotage. The longer and more resource-intensive the chain, the easier it is for shocks to cascade through it.

Strategic-minded governments around the world have recognized this. The issue transcends ideology not just in the United States but globally: No leader has been more supportive of alternative meat technologies than Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose country has included alternative meats among its national security priorities. Similarly, former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro was an early supporter of both scientific and scaling technologies for alternative meat (progress that has continued under the Lula administration), and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has explicitly included alternative meats in its bioeconomy plan.

Rising food prices have triggered riots and unrest in countries including Haiti, Tunisia, and Mozambique, and contributed to major shifts in global leadership. Food insecurity can also be weaponized, as Matt Spence, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for Middle East policy during the Obama administration, wrote in Slate in 2021: “While heading up Middle East policy at the Pentagon, I saw how [the Islamic State] leveraged drought and crop failures to win the support of vulnerable populations and expand its reach.”

Because alternative meats require a fraction of the land and water of conventional meat, Spence views them as a national-security imperative. He argued that one of the most feasible, high-impact ways the U.S. government could reduce long-term security risks would be to invest in alternative meat production.

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In a sense, the United States has been ahead of the curve in this regard.

Between 2006 and 2019, total global government spending on plant-based and cultivated meat was very close to zero, other than support from the governments of Singapore and Israel for a small handful of start-ups in those countries. When the Good Food Institute, the nonprofit that I lead, began funding open-access research in 2019, the $1 million we allocated to cultivated meat more than doubled the world’s public funding for the field over the previous decade; the $2 million for plant-based meat surpassed all prior open-access research on record.

So it’s notable that while the world’s first significant government investment in cultivated meat occurred in 2005, via a grant from the Dutch government to former Harvard Medical School professor Mark Post, the second came in 2019, when Donald Trump’s National Science Foundation granted $3.55 million to the University of California, Davis, to launch a Cultivated Meat Consortium.

Trump’s first term also saw other major advancements in cultivated meat. In 2019, Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Scott Gottlieb and Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue worked together to establish the regulatory framework that would eventually make the United States the second country in history, after Singapore, to approve the sale of cultivated meat. At the time, Perdue explained, “If [the United States doesn’t] facilitate the invention of these ideas, we’re going to see these technologies go to places around the world that are more conducive to their development, and frankly China may be one of those.”

Since then, the United States has put tens of millions of dollars into the science of alt meats via the NSF as well as the departments of energy, defense, and agriculture. State governments have also jumped in, funding research at public universities. On the private sector side, the United States is home to the world’s most robust ecosystem of both plant-based and cultivated meat companies, as well as two of the three largest meat companies on the planet—Tyson Foods and Cargill—both of which are investing in alt meat innovation.

Yet while the United States started the current wave of public funding for alternative meat research, it has since been surpassed, including by smaller countries such as South Korea and the United Kingdom, both of which have relatively low food self-sufficiency ratios. They understand that alternative meats—which require far less land, water, and fertilizer—will allow them to produce more of their food domestically.

China is now the biggest competitor in this space. In 2021, Beijing released its five-year agricultural plan, which included cultivated meat, as well as its first-ever bioeconomy plan, which included plant-based meat. That was followed a few months later by Xi’s speech during the country’s annual political conference to spell out national priorities, where he emphasized protein innovation. The following year, Xi declared that science and technology should be “the wings” on which China’s food security goals are accomplished.

Xi repeats a core message year after year: “The rice bowls of the Chinese people must always be held firmly in our own hand and filled mainly with Chinese grain.” To that end, China has passed some of the world’s most forward-thinking policies on food waste, farmland preservation, and food safety.

China now invests more government money into agricultural research than the European Union or the United States, and it leads the world in agricultural patents, agricultural patent diffusion, and high-impact peer-reviewed journal articles about agricultural innovation. All that work is focused on making sure that none of the country’s 1.4 billion people goes hungry and that when shocks come—whether from something like the war in Ukraine, another outbreak of a deadly animal disease, or tariffs from a top agricultural trade partner—the country is ready.

Yet while China’s rice bowls may be full, they’re not full of food grown in China. The country’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001 fueled rapid economic growth and a booming middle class, which created an unprecedented surge in meat demand. As meat consumption skyrocketed, so did imports of both meat and feed crops to produce meat and farmed fish. Between 2000 and 2020, China’s food self-sufficiency dropped from 94 to 66 percent, with projections of continued decline.

This dependency comes with significant risk: China’s meat system has been repeatedly rocked by animal diseases: porcine epidemic diarrhea virus in 2011, African swine fever from 2018 to 2020, multiple strains of bird flu, and a steady stream of cattle diseases. Alternative meats offer a strategic solution, since without live animals, the impact of animal diseases on the meat supply disappears.

China is aware of the impact of meat on its food sovereignty, and it sees alternative proteins as a lifeline. From 2020 to 2024, eight of the world’s 20 most active cultivated meat patent holders were Chinese. In 2023, Chinese startup CellX launched its pilot cultivated meat plant, citing favorable government policies. In 2024, Chinese officials sampled cultivated pork at another Chinese startup, Joes Future Foods. Cultivated meat is not yet approved for public sale in mainland China, but the trajectory is clear.

As Shanghai-based New York Times contributor Jacob Dreyer wrote in 2024, China is targeting “the holy grail of meat: commercially viable alternatives that taste as good as the real thing,” but without the massive land use needs and supply chain fragility. And with its combination of subsidies, regulatory coordination, and domestic market scale, China may just get there first.

Dreyer sees this as a good thing, hoping that China’s success will pique the interest of the United States and other governments, driving “innovation faster and in new and necessary directions.”

He may well be right. When multiple governments race to solve the same technical problem, innovation tends to accelerate—and if the result is meat that is cheaper, better, and more resilient than what we have today, the entire world benefits.

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Dreyer’s analysis largely aligns with a 5,000-word report on the future of alternative proteins released by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in 2023. CSIS argues that the United States should compete for global alt protein markets, noting that the country is home to both of the world’s top plant-based meat companies, the world’s most successful cultivated meat company, and both of the world’s most successful cultivated seafood companies. This is an industry that is Washington’s to lose.

The United States built the foundation for success in this space, with world-class research universities, a thriving startup ecosystem, and bipartisan regulatory momentum. But momentum is not destiny. And that is the challenge: Keep leaning in, or risk ceding to China a technology that can strengthen food security, reduce strategic vulnerabilities, and anchor the next wave of food innovation. As CSIS warned, “to cede American leadership” in this sector “is to forfeit the food security of the United States and its allies.”

One encouraging sign is that the second Trump administration has continued policy momentum around alternative proteins. In his entire four-year term, Joe Biden’s FDA and USDA approved just two cultivated meat products, and both of those processes started during Trump’s first term. In the first 90 days of his second term, Trump’s FDA and USDA approved three more, and I am told that more approvals are imminent.

However, the current administration cannot afford to rest on the laurels of a few early approvals. While it is moving faster than the previous administration, the global race is intensifying; to truly secure Trump’s “America First” goals, the United States must move into a period of unprecedented domestic scaling. As the CSIS report noted, the U.S. government should support its alternative protein industries with the same sorts of policies and prioritization that it brings to pharmaceuticals and advanced artificial intelligence chips.

The most immediate policy need across the current innovation ecosystem is regulatory clarity, which is the precondition for everything else. Although entrepreneurs in the sector welcome the current administration’s relatively pro-innovation posture, too much regulatory uncertainty remains, creating barriers where there should be clear on-ramps to commercialization. Investors will not fund companies, and companies will not build, if they don’t know whether—or under what terms—their products can reach consumers. Getting the regulatory framework right—science-based, predictable, and efficient—is what allows the private sector to compete, innovate, and scale.

From there, the industry would benefit from additional scientific research and incentives for manufacturing and infrastructure. Fortunately, the 2026 budget passed by Congress with bipartisan support includes an increase in funding for scientific research, including $47.2 billion for the National Institutes of Health, $8.75 billion for the NSF, $8.4 billion for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, and $1.85 billion for the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Congress is directing these agencies to spend that money on research that promotes U.S. competitiveness and scientific leadership. Alternative proteins do both, especially as many other countries are supporting their own alternative protein industries, including South Korea, Japan, Israel, Singapore, the United Kingdom, Canada, and European Union member states.

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The United States still has the world’s strongest ecosystem for food innovation, from public research universities to global food companies to a robust ecosystem of startups. If Washington treats alternative proteins as a strategic asset, it is likely to secure greater food resilience, industrial leadership, and geopolitical influence at the same time.

In the early 2000s, China began scaling up solar panel manufacturing, supercharged by central government policy. About 15 years later, Beijing did something similar for electric vehicle batteries. The United States made some investments along the way, but not nearly enough, and so China captured the supply chains, the jobs, and the massive economic and strategic benefits of these industries. Notably, the U.S. Department of Energy and U.S. universities had pioneered much of the underlying science in both cases, but it wasn’t enough.

Alternative proteins are now at the same inflection point solar and EVs were two decades ago. The United States has the research base, the companies, and the bipartisan momentum. What it needs is the will to use them before the opportunity passes. Few emerging technologies offer a clearer chance to build industrial strength at home while denying it to a strategic rival.