Opinion | Is Communist China Coming for Your Turkey, Too?

In late September, 11 Republican members of Congress wrote to the directors of national intelligence and the Department of Agriculture’s Office of Homeland Security to warn of the latest threat emerging in China. They said China seeks to become the world leader in production of meat alternatives — part of a “targeted attempt to dominate global food supply chains” that could pose an urgent threat to the food security of the United States and its allies.

It’s the type of reaction we see often in Washington these days, where everything China does is viewed through the narrow and often skewed prism of national security, regardless of whether it’s positive for the world. Not satisfied with trying to render our gas guzzlers obsolete with its electric vehicles, the thinking goes, the Chinese Communist Party is apparently coming for our burgers and Thanksgiving turkeys, too.

The letter was right about one thing: China is serious about achieving breakthroughs in so-called future foods, which include lab-grown, plant-based and other alternative meats. As China’s appetite has grown, the government in 2021 made the creation of domestic alternative protein industries part of its national economic development strategy. It’s become a central component of wide-ranging plans to achieve food security, and funding is pouring into new research initiatives.

Sure, the geopolitical rivalry with the United States is almost certainly part of what is motivating China; it wants to become self-sufficient in food in case tensions with the United States worsen to the point of war.

But there is much more to this picture. The age-old way of producing meat — clearing forests to feed vast herds of greenhouse-gas-emitting livestock whose flesh is shipped through global supply chains — is hurting the planet. If scientists can figure out how to affordably cultivate meat in a lab at scale, it could become the standard mealtime fare of tomorrow. It might have to. And if China is willing to invest in technologies with potentially global benefits, Americans should view it not as a national security threat but as inspiration for how our protein markets could evolve, too.

China has excellent reasons for wanting to ensure that its huge population has enough to eat that have nothing to do with the United States. Older Chinese generations still harbor painful memories of mass hunger in the decades before China’s era of economic reform began in the late 1970s. President Xi Jinping has reminisced about going to bed hungry in his youth, with nothing but soup for dinner. He has called food security “a red line that would trigger terrible consequences were it ever to be compromised.”