You could eat your favorite meat product without rearing any animals.
For many of
us, eating a meal containing meat is a normal part of daily life. But if we dig
deeper, some sobering issues emerge.
Every year,
66 billion terrestrial animals are slaughtered for food. Predictions are that meat consumption will rise, with increasing
demand for meat from China and other Asian countries as their standards of
living increase.
The impact of
grazing animals on the environment is devastating. They produce 18% of the world’s greenhouse gases, and
livestock farming is a major contributor to species extinctions.
What’s more, humans have caused tremendous suffering to animals
through industrial scale animal farming.
Some experts
have even said meat may not be essential for most people, and
a vegetarian diet is healthier than a meat-based one. So the rationale for
developing meat alternatives – “fake meat” – is strong.
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Fake meat can
be made from plant-based materials that mimic the taste of meat. But for those
who want something closer to the real thing, meat cells can be grown in a
laboratory – this is called “in vitro
agriculture”. Here’s how it works.
Growing meat,
but not in an animal
The concept
of cultured meat has been around for some time. In 1931, Winston Churchill even said:
We shall escape the absurdity of growing a
whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing. By growing these parts
separately under a suitable medium.
The world’s first cultured beef burger was
produced by Professor Mark Post at Maastricht University in The Netherlands. It
was cooked and eaten publicly at a London restaurant in 2013. It took three
months to grow the meat and cost €250,000.
Professor Mark
Post’s TEDx Talk on “test tube meat”, 2013.
Since then,
the race has been on to produce commercially available synthetic meat. Many
companies have taken out patents to grow meat on a commercially viable scale
and some have even received funding from people like Bill Gates and Richard
Branson.
Thanks to
advances in tissue engineering, we can take all sorts of cells ranging from
skin and blood to muscle and the brain from different animals, and grow them
under controlled laboratory conditions.
The type of
meat people want to eat is from muscle. This means synthetic meat production
involves producing large quantities of muscle cells in a laboratory.
Growing this
involves three main processes:
·
selecting
precursor (or “starter” cells) from the animal – in this case, muscle precursor
cells – and providing them with the correct environment for growth
·
growing them
in bulk in an environment that mimics an animal body
·
the precursor
cells then have to be switched on (or “induced”) to turn into skeletal muscle
by chemical or mechanical signals.
Simple culture of cells in a flask where they are
grown in a single layer and covered with orange nutrient liquid.
The growing
and conversion of cells into skeletal muscle are the major challenges the
industry currently faces. The appearance of this meat would likely resemble
burger-type meat, like a patty, rather than carcass meat, which is very
structured.
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For example,
when you cut into a steak, you might see the meat organised into long strands
or fibres. But with cultured meat, the organisation of the cells may be more
haphazard.
It’s entirely
feasible for some types of cells to grow fast and reproduce themselves once
every 24 hours in a laboratory setting – this is much faster than in an animal.
The challenge is to achieve this on a large scale in bio-reactors (a vessel to
contain the laboratory-grown cells), and then to get all the cells converted
from precursor cells to muscle cells.
If eating the
products of tissue cells seems unsavoury, consider that people already consume
products of cell culture technologies. Over 50% of biological molecules for
vaccines and for treating diseases (such as antibodies for cancer treatment) are produced in mammalian cell cultures..
So we are
already on track to consume “fake”, or artificially synthesised, molecules.
What takes
more resources – growing cows or growing cells?
It takes
around 18 months for a cow to grow fully, after a pregnancy of 10 months.
So in total,
it takes two years and four months of growth in a space roughly 10.5 by 15.2 square metres, in a barn. When a
cow is killed, it produces a 300kg carcass and 180kg of butchered meat.
On the other
hand, it takes 8 trillion cells in a laboratory to
make 1 kilogram of muscle meat.
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A container
of 5,000 litres (the size of an average rainwater
tank, or somewhere around 5 cubic metres) would be needed to grow this number
of cells. This would account for cells grown in layers, and covered by a liquid
to provide nutrients.
If cells in a
laboratory divide every 24 hours, then it would take just over 26 days to grow
1kg of meat.
This image shows how cells can be grown in three
dimensions, and resemble an organ.
This growth
rate is feasible for some types of cells, such as skin and gut, but has not yet
been reported for muscle cells in a laboratory.
Therefore,
lab-grown meat could take fewer natural resources (like vegetation and water)
to grow the equivalent amount of animal meat. The commercial availability of
“fake meat” could profoundly decrease the enormous environmental impact of
grazing animals and reduce animal cruelty.
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