Episode 49 - Cultured Meat

Cultured meat—also called cell-cultured meat, lab meat, in vitro meat, and clean meat—is meat produced through the replication of cells in a lab setting. This quote describes the basic idea:

“By introducing a single cell to the right set of circumstances, it will naturally divide and duplicate many, many times. Once those cells multiply enough times, they organize themselves into a visible mass called tissue. Most of the meat we eat is primarily muscle tissue, which is about 75 percent water, 20 percent protein, 5 percent fat, with a trace amount of carbohydrates.”[1]

How Cultured Meat Works

Culturing meat requires three things: cells, a nutrient-dense liquid medium to feed the cells, and a sterile bioreactor that provides the right conditions for growing cells.[2]

The cells are collected by performing a biopsy on a live animal, or by harvesting tissue from the ovaries of a newly slaughtered animal.[3] The healthiest cells come from a biopsy of a very young animal.[4] Scientists use stem cells, because stem cells can divide and multiply many times, and because they can transform into many different types of cells.[5] Or they can manipulate other cells by de-differentiating and then re-differentiating them.[6]

Culturing beef requires healthier cells than culturing chicken. Avian cells have more plasticity than mammalian cells, so it is easier to get them to do what you want.[7] That means that to culture beef, for example, the source animal has to be young. That isn’t necessary for bird cells.[8]

There are two schools of thought on how to ensure a steady supply of cells.[9] One is to collect cells from an animal farm every couple of months. Another option is to create an immortal cell line, which would eliminate the need to perform a biopsy on a live animal. Option two is better because it is cheaper, more consistent, and easier to scale. There are no truly immortal cell lines yet, but the science is getting closer.

Okay, onto the growth medium. Cell culturing used to require fetal bovine serum—blood drawn from the fetus of a cow—as a medium. That shit’s expensive ($1,150 for four cups)[10] and also cruel. To make cultured meat affordable, companies have had to find alternatives to this. The makeup of growth medium is a closely guarded trade secret, but companies like Eat Just claim to have engineered suitable plant-based or synthetic liquid mediums. Which makes sense, since the price of production has fallen. The medium is the biggest factor in pricing cultured meat.

The last ingredient is the bioreactor, which is a big container that functions sort of like a sort of mechanical cow.[11] The bioreactors in Future Meat Technologies, for example, can theoretically grow the equivalent of 1,500 chickens in just a few weeks.[12]

The main challenge with bioreactors is creating environments that allow for cells to replicate with minimal disturbances, which is tricky because cells like to grow in clumps but they also need access to the liquid medium and oxygen.[13] So, the bioreactors have to stir the liquid and keep the cells from sticking to the sides, without damaging the cells.[14] When cells are ready to be harvested they are separated from the medium through whirling the bioreactor at high speeds, so the cells spatter against the walls.

The Race to Bring Lab Grown Meat to Market

Cell culturing has a long scientific history, but culturing meat for human consumption has only recently become technologically possible.

The scientific background on cell-culturing dates back to 1885, when zoologist Wilhelm Roux extracted tissue from a live chicken embryo and maintained it in a saline solution for several days.[15] Advances in cell culturing occurred throughout the 20th century. For example, the surgeon Alexis Carrel sustained a piece of embryonic chicken heart tissue for thirty-four years starting in 1912.[16] Technological leaps in cell culturing brought major advances in medical research, but the prospect of lab-cultured meat remained a distant possibility.

But that changed. In the 1970s, researchers started growing muscle fibres in vitro.[17] The first patents for the process of culturing meat were approved in 1999.[18] In 2002, a scientist named Morris Benjaminson cultured the muscle tissue of a goldfish in a petri dish.[19] The project was funded by a $62,000 grant from NASA, which was interested in food alternatives to sustain astronauts on long space journeys.[20] The fish was fried in olive oil, garlic, lemon, and pepper. Researchers were not allowed to taste them because the product had not been approved by the FDA, but Benjaminson said “they looked and smelled just like fish fillets”.[21]

The first cultured meat that we know was consumed is cultured frog meat created by an Australian artist named Oron Catts. Catts served the frog meat to six guests in 2003 as part of an exhibit to draw attention to the hypocrisy required to love and respect animals yet also eat them.[22] 

The science really accelerated in the last two decades. In 2013 Mark Post presented the first cell-cultured hamburger at a televised event in London. The burger was made with cultured beef muscle tissue and cost over $300 000 to make.

There has been a race to get the first cultured meat to market. Since 2015 more than $100 million has been invested in cell-cultured meat by venture capitalists and existing food giants like Tyson Foods.[23] The cost of making cell-cultured meat has dropped from $1.2 million per pound to $50 per pound today.[24]

Major cell-cultured meat companies include: Eat JUST, Memphis Meats, Finless Foods, Mission Barns, Mosa Meat, Aleph Farms, and Future Meat Technologies. Four are based in the US, three are Israeli, and the remaining two are based in the Netherlands and Japan.[25] Most of the cultured meat companies are start-ups, but Eat JUST is a plant-based food company that has been selling condiments like Mayonnaise for quite some time.[26]

Cultured meat has overcome significant scientific barriers. While there is still much more work to be done to improve cultured meat, products are ready for the market. The reason these products are not widely available is regulatory hurdles

The first cell-cultured meat was sold in December 2018 in the Netherlands by Eat JUST—although this does not really count because the Netherlands food regulator . JUST was testing whether it could be grandfathered into old regulations before a new EU law came into effect, but the government did not interpret the rules the same way. 

So, Eat JUST had to wait another two years to sell cultured meat legally—which it did in December 2020 in Singapore. Singapore recently approved the first cultured meat for sale. The approved product is called “chicken bites” and is a sort of chicken nugget. The chicken bites are not yet widely available, but they are being sold at a restaurant in Singapore.

Why Cell-Cultured Meat?

Proponents generally advance three arguments for cell-cultured meat: animal welfare, climate change, and human hunger.

Animal Welfare

It’s no accident that the founders of cultured meat start-ups tend to be vegans. We have discussed the harms of animal agriculture on the show before. The living conditions on factory farms are horrific, and the vast majority of meat available on the market is from factory farms.

Every year, an estimated 65 billion land animals are killed for human consumption. And if you think that’s a lot, let me tell you about fish: more than 1 trillion fish are killed every year in fishing operations—and that doesn’t even include aquaculture.[27] Proponents of cell-cultured meat envision a future where that harm isn’t necessary.

Climate Change

Taking animals out of the equation also has immense potential benefit for the planet. Animal agriculture is responsible for an estimated 14% of greenhouse gases. A single 1,200-pound cow produces about 100 kilograms of methane, which is roughly equivalent to a car burning 230 gallons of gasoline.[28]

Animal agriculture is inherently wasteful. “It takes about 6 pounds of animal feed to produce 1 pound of beef, 3.5 pounds of feed for 1 pound of pork, and 2 points for a single pound of chicken. Animal agriculture relies on growing plant protein—vast fields of corn and soybeans—only to cycle it through an animal that has to be killed to yield less weight in food than the plants it ate.”[29]  

In William Gibson’s The Neuromancer, a cyborg character named Molly takes conventionally grown steak from a plate and says, “Gimme that. You know what this costs? They gotta raise a whole animal for years and then they kill it. This isn’t vat stuff.”

Speculative data from a 2011 study by University of Oxford researcher Hannah Tuomisto found that cultured meat could “require 45 percent less energy, produce 96 percent less greenhouse gas, and use 99 percent less land and 96 percent less water than […] current agricultural operations”.[30] That study might be slightly too optimistic, since it assumes companies are using the most environmentally friendly medium, but in any case there are substantial environmental benefits from cultured agriculture over conventional animal farming.

Human Hunger

The godfather of the cultured meat movement is a man named Willem van Eelen, and his motivation was primarily to address world hunger. As a POW in Japan during the Second World War, van Eelen experienced starvation and saw what it did to the people around him. He spent his life raising money for research into cell-cultured meat.[31]

Cultured meat is also theoretically safer, since it is produced in sterile conditions and thus is not exposed to pathogens. So, no need to use antibiotics, which could also help to prevent antibiotic resistance. But we also don’t really know whether there will be any long-run health effects from cultured meat.

Endnotes

[1] Purdy, Chase. (2020). Billion Dollar Burger: Inside Big Tech’s Race for the Future of Food. New York: Penguin Randomhouse LLC at p.30.

[2] Purdy, Billion Dollar Burger.

[3] Purdy, Billion Dollar Burger.

[4] Purdy, Billion Dollar Burger.

[5] Purdy, Billion Dollar Burger.

[6] Purdy, Billion Dollar Burger.

[7] Purdy, Billion Dollar Burger.

[8] Purdy, Billion Dollar Burger.

[9] Purdy, Billion Dollar Burger.

[10] Purdy, Billion Dollar Burger at p.37.

[11] Purdy, Billion Dollar Burger.

[12] Purdy, Billion Dollar Burger at p.40.

[13] Purdy, Billion Dollar Burger.

[14] Purdy, Billion Dollar Burger.

[15] Reese, Jacy. (2018). The End of Animal Farming. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

[16] Reese, The End of Animal Farming.

[17] Reese, The End of Animal Farming.

[18] Purdy, Billion Dollar Burger.

[19] Purdy, Billion Dollar Burger.

[20] Purdy, Billion Dollar Burger.

[21] Reese, The End of Animal Farming p.74.

[22] Reese, The End of Animal Farming.

[23] Purdy, Billion Dollar Burger.

[24] Purdy, Billion Dollar Burger.

[25] Purdy, Billion Dollar Burger.

[26] Purdy, Billion Dollar Burger.

[27] Purdy, Billion Dollar Burger.

[28] Purdy, Billion Dollar Burger at p.7.

[29] Purdy, Billion Dollar Burger at p.7.

[30] Purdy, Billion Dollar Burger at p.14.

[31] Purdy, Billion Dollar Burger.