Announcing our bold, new campaign: "Cellular Agriculture for the Public Good."

It’s Official: Cultured Meat is Ingenious!

Published April 1, 2014 | Updated October 4, 2021 |

New Harvest has been awarded the Royal Academy of Engineering’s Ingenious grant, worth £29,735 ($50,000)!

Sponsored by the Royal Academy of Engineering, the grant supports communication between engineers, designers, and the public as new ideas come into society.  New Harvest will be holding workshops and exhibitions on the future of cultured meat, giving engineers a place to share their expertise and the public a place to chime in!

Some details about the project:

The Futures of Cultured Meat

Following the milestone cell-cultured hamburger tasting in August of 2013, cultured meat technology finds itself under pressure to move from lab-scale to mass-scale production as humanity is faced with feeding a growing population in a challenging environmental context.

How does a new technology make its way from the quiet of the lab into the chaos of everyday life? When the technical trajectory collides with the real-world and all its complexity, factors such as public-opinion, policy, economics and culture become crucial elements of the story.

The Futures of Cultured Meat program brings together engineers, designers, and the cultured meat NGO New Harvest to encourage engineers as well as the wider public to imagine and question the possible, probable, and preferable futures for cultured meat through speculative design workshops and exhibitions. The goal is to provide a platform for engineers to question and discuss the wider social, ethical and aesthetic implications of their work. 

Read more about other Ingenious projects here.

A huge round of applause  for those who applied for the grant in September 2013: Marianne Ellis, an NH board member and a Biochemical Engineering Ph.D, David Benqué, a designer and research associate at the Royal College of Art, and Isha Datar, New Harvest’s Director.