Published: 18 April 2023
Farmer or scientist? Who would YOU trust with your meat production?
Heated debates regarding lab-grown meats reignited in November of 2022 after news broke that the United States Food and Drug Administration had issued its first approval of cell-cultured chicken for human consumption.
This is no fake meat we are talking about. The “no-slaughter” method involves the culture of real meat by harvesting cells from live animals. It may sound like science fiction but it is very much a real thing!
Back in 2020, Singapore became the first country in the world to approve lab-grown meats for retail sale. Their cell-cultured chicken nuggets, produced by the Californian food startup “Eat Just”, have already been served at restaurants like the private club 1880. Among the first tasters was Bloomberg’s Mark Cudmore.
“It doesn’t look exactly like chicken,” he explains in a YouTube video as he digs into a maple waffle and crispy cultured chicken bite. “It looks a little bit more rubbery if I’m honest but it tastes damn good.”
Food writer Rachel Duffell also got to sample some premium-priced, cell-cultured chicken in a rice dish sold by Madame Fan, a cantonese restaurant in Singapore. The dish showcased “breaded Good Meat chicken cutlets”, jasmine rice, carrots, micro shiso and edible flowers.
In an article for Tatler, Duffell writes: “the perfectly seasoned cultivated chicken meat tasted just like ‘natural’ chicken breast, with a noticeably smoother, more tender texture.”
Sounds like a hit so far. But the thought of eating meat produced in a laboratory is rather unsettling, don’t you think? How do you “grow” meat anyways?
Did you know? The first ever lab-grown burger was produced in 2013 by a team in the Netherlands at the whopping cost of €250,000.
Cultivating meat in the lab
Josh Tetrick is the founder and CEO of the billion dollar food tech company “Eat Just”. In a 2021 interview with Bloomberg, Tetrick details the meticulous process of culturing animal cells in stainless steel vessels called bioreactors:
“We identify a cell from a chicken, nutrients to feed those cells, so instead of eating soy and corn we identify nutrients for the cells,” he explains. “And then we culture, scale it up in a large steel vessel. And the process is somewhat like culturing beer. At the end of the process, you have chicken meat or beef meat. In our case, it’s chicken meat.”
Cells used to make meat can be harvested through “a biopsy, a fresh piece of meat, a cell bank or the root of a feather“.
According to Sylvain Charlebois, senior director at Dalhousie University’s Agri-Food Analytical Science Laboratory, the production process isn’t that complicated.
“Collecting stem cells from a live chicken or a fertilized egg is the first step,” he writes for La Presse.
“The cells are then fed in a laboratory, much like animals are fed with amino acids, fatty acids, sugars, trace elements, salts and vitamins. The main distinction between feeding a living animal and feeding cells is found in the size of the food components; that is all. While the chicken is fed corn, the cells are fed microscopic carbohydrates and proteins. The products are then placed in a cultivator to reproduce a greater number of cells. After three weeks, the product is ready for packaging, shipping, sale and consumption.”
Steel vessels also need to be carefully monitored by staff in order to provide optimal conditions for cellular division.
“The temperature (in the steel vessels) is kept constant at 37 degrees which is the temperature of the animal, essentially, and the cells just grow,” explains Yaakov Nahmias, founder of the Israel-based biotech firm “Future Meat”.
“So you just need energy to keep the temperatures stable and to continuously and slowly mix the cultures, allowing the cells to grow. So we don’t need to grow everything as well. There’s no need to grow the brain or the skin or the central nervous system or the internal organs. We’re just creating the meat.”
According to Tetrick, it takes about two weeks to make cultured chicken from scratch. This proves to be significantly faster than more traditional methods which require up to 45 days to go from chick to slaughter.
Behind the scenes, experts ranging from food scientists and biochemists to molecular biologists and chefs take on the daunting task of producing these lab-grown meats.
Fun fact: Meat isn’t the only edible food that scientists are trying to grow in labs. Lab-grown seafood, milk and coffee are all currently being developed.
The promises of slaughter-free meat
Food sustainability and animal welfare were at the forefront of Josh Tetrick’s mind when he first started “Eat Just”.
“I had less than $3,000 in my bank account,” recalls the man behind the plant-based egg substitute “Just Egg”. “And the idea was: we’re going to start a food company that takes the animal, the live animal, out of the equation of the food system.”
Advocates for lab-grown meats believe that these alternatives can play a key role in addressing climate change around the world.
For Richard Parr, managing director at a non-profit group that promotes plant- and cell-based alternatives, this type of technology can help to reduce land and water use, as well as aid in fighting “anti-microbial resistance and food contamination.”
“Shiok Meats” CEO and co-founder Dr Sandhya Sriram also highlights the greater purpose that these new meats can serve by helping “to feed the ever‑increasing population without creating additional pressure on the otherwise declining ocean health.”
Additionally, growing meat in a lab could be significantly more cost-effective according to Sylvain Charlebois. “Animal diseases like bird flu, which is currently costing the poultry industry and consumers a fortune, can also be prevented,” he writes. “Risks become much easier to contain with more sanitized production.”
Although cultured meats haven’t hit supermarket shelves yet, companies like Aleph Farms, alongside SpaceX, are already looking into lab-grown meat production in outer space.
“We know from many previous scientific studies that physiology and biology behave very differently in a microgravity environment…” explains Zvika Tamari, Head of space research at Aleph Farms. “So, we actually don’t know, nobody knows, if these processes of cultivation of meat proliferation can actually occur in space.”
In the last couple of years, cell-cultured meat companies have received financial support from the likes of Bill Gates, Richard Branson and Leonardo Dicaprio.
Scientists in Finland predict that adopting meat and dairy alternatives could help to reduce environmental pressures by more than 80%.
A set of hurdles and concerns
As the saying goes “there are two sides to every coin”. And, ironically, one of the main concerns regarding lab-grown meat production is none other than environmental impact.
Researchers such as John Lynch and Raymond Pierrehumbert remain skeptical concerning the environmental claims made by firms. They point out the fact that emissions produced by lab-grown meat facilities will most likely be made up of carbon dioxide, which can remain in the atmosphere for hundreds to thousands of years.
“Per tonne emitted, methane has a much larger warming impact than carbon dioxide. However, it only remains in the atmosphere for about 12 years, whereas carbon dioxide persists and accumulates for millennia,” highlights Pierrehumbert. “If the lab-grown meat is quite energy intensive to produce then they could end up being worse for the climate than cows are.”
Food tech companies also need to figure out how to affordably mass-produce cultured meats while maintaining clean and perfectly sterile environments in larger facilities.
“If you have a thousand cells, that’s a thousand things that can go wrong,” explains Professor Ricardo San Martin, who runs the alternative meats lab at Berkeley’s College of Engineering. “It’s the kind of thing Silicon Valley loves. It’s flashy and hi-tech. But there are real barriers to scaling it up.”
As for investigative journalist Joe Fassler, one of his biggest concerns remains the potential public health implications surrounding the use of immortalized cells in order to cultivate meat.
“Immortalized cells are a staple of medical research, but they are, technically speaking, precancerous and can be, in some cases, fully cancerous,” writes Fassler in a 2023 Bloomberg article.
In response to the article, Elliot Swartz, lead scientist at the non-profit “The Good Food Institute”, tweeted: “There are 6 hallmarks of cancer, immortality is 1 of them. Having 1 feature of a complex phenotype doesn’t mean it is that type. You can’t equate immortality to cancer.”
Biologist Robert Weinberg at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology also believes that the use of immortalized cells is of no concern. “It’s essentially impossible for a cell from one species to gain a foothold in the tissues of another species,” he explains. “So even if one were to take highly malignant cells from a cow and drink them, I don’t see what the problem would be.”
However, Fassler maintains that “despite the informal scientific consensus around the safety of immortalized cells, there just aren’t any long-term health studies to prove it.”
Some countries are already in the process of putting new laws in motion to help regulate the rise of these in-vitro meats.
In Italy, a bill aiming at banning lab-grown meats has already been approved in an attempt to protect the country’s food heritage and the nation’s health. That being said, we must keep in mind that countries within the European Union will eventually have to approve the sale of lab-grown meats produced in the EU due to the union’s free movement of goods and services.
According to the BBC, “cultured meat products are forecast to take a larger slice of the total meat market in the future.” However, at this moment in time, production remains limited.
Did you know? According to a research published in “Nature Food” in 2022, future food trends might include novel food items such as ground-up cricket, berries grown from cells and egg whites from lab-grown chicken cells.
Would you ever try lab-grown meat?
A product is nothing without its consumers. So what do the people have to say about all this?
Well, according to a 2022 study published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology, 35% of meat-eaters and 55% of vegetarians feel “too disgusted by cultured meat to try eating it.”
In another study published the same year, researchers at the University of Adelaide in Australia revealed that only 25% of Aussies are open to the idea of consuming lab-grown chicken and beef. The paper also highlighted younger age, animal welfare and safety as contributing factors to the willingness to try cultured meats.
For Chris Bryant, psychologist at the University of Bath, “price, taste, and naturalness and the related issue of safety” will most likely be the main concerns of consumers.
According to a 2022 study, “the wholesale cost of cell-cultured meat is optimistically projected to be as low as $63/kg.”
It’s safe to say that the more we dig into this topic, the more it unfolds. And so many questions remain unanswered:
-What impact will lab-grown meats have on industrial and traditional livestock farming?
-Will lab-grown meat facilities be able to achieve sustainable energy generation?
-What are the unforeseen health effects of these cultured meats?
-What about the economical, social, ethical and cultural impacts of these emerging technologies?
-Will in-vitro meats be well-received by religious communities, vegetarians and vegans?
-And, more importantly, will this protein alternative really help to save the planet?
At this point, it’s anyone’s guess.
