Professor Mark Post of Maastricht University in the Netherlands made the news in 2013 with the world's first lab-grown hamburger. He and his research team have been working since then to turn the exotic proof-of-concept product into something that will be within reach as an everyday food source:
"It was $350,000 when we first publicized the patty," said Post. "At this point we've already managed to cut the cost by almost 80 percent. I don't think it will be long before we hit our goal of 65 to 70 dollars per kilo."
That would drop the five-ounce burger to below $10, a number that Post hopes will eventually drop even further.
Cultured meat, also known as in vitro meat, victimless meat, cruelty-free meat, shmeat, test-tube meat, and frankenmeat, is in the coming years going to be a thing.
Advocates say it will create less environmental pollution, require less energy to produce than meat from a live animal, and it will prevent the animal suffering that's endemic in our current industrial meat production system.
Animal farming is a huge burden on the environment. Livestock produces methane which contributes to global warming, so reducing the amount of livestock will help. Animal waste from huge livestock farms (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, or CAFOs) is collected in waste lagoons that pollute the land, water, and air around them.
And as the demand for meat grows with the growing human population, so do the impacts on the environment.
Meat — despite popular movements to decrease the amount humans consume — is still a central part of diets around the world. People who live in industrial countries (like the United States) eat roughly 210 pounds of it each year. And consumption in the developing world, where people eat closer to 66 pounds each year, is climbing fast....
Our collective affinity for meat likely began out of circumstance — humans that lived inland from the coast had little choice but to hunt in order to live — and has persisted for evolutionary reasons. Meat carries nutrients like zinc and protein, promotes growth, and provides energy.
It's not a situation that can go on
unchecked, unchanged.
"We believe that cultured meat is part of the future," said Cor van der Weele of Wageningen University in The Netherlands. "Other parts of the future are partly substituting meat with vegetarian products, keeping fewer animals in better circumstances, perhaps eating insects, etc. This discussion is certainly part of the future in that it is part of the search for a 'protein transition.' It is highly effective in stimulating a growing awareness and discussion of the problems of meat production and consumption."
So what is this cultured meat stuff? Where does it come from, and how do they make it?
It's basically edible muscle tissue grown without the need to raise and slaughter a living animal.
A small sample of muscle tissue is taken from a living animal (supposedly painlessly). The individual cells are separated out and then cultured in a medium. They grow by replicating themselves, eventually merging into fibers. These fibers are the muscle, the protein that our bodies use when we eat traditional meat. Layered together, these strands of cells are what make up the cultured meat.
The medium the cultured meat grows in determines how meat-like it ends up. It can be collagen, which is a gelatin-like animal product already used in a wide array of food, cosmetics, etc, or it could be something not animal-derived.
And then the growing meat needs to be exercised (!) to boost its protein content:
In order to produce three-dimensional in-vitro meat, it is necessary to have a scaffold. The ideal is an edible scaffold that would not need to be extracted from the end product. To simulate the stretching that muscle cells undergo as a living creature moves around it is highly desirable to develop a scaffold that could periodically shift its form thus “exercising” the cells. This could be achieved by using a stimuli-sensitive scaffold made of alginate, chitosan or collagen, from non-animal sources. The scaffold would then stretch periodically in response to small changes in temperature or pH levels. The cells could also attach themselves to a membrane or tiny beads which could be layered on top of each other and connected together....
Through fluctuations in temperature an environment is created which can be likened to a fitness centre with movement training for the muscle cells. Cultured meat must consist of small and large fibres of muscle cells in addition to connective tissue which produces collagen and elastin as well as fat cells which are important for the taste of the end product.
Obviously, this would be as disruptive a technology as 3-D printing promises to be.
It would affect everything from the most local land use to global trade.
Every town or village could have its own small-scale cultured meat factory, or carnery. It could be incorporated into vertical farms and set in the midst of dense populations, producing new kinds of jobs and reducing the need for long-distance transportation of food, and for the large expanses of land currently needed for agriculture.
So is such a constructed product as cultured meat actually meat? What do various religions that have food restrictions around meat have to say about it?
It may or may not be kosher:
Chabad's Rabbi Yehuda Shurpin wrote the Talmud tells of "miraculous meat" that fell from heaven or was conjured up by rabbis studying a mystic text.
Since it was automatically kosher because it wasn't from a real animal, this could be a model for test-tube meat.
But he said if the stem cells are real meat, they have to come from a cow slaughtered according to kosher law, which says the animal's throat must be slit while it is still conscious.
It's probably halal:
"There does not appear to be any objection to eating this type of cultured meat," the Islamic Institute of Orange County in California responded to a questioner on its website....
Gulf News in Dubai quoted Abdul Qahir Qamar of the International Islamic Fiqh Academy in Jedda, Saudi Arabia, as saying in-vitro meat "will not be considered meat from live animals, but will be cultured meat."
As long as the cells used are not from pigs, dogs or other animals banned under the halal laws, he said, the meat would be vegetative and "similar to yogurt and fermented pickles."
For Hindus, it's still meat, and still off the menu:
The prospect of meatless beef has also prompted debate in India, where the Hindu majority shuns steaks and burgers because it considers the cow sacred.
"We will not accept it being traded in a marketplace in any form or being used for a commercial purpose," Chandra Kaushik, president of the Hindu nationalist group Akhil Bharat Hindu Mahasabha, told the India Real Time blog.
What about to ethical vegetarians as opposed to religious ones? My daughter, who's now in her twenties and has been a determined ethical vegetarian since late childhood, says she would have no objection to it. PETA is in favor of it, and has in fact in the past offered a
$1 million prize to the first laboratory to produce commercially viable in vitro meat.
As for myself, I'm not sure what I think about it. Over the years I've seen too many rosy-sounding technologies turned into something threatening, dangerous, or oppressive by corner-cutting corporations and laissez-faire or power-mad government bodies to have too sanguine a view.
If you thought melamine in your dog food was bad, wait till its equivalent is in your looks-like-a-chicken. Because it will be there, at some point, guaranteed.
But mostly it makes me think of one of the stranger science-fiction novels ever, Doomtime. In the far future, Creed is the maintenance man for his city's flesh pool. In the first scene, he's attacked by an assassin who tries to throw him into the seething cauldron of raw protoplasm, and things only get more bizarre from there.
Maybe we have a while yet before we have semi-sentient protoplasm molding itself selflessly into "tasty chickens," but it's on its way....