The more animals suffer, the better for the climate
Sinister truth.
100 billion animals at present living in factories are experiencing intense confinement, and they are great in terms of climate change! Suffering in such conditions means they use less land, their food is brought right to them, so they grow faster, emit less methane, and don’t expend energy on things like walking.
Good job! We have made the perfect machines to enjoy juicy burgers, steaks, and ice cream!
The factory farming industry strives to maximize output while minimizing costs — always at the animals’ expense. We genetically manipulate animals to grow larger or produce more milk or eggs. Chickens, for example, grow unnaturally large that their legs can’t support their bodies. The unsanitary environment in factory farms causes animal diseases, meaning the loss of at least 20% of livestock production globally.
Factory farming is a thing of the past
It was an intense intro from a vegetarian, but now more objective. We are used to living this way. But isn’t there any other, more ethical and efficient way to eat real meat and other animal products, not plants that pretend?
There is — let’s grow meat in a lab! In this article, I focus on one of Cellular Agriculture products — cultivated meat.
From a cell to beef
To understand how it works, we are going to the lab! As we know, meat is made from muscles, because of that 1) we need starter cells that can divide and develop into different cell types, including muscles. This can be done using stem cells. To acquire them we take a cell sample from a live animal (muscle tissue) or in some cases from an embryo. From chickens, the cells can even be extracted from an egg or a feather.
The stem cells are cultivated in a bioreactor: during the first step, the proliferation phase, cells multiply till they reach the desired concentration.
Then, a Culture Medium comes in, which 2) instructs the starter cells to develop into muscle cells. The cell culture medium is composed of essential nutrients (basal media) and specific added factors (recombinant proteins, growth factors or hormones, lipids, and antioxidants).
Once the cells have been cultured, they 3) continue the growth and tissue development in a bioreactor. If we want, let’s say steak, it’s crucial to have 4) structural support for cells to adhere, differentiate, and mature. That’s the job of scaffolding tech and 3D microenvironments.
Why do we need it?
Globally, we consume 350 million tons of meat a year, meaning that we are responsible for 16.5% of global greenhouse gasses (14,5 % by UN), destruction of forests, and the killing of wildlife.
The Amazon, the largest rainforest, absorbs more greenhouse gasses than any other tropical forest has lost a fifth of its forest cover. Producing traditional meat is inefficient, in terms of water and land: 77% of the land provides only 18% of the world’s calories.
Hope you still remember 100 billion animals suffering in slaughterhouses and industrial farms, terrible.
Alright, we’ve admitted that animal agriculture is good at creating climate change, animal welfare problems, lots of waste, and diseases that tend to shut the whole world down. The world population is expected to be 9.8 billion by 2050, how will we feed that amount of mouths?
Why does it make sense?
Producing and eating cultivated meat means we no longer need to slaughter animals (to get starter cells we remove them from a donor animal via biopsy). The carbon footprint from cultivated meat is lower compared to traditional via produced renewable energy.
Reduction of air pollution up to 94% compared to conventional beef, 42% to pork, and 20% to chicken. Since we don’t grow animals, there is land for carbon capture, forests that absorb CO2, protection for biodiversity, and the production of renewable energy.
The cells are grown in a controlled environment, so clean meat production doesn’t require antibiotics and reduces the risk of animal diseases.
Now it sounds like we just want to control and engineer more to benefit ourselves, so we replace ‘animal machines’ with the lab-grown. Yep, that’s why we can manipulate the composition of the culture medium, the fat content, and the fatty acid composition to, let’s say, replace harmful saturated fats with omega-3.
Wall of No
Quite easy to imagine that cultivated meat would be better. Time to be real, or to see the opposite perspective.
$1.8 trillion truth
Let’s say cultured protein is going to be 10% of the world’s meat supply by 2030. We would need a 10x bigger factory than the biggest existing one. Not one factory, but 4,000 of them. Each factory would have 130 (10,000L) bioreactor lines. As a result, it would cost $1.8 trillion, according to Food Navigator.
Expensive, isn’t it? Almost 90% of the cost is Growth Medium. It contains amino acids, growth factors, and protein (fetal bovine serum).
Global production of amino acids (which cells need to thrive) is low to support cultured meat production. Let’s take L-tyrosine, an essential amino acid: 200 metric tons of it are produced globally per year. To support even modest cultured meat production, we would need to produce 6x that. If companies can find a way to derive a full amino acid profile from cheap commodity soy, it could reduce the cost. But then we don’t solve the land and deforestation problem. Growth factors like transferrin can go for $260 a gram.
Stop for a second, FBS? Even though some companies publicly stated that they’re using an animal-free medium, fetal bovine serum still contains key proteins and vitamins needed for production.
4–25% worse
It is controversial whether cultivated meat is not only better but not harmful to the environment. This graph shows one of three scenarios of warming impact.
In the most optimistic cultured meat production footprints (cultured-a, b, c), emissions are competitive with cattle systems for CO2. The most conservative footprint (cultured-d) has a lower carbon dioxide equivalent than any cattle system but in the long-term, the temperature impact is worse than any cattle one.
Do we really contribute to solving global problems?
How do you see the future?
Justin Kolbeck, co-founder and CEO of cultured seafood startup Wildtype sees the industry as one part of several different solutions, including plant-based meat, that will help to meet the world’s growing appetite for animal protein.
Josh Tetrick, CEO of Eat Just has ambitions to scale up the industry. Eat Just made history when it became the first company to offer cultivated meat in Singapore back in 2020, recently it was approved for sale in the US.
We can’t make the whole world vegan. So, the cell agriculture industry needs to focus on low-cost growth medium, large amounts without FBS, scaling up the production to see whether growth factors will go down, and yes, game-changing ideas, such as a way where the animal can live a full life while creating conditions that solve all of the challenges that we’re trying to solve.
Your turn!
- Eat less meat (especially beef). Oxford study shows a 30% difference between high- and low-meat diets for most of the measures of environmental harm.
- Learn and dig deeper into this strange lab-grown industry!
Thanks for putting in your time and maybe challenging your viewpoint. Let’s explore and contribute to the future without slaughter together, connect with me on Twitter, LinkedIn, or email me at polinapak.un@gmail.com. Stay up to date with my newsletter!
