Leonardo DeCaprio wants you to buy meat grown in a tank.

It’s supposed to be better for the environment. In the end, it may be just impossible.

Leonardo DeCaprio is investing in cellular-grown meat companies.

Aleph Farms and Mosa Meat are growing steaks and burger meat from cell cultures taken from live animals.

It follows a trend set by DeCaprio as he’s already an investor in Beyond Meat (a plant-based meat alternative). Given the history of the growth in value of that company, I’m sure he got back what he invested if he sold his shares prior to the recent sales slump and share devaluation, and he’s hoping to do it again.

DeCaprio — along with other public personalities — are funding companies they believe can more ethically, and with less environmental damage than current production practices, provide meat protein to feed the growing demand worldwide.

As DeCaprio said when he announced his investment in Aleph Farms:

Aleph’s extraordinary technology platform combined with their inclusive approach to bringing about systemic change in our food systems make them a leader in this field. With their one-of-a-kind cultivated steaks, they demonstrate how creativity and ingenuity can help solve some of humanity’s greatest challenges.

The Aleph Farm steak on the left; the Mosa Meat burger on the right.

Both companies use more or less the same research to justify their production methods, claiming that cellular-grown beef has the following positive effects:

• Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions will be cut by 92%
• Land use will be cut by 95%
• Water use will be cut by 78%

These claims are compared to current global averages for GHG emissions, land use and water use for producing beef, chicken, pork and plant-based alternatives using conventional methods.

I’m completely onside with the idea that we should all be striving to find ways to produce food with less GHG emissions, and improve the overall health of our soil.

But try as I might, I couldn’t find an justification for the 92% reduction in GHG emissions.

It seemed counter-intuitive that, if you produce large quantities of meat in bioreactors (i.e., in a tank), you need a lot of electricity for the production process. If you’re sourcing your power from a plant that burns fossil fuels, your GHG emissions are impacted, and should be included in any claims of overall emissions reductions.

In my mind, in today’s market, you should be considering your entire production chain — from source of power, to the construction of a facility to produce the meat, the acquisition and use of the growth media, to the packaging and transport used to get your product to market, to how you dispose of the waste you generate to the labour practices you use — as part of an determination of your impact on the environment. I didn’t see that in any of the articles hyping this new method of producing protein.

Another thing. The pitches for this new method of protein production were like the ones I experienced in the telecom sector in past years: they felt too good to be true.

Think of it, they say. Humans will no longer need to raise livestock to enjoy animal protein. We’ll be able to grow enough meat in stainless-steel bioreactors to feed the world. These advancements in technology would fundamentally change the way humans interact with the planet, making the care, slaughter, and processing of billions of farm animals the relic of a barbaric past.

So, I dug around a bit more. And as I dug, more and more issues were exposed that tell me that cellular-grown meat has a lot of hurdles to jump before they can live up to their environmental claims, if at all.

Let’s start with GHG emissions.

There is one study — one — that is being used as the go-to research on this topic, particularly by Mosa. It’s a paper written by Pelle Sinke and Ingrid Odegard (‘Sinke/Odegard’) in February, 2021 entitled ‘LCA of Cultivated Meat: Future Projections for Different Scenarios’ for the Good Food Institute.

The secret with any study is understanding the assumptions. Sinke/Odegard’s Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) study compared the production of a cellular-grown ground meat product in a commercial-sized facility under two scenarios: 1) using conventional power sources, and 2) using sustainable power sources. The results were then compared with global averages of GHG emissions for conventionally-raised beef, pork, chicken and plant-based meat alternatives.

In general, they found the cellular-grown meat using conventional power sources produced less GHG emissions that conventionally produced beef, but more than conventionally raised pork, chicken and alternative meat products. On the other hand, cellular-grown meat using sustainable power sources had GHG emissions that were lower than all the conventionally produced proteins, but the amount of sustainable energy used in the production of cellular-grown meat has to be greater than 30%.

Figure 1 from the Sinke/Odegard Paper on the LCA of Cultivated Meat showing the effects of using either conventional power sources and sustainable power sources on the level of GHG emissions for cultivated meat.

Sinke/Odegard also stated that the majority of the environmental impact for cultivated meat hinges on just two factors: electricity source and the medium used to grow the cell-based meat.

So far, so good.

But what caught my eye was the use by Sinke/Odegard of ‘global averages’ of GHG emissions as comparisons.

They relied on data from another pair of researchers, Thomas Poore and Joseph Nemecek who, in 2018, published a paper entitled ‘Reducing food’s environmental impacts through producers and consumers’, where they consolidated data from over 38,000 farms producing over 40 different agricultural goods from around the globe in a meta-analysis comparing different food production systems and their environmental impact.

Through this meta-analysis, Poore/Nemecek computed global averages for the GHG emissions of 40 agricultural goods, in particular, the production of beef, pork, chicken and plant-based meat alternatives.

Global averages — while a useful overall data point in the discussion about the contribution of agricultural production to GHG emissions — tend to gloss over regional differences in production methods in those emission calculations.

Ryan Katz-Rosene, an Associate Professor of Ecological Political Economy and Climate Policy at the University of Ottawa, did his own analysis of the Poore/Nemecek study.

In a self-described ‘nerdy’ twitter thread, he pulled out the Canadian data to determine what the Canadian values would be for GHG emissions for our beef, pork and chicken industries.

What he discovered was surprising: Canada’s agriculture actually is a far better performer on the issue of GHG emissions than those of other countries:

• The Global mean GHG footprint for beef from the dairy sector is 33 kg CO2e per kg of product at the store. The Canadian data show GHG footprints less than a third of that (10.7 & 9.6 kg CO2e per kg product, respectively);
• The Global mean GHG values for pork, poultry & lamb respectively are 12.3 kg CO2e; 9.87 kg CO2e; and 39.72 kg CO2e. The Canadian mean GHG values are 8.95 kg CO2e for pork; 5.4 kg CO2e for poultry; and there are no studies from North America reporting for lamb.

Based on his analysis of the Canadian data, he concluded that the values for Canadian ruminant animals (cows) are somewhere between 9.6–64 kg CO2e per kg and 5.5–9 kg CO2e per kg of monogastric (pork, poultry, lamb) meat in Canada.

As a bonus, those values include the GHG impacts across the supply chain (including land use, loss, retail, packaging, transport, etc.)

Katz-Rosene also took at look at available studies of lab-grown meat as well. Of the three LCA studies out there (based on studies of specific locations, such as Thailand, Spain and California — again, all different from Canada), the mean is 4.7 kg CO2e per kg of cell-cultured meat, which is a bit lower than poultry in Canada, less than half of the beef from dairy in Canada, and about a fifth of an average of regular beef.

However, Katz-Rosene notes that the three LCA studies did not include land use, loss, retail, packaging and transport — unlike the Poore/Nemecek studies — and also excluded the effects of growth factor production and waste water treatment and treatment of other waste products. If included, the value for lab-grown meat will be ‘considerably’ higher.

So, the GHG emission claims of cellular-grown meat are certainly better than conventional meat production methods, but the current research purporting to demonstrate this has some data holes that require filling before we can do a real apples-to-apples comparison.

But as I read the different research pieces on cellular-grown meat, a number of other issues surfaced that are far more serious than the production of GHG emissions:

• Nutritional values. While the meat grown in bio-reactors is based on cells taken from live animals, the nutritional values of cellular-grown meat appear to be lower than meat produced using conventional methods (7%-19% for cellular-grown vs 26–27% for beef/chicken raised conventionally). As a result, a consumer would need to consume more of the cellular-grown variety just to stay even with the protein intake they would normally get with regular meat. If you consume more on a per capita basis, then the environmental impact is affected as a result;
• Cost. The Good Food Institute (GFI) — a non-profit that represents the alternative protein industry — released a Techno-economic analysis (TCA) study earlier this year that purported to show that the projected costs of producing a kilogram of cellular-grown meat would decrease by an astonishing 4000% over the next nine years — from $22,000/kg today to about $5.50/kg — by addressing a series of technical and economic barriers that could lower the production costs over that period of time. It seemed like a miracle. And it is. An external expert with experience in the field of cellular growth mediums did his own critical analysis of the GFI cost study and concluded that it projected unrealistic cost decreases, and left key aspects of the production process undefined, while significantly underestimating the expense and complexity of constructing a suitable production facility using bio-reactors. Another organization, Open Philanthropy, did its own study of the costs of cellular-grown meat, and concluded that it will never be cost competitive with current methods of producing protein — any protein. The lead researcher (David Humbird) for Open Philanthropy concluded, ‘Clearly, I don’t think cultured meat has legs. I think I make that clear in [my] paper, if not in such colloquial terms. But it seems like a bunch of hooey to me’. Producing cellular-grown meat is a process similar to producing vaccines. You need sterile facilities to prevent contamination, access to sources of growth medium, excellent quality control and highly trained people at every step of the process to ensure that nothing goes awry. A clean room to house a few of those would cost another US$40 – 50 million. The electricity needed to power all that, another huge cost. Costs are affected accordingly.
• Complexity. Growing meat in a bio-reactor, at scale to produce volumes that will have an impact on consumption, is a hugely complex process. The expression ‘what could go wrong?’ comes to mind when considering all the myriad steps (courtesy of Joe Fassler of The Counter) needed to produce a mere sliver of meat: 1) you begin with a 1.5-milliliter vial of production-optimized animal cells used to inoculate a 250-ml flask filled with a growth medium — a nutrient-dense broth of purified water, salts, glucose, amino acids, and “growth factors” (the hormones, recombinant proteins, cytokines and other substances that regulate cell development and metabolism, as well as fetal bovine serum, which is blood from unborn cow fetuses. It’s important to note that some companies use growth media that does not contain fetal bovine serum); 2) After 10 days the cells are moved to their first bioreactor, a small, 50-liter model; 3) In another 10 days, they would be moved to a larger, 12,500-liter stirred batch reactor, similar to what you see in a brewery. More fluid is pumped into the reactor as cells multiply, maintaining a specific ratio of fluid to cells. Any cultured meat facility, real or imagined, will likely need to operate this way: with a graduated series of ever-larger reactors; 4) the stirred-batch reactor will be harvested three times to fill four smaller perfusion reactors, more sophisticated vessels that help the cells mature and differentiate. At the end of the process, each perfusion reactor would ultimately deliver a total of 770 kilograms of cultivated meat, slightly more than the weight of a single live steer before slaughter — this time without the bones and gristle. And this doesn’t include inventing some kind of machinery to ‘exercise’ the meat cells to stimulate growth; all beef cows wander in their pasture, even ones that are later fattened in a facility prior to slaughter. Replicating that wandering activity is a technical hurdle that hasn’t been invented yet. In order to scale production, bigger bio-reactors will need to be considered, something that has never been done due to the overall complexity and cost; the hypothetical cost of a 100,000 litre bio-reactor is in the neighbourhood of US$20 million.

This is a relatively small bio-reactor compared to what is needed to produce cellular-grown protein at scale.

• Waste. Once a particular line of cells within a bio-reactor has been contaminated, the whole line needs to be dumped, the reactor sterilized and you start over. Animal cells grown in such complex growth media have no immune system; they’re highly susceptible to contamination from the most innocent of sources: a technician who has a cold, a stray cell on a glove. But once that cell line is contaminated, you dump it where? How is this waste treated, if at all? And, if you’re producing at scale, that’s a lot of potential waste to dispose of over time. At current prices of $490/litre, growth medium isn’t cheap and all those components need to be treated with care if this even has a hope of working correctly. Then there are the clean rooms. In order to keep them clean, a lot of disposable plastic is used. Again, at scale, production of cellular-grown meat will generate a lot of plastic waste that needs proper disposal. Add to this the possibility of contamination from the plastic used in the clean rooms of the final product, through the transmission of endocrine disruptors, the very thing that has been linked to disruptions in the hormone system of humans. Finally, the one study that has been done to look at the GHG emissions of the pharmaceutical industry found that it emitted more GHG emissions than the automotive industry. Given that production of cellular-grown meat is similar to producing vaccines, there’s clearly some additional reflection that needs to be done.

GHG emission level reductions that are questionable.

Lower nutritional values.

Immense cost.

Enormous complexity.

The generation of mountains of waste.

Is this the future that DeCaprio has in mind?

I can’t pretend to speak for Mr. DeCaprio. But somehow I doubt it. His beliefs, and his pocketbook, are in the right place, but in this specific case, the jury is very much out on whether or not this is the path that humans need to take to generate the protein we need.

In an era where industrializing the production of food has led to innumerable problems — antibiotic resistance, the production of new viruses, animal cruelty, pollution, soil degradation, obesity—does adding yet another highly complex, technology-dependent method of food production even make sense? Maybe it will, someday. But those advocating for it need to demonstrate very clearly that the entire production chain has been thoroughly studies for its effects on the environment; not just pieces of it.

We should instead be focusing on what we know, on what we’ve learned across centuries of trial and error. We know farming works. We know that we can improve how we farm, to turn farming into a vigorous cycle of carbon sequestration and soil renewal, of greater diversity in the food we consume and greater food sovereignty in making choices of what we consume based on where it is grown.

Will it be enough?

Not with current consumption habits, particularly in North America and Europe.

We’ll need to find a better balance between our consumption of meat protein and plant-based protein, and learn to make better choices in the animal proteins that we do choose to eat. Through a combination of continuing consumer education about food and food systems, and more ethical means of producing food (both animal and plant-based), we can address many of the most pressing environmental problems of today’s agricultural system. And we can feed ourselves with real food in the process.

We’ve begun to make these steps. We just need to keep going. And ignore the siren call of those who think that a technological solution is the way out of our self-induced problems.

Further reading:

• Joe Fassler, Lab-grown Meat is Supposed to be Inevitable. The science tells a different story. https://thecounter.org/lab-grown-cultivated-meat-cost-at-scale/
• Tom Philpott, Is Lab Meat about to hit your dinner plate?, https://www.motherjones.com/food/2021/08/is-lab-meat-about-to-hit-your-dinner-plate/
• Mosa Meat, Where’s the Beef? A First-Hand Assessment of Cultivated Meat Progress, https://mosameat.com/blog/cultivated-meat-progress