Ever wondered if you can actually devour a juicy scrumptious burger in India to complete your cheat day? Enticing stacks of cheeseburgers are unavoidable while scrolling through one’s Instagram feed. Well, now you may have an option of consuming it without ethical remorse. The idea may not be too far-fetched in a country like India where cow slaughter is an inherent taboo. Recent developments in the food industry have allowed one to fulfill their desires to bite into a burger without offending almost half the country. Yes, that’s right! Several startups in the US have managed to produce meat without killing any animals.
The idea of ‘clean’ meat has grabbed the attention of many in the food community in spite of the ethical reasons for not killing an animal and the environmental concerns that come in tandem which may drive one away from such a concept. It is believed that humans consume about 300 million pounds of meat annually and that rate is only going to increase as the population continues to boom. Well traditionally, in order to consume that meat, there are other shocking concerns- it requires at least 16 pounds of grain to produce one pound of meat. Not only that, the cows we raise to feed ourselves release methane which account for about 15% of greenhouse gas emissions in the world. Even worse, methane is 30 times more potent than carbon dioxide as a heat trapping gas. When you sum up these facts, it really makes one question our decision to consume meat despite the large cost attached to it, and its environmental impact. The clean meats produced by companies like Memphis Meats and Mosa Meats don’t kill any live animals, but utilize a sample of muscle tissue from living animals. They extract stem cells from the tissue and put them in an environment where it can get sufficient nutrients and proteins to culture. After the stem cells are exposed to these conditions, they are persuaded to start multiplying into muscle tissues. Such a process sounds way too tedious and expensive for mass commercial production and that is true to an extent as the first time this process was used in 2013, it took about $325,000 to produce a burger. However, since then that cost has come down to about $11. The cost of such a burger is definitely a concern but there are other things which people have to consider- the taste itself. The first burger produced using this process was described as tasting an animal protein cake which to be honest doesn’t sound appetizing at all. Anybody consuming a burger would place taste as a first priority and then consider its environmental implications.
At this stage, companies have to tackle several roadblocks- they have to figure out how to increase the scale while keeping costs low at the same time. They have to cultivate a product which should be indistinguishable from the original in terms of texture and flavor. Lastly, they have to convince the average consumer to actually consume something grown in a petri dish at a lab. If they manage to resolve these issues with their product, we could expect something revolutionary for the environment as one would reduce the land and water consumption drastically across the world. Experts predict that lab cultured meat would reduce the amount of land and water used for livestock by 90% in a few decades. Such a change would have a massive positive impact from an environmental standpoint, since there would be 90% less greenhouse gas emissions. Like any disruption, this development has promising potential to change our way of consumption and even how our world survives in the years to come. For disruption at such a large scale, one would require money and a lot more resources to make it commercially viable. Recently, we’ve seen tech billionaire Bill Gates invest in companies in this space and we hope that it invigorates the idea into a large scale application. Until such time, keep swiping and salivating looking at those stacks on stacks.
