The judgement had come down. Critics had tasted the burger in front of the camera and an invited audience of journalists, and they had judged the patty to be “rather like” meat. The key was that the burger was not made from conventional meat: rather, it was composed of cultured beef muscle cells grown in a petri dish.
This taste test was long in the making. Originally funded by Google co-founder Sergey Brin, this initiative later grew into the company, Mosa Meat, which seeks to bring cultured meat to plates everywhere. In an interview for the HPR, Sarah Lucas, Public Relations officer of Mosa Meat, described this taste test as a means of showing the potential of clean meat in an environment where traditionally produced meat is increasingly unsustainable. Ultimately, the potential of cultured meat to serve as a clean meat source is tremendous, carrying environmental and health benefits.
The Problems with Traditional Agriculture
The world currently has 19 billion chickens, 1.4 billion cattle, and one billion each of sheep and pigs. The ecological footprint produced by these livestock is massive, as evidenced by a recent UN report: the livestock sector consumes 30 percent of all land on the planet, being the largest human-generated land user, and generates greenhouse gas emissions larger than the transportation industry.
Apart from environmental caveats, however, traditional agriculture also poses a healthcare problem. Almost 80 percent of all antibiotics used in the United States are consumed by livestock and these same ones are prescribed to humans daily. The implications of this practice are detrimental. According to a 2013 study, human beings living near crop fields fertilized with swine manure and pig-farming operations were 32.8 percent more likely to contract an antibiotic-resistant infection. Incidences of deaths due to antibiotic resistance are further projected to rise to approximately 10 million each year from the current 700,000 per year.
Environmentally-Sustainable Meat
In comparison to traditionally produced meat, clean meat production is much more efficient, according to Paul Shapiro, bestselling author of the book Clean Meat: How Growing Meat Without Animals Will Revolutionize Dinner and the World. In an interview with the HPR, Shapiro said that clean meat production “takes 99 percent less land, 96 percent fewer greenhouse gas emissions, 45 percent less energy, and 96 percent less water use.” The reasoning for this is simple: rather than wasting food energy and water on growing inedible animal body parts, such as the scales, the hooves, and the bones, all energy inputted is more or less completely dedicated to meat tissue production. Moreover, as clean meat can be virtually grown anywhere with a lab space, it allows for city buildings to be converted into centers for meat production, thus mitigating the need to clear vast swaths of wildlife habitat or fence off portions of the ocean for the raising of livestock.
Happy, Healthy People
Clean meat also offers advantages for the well-being of both humans and animals. As the meat tissue is grown in sterile laboratory facilities, there is very little chance of bacteria posing a threat to the general safety of the meat product. No antibiotics are required for the production of these meat cells, and hence, there is no threat of antibiotic resistant food-poisoning arising after consumption. Harvesting the cells used in clean meat is also quite humane: clean meat startup JUST cultured chicken nuggets from cells derived from a fallen chicken feather, and this development points to a clean meat industry where animals will not have to suffer for human tastes.
The possibilities for changing the composition of clean meat can result in more heart-healthy meat products. Matt Ball, representative from the Good Food Institute, an organization dedicated to promoting clean meat and plant-based meat solutions, said in an interview with the HPR that there are two competing schools of thought in the clean meat industry: one school centers on replicating the exact nutritional profile of traditional meat, and the other on changing the proportions of cells within the meat to create a healthier nutritional profile. Here, one can produce meat that “has omega 3-fatty acids…[contains] cells or even the DNA of a different type of animal [and has] meat from different types of animals”. All these modifications could create potentially healthier meat products, which can mitigate many of the health risks that high meat consumption may have.
The Question of Cost
The methods used to grow meat cells in laboratories stem from regenerative technology, which, although effective, has an exorbitant cost to it. The burger produced in the laboratory of Mark Post, a leading scientist in the clean meat revolution, had an initial price tag of €250,000, 75,000 times more expensive than your average Big Mac. The reason for this pricing is simple: in Matt Ball’s HPR interview, he noted that “in the field of regenerative medicine, you don’t have any constraints of cost. So if you have a weakening heart and you need heart tissue, you’ll pay whatever it takes.” However, clean meat needs to be cost-effective to become widely used , and thus, “the [current] procedures in biology going into regenerative medicine are not going to be cost-competitive to bring meat to the marketplace.” The process of harvesting the cells, placing them in a nutritional medium, and promoting them to proliferate takes an astronomical amount of money to maintain for only little reward: a trillion muscle cells only amounts to a small amount of meat. Therefore, growing a quantity large enough for consumption requires a huge financial investment.
With Mark Post’s initial project, the technicians responsible for producing the burger were simply producing strains of beef in standard tissue culture flasks, and they had to repeat this task upwards of a thousands times. The labor-intensive nature of the process, in addition to the costs needed to pay the technicians, caused the elevated price. This prevents clean meat from being currently available on the market and is slowing further research efforts. Despite the benefits to the health and environment, further price optimization will be necessary before growing clean meat can pose a viable alternative to traditional agriculture.
The “Yuck” Factor
Customer acceptance of the product is another large, open question. There are many concerns about the product being “unnatural” , with many designating it as “Frankenmeat.” Our notions of what is “delicious” versus what is “disgusting” are very fickle, and for many, this is the largest obstacle in clean meat’s presence in the market.
However, Ingrid Newkirk, the president of PETA, believes that people can overcome this revulsion, much like they did in overcoming the initial revulsion towards plant-based meats. “When PETA first started,” Newkirk told the HPR, “a lot of people would [still] go and have [a] meat hot dog.” But Newkirk says the younger generation has changed this, like how “the popular demand for vegan hot dogs in school dining halls shows how this past revulsion has turned into modern acceptance.”
The Potential of Clean Meat
These ever-changing attitudes towards clean meat speak to a fledgeling industry effectively making a footprint in the marketplace. They further speak to the possibility of creating a sustainable and healthy future of meat consumption. According to Newkirk, “Initially, when people heard about lab-grown meat, [they] expressed skepticism about the project just because it’s something different. Now, you find people saying that they’d like to try [lab-grown meat].” Clean meat may seem like a project in its very beginnings, but soon, it may grow to epic proportions in the world marketplace and revolutionize our diets for ages to come.
Image credit: Wikimedia Commons /Keith Weller USDA