“Why would I trust seafood made in a lab? I want what’s natural,” says your uncle, just as he’s about to take his first bite of a piece of mackerel caught off the coast of South Africa, cleaned and processed in Thailand, and shipped to the USA — where it now sits on a plate in a household in Portland.
Ah, natural. The word does a lot of heavy lifting these days.
The uncle-at-the-dinner-table scenario is one most of us have lived. Someone in your life — well-meaning, not stupid, just deeply allergic to anything that sounds like it was invented last Tuesday — pushes back on a sustainable choice you’ve made or something you’ve mentioned. And suddenly you’re not just talking about fish. You’re defending the entire premise of progress.
Here’s the thing: you’re probably not going to win this one with a TED talk. But you might win it with the right question.
Start with what “natural” actually means
The seafood on your uncle’s plate has already been on a longer journey than he has. Wild-caught fish today involves GPS-guided vessels, flash-freezing technology, and logistics chains spanning multiple continents. The average piece of supermarket salmon has been handled by more machines than a Tesla.
None of that makes it bad. It just makes the word “natural” a bit slippery.
Lab-grown seafood, more accurately called cultivated seafood, starts with a small sample of cells from a real fish. No killing required. Those cells are then grown in a controlled environment using nutrients the fish would get in the wild anyway. The result is real fish tissue. Same proteins, same fats, same omega-3s your uncle loves to cite whenever he’s defending his third helping.
One leading startup in the space is Wildtype , an energetic, diverse, and earnest team of world-class scientists, chefs, engineers, and entrepreneurs who share a collective passion for transforming the food system.
The sustainability case (without the sermon)
Here’s where you could go full PowerPoint. But we’d advise against it.
Instead, try this: wild fisheries are under serious pressure. Around a third of the world’s fish stocks are currently overfished, and another 60% are being fished at maximum sustainable capacity. The oceans aren’t broken yet, but they’re being pushed. Cultivated seafood, if it scales, could take significant pressure off those systems — producing protein with a fraction of the land use, water use, and bycatch of conventional fishing.
You don’t have to be an environmentalist to find that useful. You just have to like eating fish in twenty years.
The disgust factor is real, and valid
Let’s be honest: “grown in a lab” doesn’t exactly make the mouth water. The instinctive recoil is human and understandable. We’re pattern-matching creatures, and “lab food” still pattern-matches to “bad science fiction.”
But the same reaction greeted pasteurised milk, IVF, organ transplants, and — if we’re going back — the first person to suggest that heating raw meat before eating it might be a good idea. The disgust response is a useful heuristic, not an oracle.
The companies building cultivated seafood know this. Which is why the smartest ones aren’t leading with “it’s made in a bioreactor.” They’re leading with taste, texture, and traceability — things even your uncle cares about.
What actually changes minds
Not data. Not shame. Not a documentary recommendation at 11pm on a Sunday.
What works is curiosity, not confrontation. Ask what matters to your uncle about food — taste? Tradition? Knowing where it comes from? Then find the genuine overlap between those values and what cultivated seafood actually offers. Because it does offer them. It’s not a compromise dressed up as progress. It’s a genuinely different way of solving an old problem.
The uncle isn’t the enemy. He’s just working with incomplete information, and a lifetime of assumptions that, frankly, most of us shared until pretty recently.
So next time he reaches for the mackerel that’s circled the globe to reach his fork — don’t preach. Just ask: what does “natural” mean to you, exactly?
Then let the conversation do the work.
Leave a Reply