During the fourth wave of far-right politics, far-right parties have started to mobilize on a broad range of salient issues beyond their core topic of immigration. Among them, and of increasing relevance, are the environment, climate action and animal welfare. Even though these three interrelated issues are addressed by a growing academic literature, scholarship has neglected the emergence of far-right mobilization against a key technological development that transverses the environment, climate action, and animal welfare: cultured meat. Our exploratory article is, to the best of our knowledge, the first one to examine far-right mobilization against lab-grown meat. We ask: How and why do far-right parties politicize the issue of cultured meat? We do so by comparing and contrasting key cases of far-right politics in Western Europe and the United States. We are especially interested in the framing of cultured meat by far-right actors and in the types of responses they pursue. Most prominently, the Meloni government banned the production and selling of lab meat in 2023 products. This article highlights that the politicization of cultured meat by the far right has the potential of becoming a key aspect of a ‘cultural struggle’ against ‘progressive’ urban elites in the context of a significant transformation of agriculture and the way societies perceive food. The far right’s focus on cultured meat underlines the party family’s capacity to strategically respond not only to salient issues, as during the COVID-19 pandemic or in the context of climate change, but also to anticipate the public relevance of new issues by going into an issue before it makes the headlines.
