Clean Meat? Still A Work-In-Progress
It looks like beef. It smells and, pretty much, tastes like a burger as well. For all intents and purposes, it is animal meat but it was grown in a laboratory not on a farm. And eventually, it will be mass-produced in a food factory.
Clean meat. Slaughter-free meat. Frankenmeat. At this point the name is not as important as the idea behind it. Meat grown in a laboratory might make consumers uneasy, but lab-grown meat companies are counting on it being the protein source of a sustainable future.
Experts and academics are cautious against thinking too far into the future. They think we might be frying the bacon before we cure the pork belly.
Food tech companies are claiming the innovation of cultured meat will reduce the environmental impact of animal agriculture and create a sustainable food source. Cultured meat is expected to use less energy, less land, and less resources. By using cellular engineering, companies claim they can make a safer product that has less risk of food-borne pathogens, reduce the use of antibiotics in our food and make meat healthier to consume; for example, by replace saturated fats with Omega-3 fatty acids.
Sounds great, right?
Academic experts and researchers are wary that the scaling up process of making lab-grown meat is not even close to being ready for the retail market. Cellular meat companies have not adequately addressed some of the glaring problems about their production methods.
“They’ve gotta do what they’ve gotta do to keep the money flowing in,” said Paul Modziak, professor of Poultry Science at North Carolina State University.
As cell-cultured meat companies court investment in their research they are making many claims of how their product will solve the problems inherent in the conventional system of meat production.
Cell-cultured meat is one form of cellular agriculture; the process of growing cells — in this case animal muscle — in a lab. Here is a three-sentence, speed-read through cellular meat production or for a slightly more nuanced description see Mosa Meat’s explanation.
It begins by harvesting stem cells from a living animal and injecting those cells into a medium. The cells are “fed” with proteins. Then the cells are placed in a bioreactor — similar to those used in making beer or yogurt — which applies enough energy to grow the cells into animal muscle.
It seems complicated and it is, but the result is meat without a dead animal. Just like that, there is a steak, a chicken breast, or even a piece of salmon made without harming a creature.
Well, not quite, but that is the general idea that is being proposed by some of cultured meat companies.
Through this process, it could drastically reduce the negative health impacts that arise from conventional animal farming.
Between 1998–2008, 22% of all foodborne illnesses were directly correlated to meat and poultry, reported a Center for Disease Control and Prevention study. This doesn’t even account for animal byproducts contaminating waterways causing E. coli, salmonella and other bacterial outbreaks.
“The way we produce meat right now causes a lot of problems with human health,” said Shir Friedman, chief compliance officer of Super Meats — a Israeli food tech company focusing on poultry. “We are over-crowding the land to produce meat. Cultured meat will solve this.”
Yet, the idea that altering one component of a biological process won’t create unintended consequences due to that change seems unrealistic. What happens to the taste, the texture, or — more importantly — what unaccounted for health or safety problems could arise?
“In-vitro meat can certainly be manipulated to be more digestible and nutritious,” Modziak said. “But what will it look like in the end?”
As exciting as these innovations are to Modziak, he has studied this science for over 20 years. He agrees that the potential to create a sustainable meat source is there but we still have a lot to learn. Scientifically, all of the problems that cultured meat claims to solve are possible, but that the technology is not there yet, he said.
“Animals are not efficient meat makers,” said Friedman. It take 4000 liters (about 1056 gallons) of water to produce two pounds of chicken meat in a conventionally; multiply that by four when it comes to raising cows for beef.
The way that most livestock are currently raised puts significant strain on the environment. It also puts them in contact with viruses and bacteria.
Farms and slaughtering facilities are the main points of meat contamination. Animals acquire these potentially harmful pathogens from the dirt and feces, from other sick animals they are raised with or from the slaughtering process. During the slaughtering process, meat is often put into contact with fecal matter and bacteria from the intestines.
Cultured meat, on the other hand, is currently produced in sterile, laboratory environments where harmful bacteria are prevented through strict monitoring and controls.
A mass-produced cultured meat facility would be free of actual animals as well as the slaughtering process. This would reduce the likelihood of contamination, said many cultured meat company representatives.
Not so fast, said Dr. Alison Van Eenennaam, an expert of animal biotechnology at University of California at Davis. She is skeptical of these claims, but is cautiously optimistic for the future of cell-cultured meat.
Cellular meat production would have to change dramatically from its current process to meet the demands of a retail market.
There would be “big old vats filled with soupy goos of animal cells and biotic culture,” she said. “If you are a bacteria, this is a party.”
Slaughter-free burgers and cultured chicken breasts in a grocery store will necessitate shifting from small labs to full-scale, food production facilities. This brings more fault points and more variables, which could cause new problems.
The potential advantages and proposed risks will only be known once the scaling up process begins, said Modziak.
Cultured meat companies have proposed that there won’t be a need for antibiotic use in these production facilities because they don’t need them now in the laboratories.
The majority of antibiotics the world produces right now, don’t go to help people get better, said Matthew Ball, senior media relations specialist at The Good Food Institute. “They are fed to farmed animals in sub-critical doses as a growth promoter and to keep them alive in the conditions they are kept in.”
The antibiotics used on farms and feedlots make it into our food, thus increasing the likelihood of more antibiotic-resistant superbugs, Ball said.
The CDC reports that “each year in the U.S., at least 2 million people are infected with antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and at least 23,000 people die as a result.”
Cultured meat companies claim that antibiotic use in their products will be low to non-existent because the cells are being grown in a controlled, sterile environment.
Not using antibiotics on the scale needed to mass-produce cultured meat would inevitably lead to bacterial contamination, Professor Van Eenennaam said.
Cultured meat companies are also proposing that they can manipulate their product so that it is healthier for consumers.
In theory, saturated fats could be replaced by polyunsaturated fats — like omega-3 fatty acids — which are beneficial to human health. This would reduce the cholesterol intake and the risk of cardiovascular diseases. Fortifying the product with vitamins — like B12 or higher levels of iron — is possible, but at this point is still conjecture.
The product is expected to last longer due to the lack of microbial contamination they expect to encounter, said Sarah Lucas, head of operations for Mosa Meats — a Netherlands-based company. “This could mean that there will be less food wastage, the meat will not go ‘off’ as quickly.”
As with a lot of the PR coming out of the nascent industry, details are fuzzy but the claims of its potential are plentiful.
“There is way too much PR and hype out there. And way too little science,” said David Kaplan, professor of biomedical engineering at Tufts University. “If there is good science out there in the industry, it isn’t being released.”
The world needs more sustainable food sources that are beneficial to human health and so the progress so far is encouraging, said Dr. Eenennaam. But the media attention surrounding commercially-ready, cultured meat is co-opting the actual research and distorting the facts, she said.
Science shouldn’t be used to fit a message for a marketing campaign, she said. “Have your stuff get better without using misinformation to deceive people.”
The fact is, cultured meat is possible and it will eventually be available in stores and restaurants. For these reasons, there is a lot of capital flowing into the companies who are racing to control the market.
Mosa Meat, Super Meats, and many other food technology companies are all competing to produce the first commercially-accessible, cultured meat. They are collecting huge sums of venture capital money to further their research.
Memphis Meats received $17 million from a group of investors who included Bill Gates, Richard Branson and Cargill — the massive food corporation — amongst others.
The industry is “largely propelled by venture capital and the expectations of a significant return on investment, with some wink toward ’sustainability.’ Eventually economic pressures will push this toward the same opportunities for error that exist in the (current) meat industry,” said Carl Batt, food science professor at Cornell University.
Batt is not an expert in cellular agriculture but he thinks this sci-fi approach to food systems is not the answer.
“There are people who believe Velveeta is cheese. (Cultured meat) is not quite Soylent Green, but it’s not far off.”
