Building a Better Burger: Could Lab Grown Meat Save the World?
By Madeleine Reilly
December 8, 2017
You are sitting down for dinner and burgers are on the menu. They are cooked like meat, they look like meat, and—you take a bite—they taste like meat. All in all, it feels like a pretty standard burger-eating experience. But what if you learned that your burger was grown in a lab?
If your appetite just plummeted, be prepared, because this may be the future of meat consumption. The emerging “clean meat” industry is comprised of a small number of food technology companies that share the goal of producing real meat, poultry, and seafood in an ethical and environmentally-conscious way.
Back in 2006, the United Nations’ (UN) Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) released Livestock’s Long Shadow, an extensive look into the link between animal agriculture and climate change. The numbers were startling then, and 11 years later, they continue to grow. Animal agriculture is responsible for more than 14.5 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions and occupies nearly a third of the earth’s cultivable land. The UN estimates the earth’s population will increase from the current 7.3 billion to 9.8 billion by 2050. Our food supply will need to match that increase. Unless there is a dramatic shift in our diet, our planet’s future is looking bleak.
Strategies for reducing the environmental impact of our diets include swapping main offenders, like beef, for poultry or plant proteins, or adopting a plant-based diet entirely. Despite the growing popularity of plant-based meat substitutes, like tofu, many people still crave the real thing. What if there were a way to satisfy the desire for meat while significantly reducing its environmental impact? Mark Post, the CEO of the first successful lab-grown meat company, MosaMeat, offers his answer: “We are producing meat, it’s just not in a cow.”
The complex process of producing and marketing lab-grown or ‘cultured’ meat can be divided into four main steps:
The Sample. An initial sample of cells is harmlessly acquired from a living animal. Ideally, immortal cell lines will be established from this sample, eliminating the need for an animal past this step.
Proliferation. The cells are then placed in a bioreactor (similar to what beer is brewed in) with a growth factor that provides the cells with nutrients so they can replicate.
Maturation. The cells are moved to another bioreactor to begin differentiating into, for example, muscle or fat cells, and growing along a scaffold. Scaffolds are biodegradable, edible structures that produce the familiar shapes of ground beef or a chicken breast.
Marketing/Distribution. Once the meat is grown and distributed to stores, it has to be well advertised, affordable, and appealing to consumers.
If companies can streamline this method, cultured meat is projected to be a key player in fighting our current climate crisis, as well as in promoting human health and animal welfare.
Since clean meat aims to eliminate the need to sustain livestock with food, water, and land, widespread acceptance is estimated to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 78 to 96 percent, land use by 99 percent and water use by 82 to 96 percent (as compared to conventional meat production). Clean meat could free up resources that could address world hunger; the grain currently grown for livestock feed in the U.S. alone could potentially feed 880 million people.
By moving meat production to a lab, cultured meat could spare billions of animals suffering on factory farms, garnering support from animal welfare groups like Mercy for Animals.
Memphis Meats CEO Uma Valeti sums up their mission: “Transform a giant global industry while contributing to solving some of the most urgent sustainability issues of our time.” This will take time, but with recent investments and advancements, mainstream clean meat is well on its way to becoming a reality. Until then, dietary adjustments remain the best way to lessen our individual footprints, but we might soon see the day when environmentalism, ethics, and better health will exist together on one plate.
Lab-grown meat has so far only been produced in small batches and many of these statements are just projections. Clean meat still faces technical and ethical challenges, as many environmentalists oppose genetic modification and other forms of bio-engineering.
Additionally, the growth medium used by clean meat laboratories is controversial. Fetal bovine serum—fetal calf blood—is needed to start production. Besides turning off any self-respecting vegan, it is counterintuitive to use the resources needed to raise a cow for the very meat whose purpose is to avoid that. Furthermore, this serum is expensive, difficult to obtain, and can carry disease.
Leading companies like MosaMeat, Memphis Meats and Hampton Creek have all pledged to find alternative plant-based growth mediums such as algae or cyanobacteria. Emily Byrd from the Good Food Institute, a nonprofit supporter of clean meat, promises that “there will be no animals used in media by the time clean meat is commercialized, for both ethical and practical reasons.” Scaffolds are also traditionally composed of animal collagen, but another food tech company, Geltor, is pursuing animal-free alternatives.
The biggest hurdle at this point is lab meat’s price tag, though it is worth noting that the price has fallen dramatically in just a few years. In 2013, MosaMeat’s hamburger cost $330,000, but by 2016 it cost about $11 per burger. The price is not quite competitive with conventional meat yet, but it is closer than ever. With more funds, animal-free ingredients and larger bioreactors can be purchased to enable production on an industrial scale, which will lower the market price.
Big names like Bill Gates, Richard Branson, and Google co-founder Sergey Brin have already invested in Memphis Meats and MosaMeat. On consumers’ perception of cultured meat, Brin feels that “if what you’re doing is not seen by some people as science fiction, it’s probably not transformative enough.”
While MosaMeat made the original lab hamburger, Memphis Meats successfully made the first lab-grown meatball in 2016, and the first lab-grown chicken and duck in March 2017. In a recent press release, Memphis Meats announced their goal of hitting consumer markets in 2021. Though MosaMeat predicts another 10 to 20 years will be needed before clean meat is fully commercialized. On the other hand, another company, Hampton Creek, has lofty plans to bring cultured meat to supermarkets by 2018.
Mark Post, a Dutch tissue engineer, painted this picture of the future in his TED talk about lab-grown meat: “20 years from now, you walk into a supermarket and you see two meats. One is made in the lab, it’s cheap and the same price, same taste, same color, and same mouthfeel. And you have this other product that now has an eco-tax, it’s four times more expensive because it’s scarce, and it also has this nasty little label that animals have suffered for that product; what are you going to choose?”
