Today’s Science, Tomorrow’s Food
Globally, over 70% of freshwater is utilized for agriculture. These amounts can reach as much as 95% in some developing countries. Poultry, pork, and meat industries are contributing to a huge water footprint. In fact, 1,800 gallons of water are used per pound of beef produced.
By 2050, we will need to feed a planet of over 10 billion people, requiring an estimated 50% increase in agricultural production and, in turn, a 15% increase in water removal. And in the next 50 years, we’ll need to raise more food than we have produced in the last 10,000 years, combined.
Rising incomes and economic development are also expected to impact the growth of food demand for meat, fish, and dairy products, including a demand for feed, such as protein meals and coarse grains. This trend will have important consequences since meat and dairy production are more water-intensive than that of cereals.
In our current changing environment and global agricultural markets, the industry faces three challenges.
- It has to increase the production of safe and nutritious food to meet the growing demand driven by population rise.
- The agricultural industry has to create jobs and incomes in order to contribute to poverty elimination and economic growth in rural areas.
- Agriculture has a major role in the sustainable management of natural resources and must mitigate the threat of climate change,
which is already determining livelihoods, especially those vulnerable.
Even if the agriculture industry somehow figures out how to sustain its current methods to satisfy the rapidly expanding population, something needs to change.
Raising livestock necessitates a great deal of land while disrupting natural habitats. Meat products from animals demand plenty of water and precious resources. If these wasteful food habits continue, there will be food and water scarcity.
If that isn’t damaging enough, raising livestock is also accountable for emitting methane gas into the atmosphere, which is 23 times more powerful and destructive to the environment compared to carbon dioxide. Agriculture is responsible for contributing 18% of greenhouse gas emissions, while transportation contributes 14% of carbon dioxide emissions.
Traditional ways of producing agriculture require tons of food, water, and land. This is why it is absolutely essential our farming methods change!
Although many people have begun to recognize this grave issue and transition to solutions such as becoming vegan, this is not the case for billions. Nonprofits have attempted to persuade people to change the way they eat, but by in large people love to eat meat, Americans especially. We all have grown up used to these same foods that are draining our water systems, taking up all our land, and leading to severe climate disasters. All of this destruction will amount to nothing; we won’t even be able to feed the billions around the globe.
So What Can We Do About This?
Cellular Agriculture is the answer. Cellular agriculture is the production of animal-sourced foods from a cell culture. This groundbreaking technology can produce the same delicious meat products: 100% raised in a lab. Cellular agriculture is the food of the future.
These meats and animal byproducts will use a fraction of the land, water, and resources that traditional agriculture requires. Cellular agriculture also eliminates the need to raise and slaughter livestock. Meat as we know it will be produced in a manner where we can use fewer resources to generate much more meat, while curbing greenhouse gas emissions and promoting animal welfare.
Cell-cultured Meat will Change the Agriculture Industry and Safely Produce Delicious Foods
Cell cultured meat isn’t a veggie burger. Or the bleeding plant based proteins like the Impossible Burger. It’s actual meat. All it requires is a handful of cells.
In the production of lab-grown meats, scientists collect stem cells out of animals such as cows, pigs, and chickens, and place these cells from isolations into a nutrient dense liquid medium. Then this “feed” goes into a bioreactor tank where cells mass will grow and proliferate. The resulting product — a combination of muscle and fat tissue — is identical to conventional meat on a molecular level.
Cultured meat is created by taking just a few cells from a small amount of animal tissue so they can further develop. With the help of heat, oxygen, sugar, salts, and proteins, this duplication is possible. The cells will in fact naturally replicate as scientists mimic the environment they’re produced in originally. The cells develop from cells into muscles and tissues, just like they would in the body of that animal.
Cell cultured meat will form the same way as it would inside an animal, since they consist of the same DNA building blocks. This is a great, sustainable method since no animals were harmed or killed in the process; only a small sample of their DNA was extracted. Using only one tissue sample from a cow, scientists can yield enough muscle tissue for 80,000 quarter-pounders.
Clean Meat Production Isn’t Perfect … Yet
The production of cell cultured meat still has its imperfections. First, this process is extremely expensive. In order for the cells to grow, a serum with the necessary nutrients is needed to support that growth and development. However, this serum is made using animal products, which is quite contradictory to the goal of producing meatless-meats in a clean, safe manner. Currently, lab-grown meat companies are working to find these alternatives that are cost-effective, appealing to taste, and vegan.
Another challenge companies are presented with is mastering the taste and texture of cultured meat. There is simply no way lab grown meat will survive and flourish in the market if it doesn’t taste like meat. In response, a variety of companies are working to improve the taste and texture of their products to match traditional meat offered in the market. They are even using artificial intelligence to test a handful of nutrients on their effect on taste and texture.
There is also the issue of public perception. Companies have made little scientific data available for independent review. Making critics wonder if cultured meat can even make it out of the labs and onto our dinner plates.
Also, there is no production facility that yet exists where we can measure the specific usage of resources. How much water is used? How much electricity does it take? How energy-intensive is it? These are all valid questions that currently fail to be answered. Until we have that information we won’t actually know exactly how environmentally friendly this new process is.
This is cause for concern for many people. Until lifecycle assessments can be conducted on a commercial scale and until these products are put forward for institutions such as the American Science Association, many will remain skeptical.
In order for the biggest customers in the world and consumers to be comfortable with this, we need a regulatory framework. These cell cultured meat companies believe their products are safe, they know it to be safe, but their goal is not to feed themselves. The goal is to feed millions, possibly even billions of people.
What’s In a Name?
This is only the first step in the battle to get cultured meat to the market. Agreements between the USDA and the FDA have not declared exactly how these products will be labeled.
The conventional meat industry is reticent to allow these cell-cultured meat companies to label their products as “meat”. Why does this matter? The name of these products is how the general public will perceive these products.
States like Missouri have already passed legislation banning cell cultured meat from even being called “meat”. This inspired many other states to follow suit. At the level of DNA, this is meat. But the reality is, it’s going to be a major hurdle if we have to invent a new language to talk about something as familiar to people as meat.
The technology is ready. The science is there. We just need regulation.
Memphis Meats → A First of Its Kind
Memphis Meats is a bay area startup company reinventing modern animal agriculture. They not only have the potential to replace the billions of cattle, hogs, and chickens raised worldwide each year, but also the grain and water they consume. The production of their clean meat uses a tenth of the water, and a hundredth of the land used to raise conventional animals. Memphis Meats is also looking at cutting down energy consumption by more than half.
Other competitive companies working on clean meat include Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat.
Just → Equitable Food Systems
Just is another startup working on several animal-free alternatives, such as animal-free mayo and egg-free cookie dough. In addition to mayo and cookie dough, they are one of a handful of companies involved in clean meat production. Their goal is to create a more just, equitable, and sustainable food system. Just hopes to accomplish this goal by improving prices, nutritional value, and the taste and texture of their products.
Just’s mission of improving nutrients is especially important due to the substantial amount of protein required for cattle growth. So many nutrients are required to feed cattle, however, when beef or other meat parts are harvested, a mere 3% is transferred to humans. To imagine that 97% of the food given to cattle is essentially wasted is appalling.
Another Holistic Application of Cellular Agriculture: Disrupting the Dairy Industry
As people recognize the dangers of climate change and how the meat industry is one of the biggest drivers of this disruption, many transitioned to vegetarianism. However, eggs and dairy are a part of the very same problematic system as meat. Imagine saying goodbye to the cream in your coffee, the butter on your toast, the milk in your cereal, cheese in all of its delightful forms: personally, that would suck. Food that is good for the environment and good for the animals forces us to compromise on flavor, nutrition, and our overall experience of food.
Animal agriculture and protein pose a grave threat to our planet as it is. Sure the easy solution would be to stop eating animal products and switch to alternatives, but that’s easier said than done. But yet again, cellular agriculture is here to save the day!
Animal-free milk. Produced without animals, containing the same exact proteins made in a cow, all while tasting identical to traditional milk. Using a combination of cow DNA, yeast, and sugars, milk can be produced, this time without the environmental footprint.
Perfect Day → Forget Soy, Almond, and Oat
Perfect Day set out to support the evolution of our food system as a whole, creating a more secure, environmentally friendly, and nutritious source of protein. Without the use of a single animal in the entire process. So how did this startup do it?
The key is fermentation — the art and science of converting nutrients from one form to another. Perfect Day created a type of yeast that converts sugar into milk protein. In other words, they are taking sugar, which the world is pretty good at producing, and converting it into high quality proteins that the world is demanding. What’s so innovative about this startup is they designed their process to fit into existing infrastructure, working with industries to scale up.
Their technology allows them to create any protein out there. But they chose dairy proteins for 2 reasons: their nutrition and functionality. Using high-tech gene sequencing, Perfect Day is producing dairy products in a revolutionary process.
- First, DNA from a cow is extracted, sharing its protein-producing qualities with ordinary food-grade yeast.
- This results in a new strain of the basic microbe behind bread and beer: this time with a milky twist.
- When fed with the right nutrients it can produce whey and casein, the building blocks of dairy products such as milk, yoghurt, and cheese.
- With Perfect Day’s dairy proteins, companies can still make cheese, yoghurt, and ice cream the traditional way, but it will be better for us, better for our planet, and better for the cows.
Perfect Day’s plan is to create a new way to make dairy proteins but in a manner so we can all go on eating our favorite food products; just healthier, kinder, and greener than ever before. The dilemma disappears.
Key Takeaways on Cellular Agriculture
The major issues with the way our food system operates today:
- Today, there are 70 billion land animals, but they feed only 7 billion people. Most of the feed we grow as society goes to feeding those 70 billion animals. Only a small fraction is converted into food we can use. The natural resources of water and land that are required to produce these products at scale are becoming more, and more scarce each day. But the demand is only growing.
- It’s hard enough to produce sufficient animal proteins to meet the demand of today. What about tomorrow? By 2050, global demand for protein is expected to increase by 80%. As mentioned previously, the world population is expected to surpass 10 billion people by 2050. Many of these new people will be in developing economies, as a larger and wealthier middle class emerges. Typically, one of the first things that these empowered consumers purchase are animal proteins.
These two factors create a dangerous “storm” since not only do we have to produce far more protein, but we must do so in a way that is fundamentally less destructive.
Cellular agriculture is the answer. It will revolutionize our food industry as we know it. Overall, it will require less land, use less water, release drastically less greenhouse gas emissions, while supporting the demand of our growing population.
Now that you know more about what cellular agriculture is, why it’s so necessary, and some current and exciting applications keep your eyes out for this emerging industry. Look out for these clean dairy and meat products in your very own grocery stores.
