Is lab-grown meat the food of the future?

Lab-grown meat, also known as “cultured” or “clean” meat, is no longer a science-fiction fantasy. The first test restaurant selling synthetic chicken – aptly named “The Chicken” – opened in Tel Aviv, Israel, in November 2020, and Singapore’s government approved the sale of lab-grown chicken nuggets for the first time just a month later. Startups around the world are racing to develop meat products that promise to be accessible, have a reduced environmental impact, free up land currently used for animal agriculture, and bypass the unnecessary slaughter of millions of animals every day. Whether this all sounds too good to be true is still a matter of debate – all we can be sure of today is that synthetic meat is coming and it will change the way we think about food. In 2008, the international animal rights non-profit organization PETA announced a one-million-dollar prize for the first laboratory to create commercially viable synthetic chicken meat.

While no brand succeeded in meeting the 2014 deadline, a decade after the launch of the campaign a dozen companies are competing in the development of in vitro meat. Mosa Meat, from Maastricht, Netherlands, released its first cultured beef burger in 2013, while Eat Just’s “chicken bites,” developed in a 1,200-liter bioreactor in San Francisco, were deemed safe to eat by the Singapore Food Agency in December 2020. Another California-based venture, Memphis Meat, recently completed the largest funding campaign for a lab-grown meat company, raising 161 billion dollars in 2020 from investors such as Richard Branson, Tyson Foods, and Bill Gates, who stated that “all rich countries should move to 100% synthetic beef.”

Currently, the major obstacle to the commercialization of lab-grown meat is the production cost. The synthetic burger developed by Professor Mark Post for Mosa Meat in 2013 cost 280,000$ to produce and while over the course of the years the price has been drastically reduced, it remains still significantly more expensive than its traditional competitor. SuperMeat, the Israeli company behind The Chicken restaurant, has managed to decrease the production cost of a burger down to 35$, although only 50% of the patty is actual meat (the rest being plant protein). Future Meat Technologies, a food-tech company based in Rehovot, Israel, is building a platform for cost-efficient meat “cultivation” and expects to supply brands with the equipment necessary to produce lab-grown meat at 22$ per kilogram by 2022.

What is cultured meat exactly?

While meat consumption is expected to increase as the world’s population grows, the demand for substitutes has also risen steadily in recent years. The global meat industry is worth approximately 2 trillion dollars according to IDTechEx latest report, and the meat alternatives business has reached a value of $20 billion with an expected growth of a further $3 billion by 2024. Cultured meat taps into both markets, aiming to satisfy meat eaters concerned with the ethical issues of animal farming but not ready to give up the taste and texture of meat. Cultured meat is made by harvesting animal cells and allowing them to grow into muscle tissue by feeding them with plant-based or animal nutrients. The cells used to start the process are either obtained from cell banks or extracted painlessly through biopsies. In short, lab-grown meat is meat that doesn’t require the killing of an animal. The first synthetic burger ever produced, was created by 20,000 muscle fibers fed with animal serum for three months before being compressed into a 150-gram patty. Currently, most companies developing lab-grown meats are abandoning the animal serum used in the initial experiments, in favor of plant-based nutrients that will allow them to produce meat that is completely “animal-free.”

At the time of writing, it is not yet possible to produce a full-fledged animal muscle in a laboratory – its structure is simply too complex. Beef patties and chicken nuggets are made by combining fibers that are cultivated individually, imitating the texture of meat foods that are traditionally processed by mincing. Technology, however, is developing fast. Israeli enterprise Aleph Farms has trademarked a 3D technology to produce the first lab-grown steak. Aleph Farms’ printer will allow the cultivation of the different cells that co-exist in a steak together with connective tissue and fat.

Animal welfare

The attempts to imitate the taste of meat by combining ingredients such as pea, soy, or coconut oil, as companies like Beyond Meat and Impossible Burgers are doing, have been welcomed by vegans and vegetarians, but the group of people willing to give up meat entirely remains low. In the US, only between 2% and 5% of people define themselves as vegan or vegetarian and while the percentage is rising, plant-based diets are far from mainstream.

Global meat consumption has increased by 58% in the past 20 years. According to research conducted by the World Economic Forum, an estimated 50 billion chickens are slaughtered every year – a number that doesn’t account for the unproductive male chicks executed in egg production. Figures are just as worrying when it comes to larger livestock animals – 1.5 billion pigs, half a billion sheep, and 300 million cows are killed yearly to make food for human consumption.

What we choose to eat, however, impacts other species as well, as massive amounts of land are employed to raise animals, decreasing the space needed for wildlife to thrive. Of all the ice-free land available on Earth, 26% is used for livestock grazing, while 33% is needed to grow crops that become livestock feed, FAO reports.

The human species, which composes only 0.01% of all life on the planet, has become a threat to animal life, and the ecosystem in general. Cultured meat could drastically reduce the impact of our eating habits if made accessible to a wide portion of the world population. If the production of lab-grown meat was to evolve into widespread practice, the consumption of animals, land, and water resources could be cut down in favor of a more balanced co-existence between species.

What about sustainability?

When it comes to sustainability the answer is less straightforward. Livestock activities are currently responsible for 14.5% of the world’s yearly greenhouse gas emissions and are one of the main drivers of deforestation. The cultivation of soybeans for animal feed is destroying the Brazilian Amazon and the dissipation of water during the production process of industrial agricultural products is a major cause of environmental concern.

Evidence on the unsustainable nature of meat production is abundant, but the scientific community has yet to find consensus on whether cultured meat is a better alternative for the environment. The benefit of producing meat in a lab seems obvious – land use would be drastically reduced and methane emission from manure and the digestive process of animals would go down to zero. Still, there are doubts regarding the impact of in vitro meat production.

Early studies from the University of Oxford and the University of Amsterdam show that cultured meat has the potential to generate up to 96% lower greenhouse gas emissions and consume between 82 and 95% less water compared to traditional European meat.

One issue, as shown by a study done by the University of Oxford, could be in the type of greenhouse gas emissions released, rather than in the amount. Methane emissions from traditional breeding remain in the atmosphere for about 12 years, while CO2 produced by powering the laboratories where synthetic meat is cultivated accumulates and gets stuck for millennia. The study explores four possible modes of production of cultured meat and explains that while in the short term there are clear benefits to switching to lab-grown meat, in the long run, the energy required to produce synthetic meat on a global scale may do more harm than good unless energy is sourced from decarbonized sources. While the Oxford study is built on hypothetical scenarios, the switch to green energy remains an essential step toward sustainable food production.

The emissions resulting from the transportation of food are also a central aspect of the sustainability issue. Singapore, the first country to approve of “meat grown under controlled conditions,” is the perfect example of how sourcing food could change with cultured meat. The South-East Asian country currently imports 90% of the food it consumes, relying minimally on agriculture. Small-scale plants cultivating synthetic meat could become a promising solution to the environmental problems caused by the globalized food industry, allowing countries (or cities) where space for agriculture is limited to localize production.

Is cultured meat good for you?

Another advantage of producing meat in vitro is the direct and indirect health benefits it could bring to the table. Cultured meat greatly reduces the risks related to the advance of antibiotic resistance and possible new pandemics derived from cross-species virus transmission. According to the Food and Drug Administration, 72% of all antibiotics sold in the US are given to animals, encouraging the emergence of resistant bacteria that can be harmful to humans.

As Dr. Mark Post explained in an interview to The Atlantic, at this stage lab-grown meats still need antibiotics to protect the cells from unwanted bacteria, but as production is scaled up in the future, it will be possible to cultivate meat in sterile environments, making synthetic meat “clean” from antimicrobial medications. Additionally, synthetic meat would be free of other toxic substances often found in factory-farmed meats – such as pesticides, growth hormones, or tranquilizers – and could be engineered to contain less (and healthier) fats.

So, would you eat it?

The technology to produce in vitro meat is ready. At the moment, the main obstacle is its cost, which will decrease significantly as production is scaled up. Meat obtained without animal slaughter appears like an ethically superior food to what supermarkets are selling right now and its claims of sustainability make it an appealing alternative for anyone concerned with the future of our planet.

A plant-based diet would still be a better choice for the environment, as the energy needed to cultivate synthetic meat in bioreactors will still produce a significant amount of CO2 for the foreseeable future. However, as trends show, a global shift toward veganism is unlikely to happen soon – in this sense, lab-grown meat seems like a decent compromise.

If cultured meat became widely accessible, the last barrier to overcome would be consumers’ perception. As of today, surveys show that a majority of people are still put off by the idea, seeing lab-grown meat as unnatural. Would you eat it?

Story by: By Angelo Zinna