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It's been 10 years since the first burger made from laboratory-grown
meat was eaten. So why is it still only available in one country, in one
restaurant, only on Thursdays?
In summer 2013, a handful of people gathered in London in what looked
like a TV set for a cookery show.
A man in a white coat and chef's hat basted a burger. The camera filming
him cut to a close-up as he spooned oil onto the minced patty. Food
critic Hanni Ruetzler perched on a high stool at the end of the counter.
At length, a plate with the meat, a side of salad and a rather
dry-looking sesame-topped bun was placed in front of her.
Ruetzler was about to taste a £215,000 ($330,000) burger, grown in a lab
by a scientist who had dedicated his career to the cause of cultivated
meat. That scientist, Mark Post of Maastricht University in the
Netherlands, was seated right next to her.
If that wasn't pressure enough, her reaction was about to be featured on
news programmes across the world later that day.
Ruetzler delicately cut into the burger, ignoring the bread, and placed
a small browned bite into her mouth. She chewed. The room, crowded with
journalists, waited.
As the cameras zoomed in for a close up, she gave the sense of trying to
be polite. "There's quite some intense taste," she began, before pausing
for a moment. "It's close to meat. It's not that juicy but the
consistent [sic] is perfect." She then added that she "miss[ed] salt and
pepper", much to the amusement of the studio audience.
Ten years later, as I watch the video of Ruetzler tasting the burger,
I'm left wondering whether I will ever get the chance to try cultivated
meat myself. Today, lab-grown meat remains far from widely available.
But with scientific advice on the need to scale down on meat consumption
sparking a wave of interest in meat alternatives in recent years, could
it be poised to stampede into restaurants?
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"So the industry is fairly new," says Tasneem Karodia, co-founder of
Mzansi Meat Co, a South African cultivated meat firm. "The first burger
was made in the Netherlands in 2013. And probably three to four years
later, there was a handful of companies. Now, we're sitting at probably
over 100 companies in the space." Between them, they're growing lamb,
duck, beef, chicken, fish and more. They are also collectively receiving
billions of dollars of investment, according to The Good Food Institute,
an alternative protein think tank.
But what exactly is cultivated meat?
Cultivated meat essentially means "replicating the same process you'd
find inside of a cow, outside of the cow", says Karodia. In other words,
lab-grown meat is genetically indistinguishable from the real deal.
The first step in making it is to take a small, peppercorn-sized biopsy
from a cow – leaving the animal "up and running afterwards", Karodia
notes. The biopsy is taken back to the lab where it's put into a
bioreactor – a metal vat not unlike those beer is brewed in. It's full
of a nutritious broth that contains all the ingredients that cells need
to grow and grow.
Karodia tells me her company's broth contains fetal bovine serum (FBS).
This has become controversial as it's derived from the blood of a cow
foetus – meaning a pregnant mother needs to be slaughtered to make it.
For that reason, Karodia is looking to replace FBS entirely. Her team
hasn't figured out how just yet, but even if Karodia doesn't find a way,
using FBS will still result in fewer calves, lambs, pigs, ducks and
chickens being raised and slaughtered for consumption.
That means you don't need to use a significant portion of the Earth's
land to plant soy and corn to feed all the animals, according to Josh
Tetrick, chief executive of another cultivated meat firm, Eat Just.
That, he says, results in fewer emissions. "So it's a way of eating meat
that makes sense for the future." Indeed, Tetrick sees it as replacing
all conventional meat one day.
Several studies and reports from think tanks and consultancies have made
similar assertions about lab-grown meat, finding that it could
substantially reduce greenhouse gas emissions. One study found
cultivated meat would produce 96% fewer greenhouse gas emissions than
conventional meat. Another found it would reduce emissions by 74-87%.
The gains are higher for highly polluting livestock like beef or lamb
and less for poultry or fish.
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However, all these studies agree that cultivated meat will still be
higher impact than most plant-based meat alternatives. And other studies
find that it could be worse for the climate than even conventional
livestock, due to the large amounts of energy needed to grow the meat
and produce the growth media. Much of the disagreement arises from the
fact that the studies are all trying to model a system that doesn't yet
exist at scale.
Regardless, there is broader recognition than ever in the scientific
community that the scale of livestock farming is unsustainable. Raising
animals for meat causes a plethora of environmental issues from acid
rain to algal blooms and accounts for 14.5% of the world's greenhouse
gas emissions. Despite these warnings, meat production is expected to
double by 2050 as the world's growing population make more money,
meaning they can afford more meat.
Cultivated meat could perhaps begin replacing some meat. But does the
assertion that it might not be an alternative but the alternative to
meat really stand up?
As it stands today, there's only a single country in the world where you
can wrap your tongue around one type of lab-grown meat. Even there, it's
only available in one restaurant, and only on Thursdays.
Since January 2022, curious diners have been able to book a table at
Huber's Butchery in Singapore. There they can sample cultivated chicken
strips on a "spring vegetable orecchiette" pasta, or in a sandwich with
a side of fries for around $14 (£11). The meat was previously available
at another Singapore restaurant, 1880, starting in 2020.
Singapore is a tiny island in southeast Asia home to just under 5.5
million people. Its interest in lab-grown meat can be ascribed in part
to this geography. Land is scarce, with 90% of its food imported, and
food security is a high priority for the authorities. Consequently, the
government has given tax incentives and subsidies to companies like Eat
Just, which grows the cultivated chicken for Huber's Butchery.
Despite that support, the company only grows around a couple of kilos of
lab-grown chicken a week – roughly equivalent to the meat from a single
chicken.
To make more, and cheaply, the company would need more and bigger
bioreactors to grow it in, says Tetrick. "The ability to scale up from
smaller vessels to larger vessels is both an engineering-technical
challenge, and also a capital challenge," he says. "It's hundreds of
millions of dollars, ultimately billions of dollars, to build many of
these facilities."
Tetrick admits this scale-up may never work. But "we think it's a bet
worth taking," he says.
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Eat Just is one of several cultivated meat firms headquartered on the
west coast of the United States. Here, the FDA recently deemed some
brands of cultivated chicken "safe to eat". However, those companies
still can't legally sell it until their facilities are inspected by the
US Department of Agriculture, something expected in 2023. In India, the
government is funding research into cultivated meats. In contrast, there
are plans in Italy’s parliament to ban all forms of cultivated meat over
concerns about the country's food heritage.
In many countries, regulators haven't kept pace with the science. That
means there's no legal classification for lab-grown meat, which is
needed for its sale in some countries. Companies also have to
demonstrate that their product is safe to eat. Such regulatory hurdles
will take time to overcome.
Importantly, people do seem to want lab-grown meat, according to
JingJing Liu. She's a meat researcher officer at Teagasc, the Republic
of Ireland's Agriculture and Food Development Authority, and has been
conducting surveys across the world to assess the acceptance of cultured
meat. Liu has found that from China to Cameroon roughly half the people
she has surveyed say they would try it, providing it was better for the
planet than conventional livestock.
That caveat is going to be hard to prove until the industry scales up.
As it stands today, every company has its own special way of making
meat. But broadly speaking, the growth media or broth the meat cells are
grown in is the same as used in the pharmaceutical industry for things
like vaccine development.
A pre-print (not yet peer-reviewed) study suggests that using pharma-grade
media could mean that the impact of cultivated beef on the climate is
actually four to 25 times greater than the average for the farm-reared
equivalent. Karodia of Mzansi Meats hopes that ingredients we already
use in food, like soy derivatives, could one day be used to grow the
cells. Moving away from such a pure pharmaceutical-grade growth media
would have a much lower carbon footprint, she says. But not all experts
are convinced that this would lead to lower emissions.
"It's not entirely divorced from conventional agriculture. You're still
going to need probably some crops, or possibly some kind of sustainable
algae production, to go in and get that initial nutrient source," says
John Lynch, a postdoctoral researcher from the University of Oxford in
the UK. "Is it going to be soy? How's it going to be grown? And is it
actually going to be that much more efficient than livestock
production?" Such questions are yet to be answered.
The other main climate impact of cultivated meat is how much energy it
takes to grow meat in a lab and how that energy is produced. Last year,
just under two-thirds of the world's electricity was produced by burning
fossil fuels, releasing carbon dioxide. That may change, given many
countries' pledges to reach net-zero emissions by the middle of the
century. Already, grids are increasingly powered by renewables such as
wind and solar.
Even so, we simply don't know how energy-efficient it will be to produce
large quantities of cultured meat. If it ends up being highly
inefficient, it may not outweigh the climate cost of conventional
agriculture. Instead, it could put a huge strain on the grids as they
try to transition to renewable energy, says Lynch. "If we have increased
energy demand through novel food production processes, then we're never
going to achieve any of our climate targets," he says.
Industry advocates argue that labs take up less land than agriculture,
meaning freed-up land could be used to grow forests or restore other
major carbon sinks. In theory, this is true. But in practice, Lynch
questions whether this land would indeed be used in this way: it might
instead become "just another golf course".
"It's not the cultured meat per se which is actively good for the
climate," says Lynch. "It's just that if you eat less meat, then there's
less emissions and less land use associated with that."
In other words, we can't overlook the fact that there are already
low-carbon alternatives to meat, like lentil burgers and soy sausages.
Still, change is hard and meat consumption is only going up. It may well
be that cultured meats are an easier sell than their plant-based
alternatives.
There's still a long list of barriers for cultivated meat to become more
widely available. They range from consumer acceptance and green
credentials to the technical feasibility of scaling-up and the capital
required to do that. Nevertheless, Eat Just's Tetrick is hopeful that
simple cultivated products like ground beef, sausages and chicken
nuggets will be "more widely distributed" in the next five to ten years.
Perhaps it won't be too long before we can find out if food critic
Ruetzler was just being polite – or whether it's really good enough to
replace the real deal.
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