In December 1931 the future prime minister of England, Winston Churchill wrote an article for Strand Magazine in which he claimed that one day people will “escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium”.
According to authors William and Lynette Ray, Churchill's comment was the 73rd most entertaining prediction about life in the 21st century. However, unlike other predictions that they cover in their work that never came to pass, mass production of meat grown separately from the animal may become a reality in the near future.
Recently the head of the department of vascular physiology at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, Professor Mark Post, made international headlines, by receiving funding from a philanthropic organization to create a hamburger in a laboratory within the next year. Known as “in vitro” or “cultured” meat, lab produced meat has many supporters due to potential heath and environmental benefits.
Science Behind Cultured Meat
Most edible animal meat is made of skeletal muscle tissue. To create cultured meat, scientists extract myoblast cells, a precursor to muscle cells, from left over animal material at slaughterhouses or from living animals without causing them harm. To help the cells multiply they are soaked in a nutrient rich medium, consisting of sugars, amino acids, lipids, minerals amongst other essential nutrients. Sometimes this medium is fetal bovine serum, a nutrient-rich liquid taken from the blood of unborn calves, which can effectively grow cells in a lab.
After the cells have multiplied for several days they are put on a biodegradable scaffold system to support tissue formation. This scaffold could be made from plastic; edible bio-polymers (such as collagen, cellulose, alignate, chitosan); or long elastic sheets amongst other things. For several weeks, the cells are then placed in a bioreactor, a device used for growing cells in tissue engineering.
To stimulate growth and to help make the cultured meat texture resemble natural muscle, the meat must be exercised, stretched and flexed. In past experiments this was achieved with electric shocks. Mark Post says that electrical shocks would increase growth by 10 percent, but the vast quantity of energy required to produce meat in a lab or factory would make it uneconomically viable. Instead Post will exercise the meat by stretching and applying pressure to the muscle cells with velcro, relying on the muscles' own tendency to contract. As the velcro provides resistance, the muscle will put on bulk to increase the force of contraction.
In past experiments Post produced pale strips of muscle tissue, each of them around 2.5 cm long and less than a centimeter wide, making the meat so thin that it was transparent and would require 3,000 strips to make up the thickness of a hamburger. Currently growing the meat thicker would destroy the cells in the middle of the strip, by depriving them of oxygen and nutrients.. Post told Reuters that as the meat had no blood it lacked colour and appeared similar to the flesh of scallops.
Potential Benefits of Cultured Meat
According to the Worldwatch Institute, the livestock industry is responsible for the death of approximately 56 billion livestock who are raised and slaughtered each year. In 2006, the Food and Agriculture Organization reported that the livestock industry was:
- one of the greatest culprits of deforestation and biodiversity loss;
- emitting 18 percent of man-made greenhouse gas emissions;
- occupying 80 percent of all farmland;
- consuming 10 percent of the world's fresh water supplies when 64 percent of the population may be living in freshwater stressed area by 2025.
Theoretically cultured meat only needs a single animal to provide myoblast cells to produce the world's demand for different types of meat within weeks as well as producing less waste than the production of conventional meat. According to scientist Hanna Tuomisto, compared to conventional meat, the production of cultured meat may involve approximately:
- 7 - 45 percent lower energy use;
- 78 - 96 percent lower greenhouse gas emissions;
- 99 percent lower land use; and
- 82 - 96 percent lower water use.
Other benefits include:
- The possibility of significantly reducing the incidence of food-borne illnesses, such a e.coli, campylobactor, salmonella and mad cow disease as well as removing the exposure to pesticides, arsenic, dioxins, mercury, antibiotics and hormones associated with conventional meat production.
- Cultured meat would alleviate concerns on the treatment of animals and their suffering related to factory farming, including issues of overcrowding, poor animal diets and use of growth hormones to increase yields.
- Controlling fat content and possibly reducing levels of saturated fatty acids, which are plentiful in conventional meat and which have been linked to heart disease. Cultured meat may have increased levels of poly-unsaturated fatty acids, which are beneficial for blood cholesterol.
Some Past Experiments and History of Cultured Meat
In 1912 biologist, surgeon and Nobel Prize winner, Alexis Carrel kept a piece of chicken heart muscle alive and beating for 18 years by soaking it in a nutrient bath, demonstrating that it was possible to keep muscle tissue alive outside of the body.
In 1948 author William Gibson wrote his cyberpunk novel, Neuromancer, where people ate 'vat grown meat' which was grown apart from the animal. In Frederik Pohl and Cyril. M. Kombluth 1952 science fiction novel The Space Merchants artificial food plants produced a giant throbbing mass of cultured chicken breast, kept alive by algae, which was called 'chicken little'
In the early 1950s doctor Willem van Eelen of Netherlands had the idea of using animal tissue culture for the generation of meat products and in 1999 van Eelen’s theoretical idea was patented.
In 2002, NASA, interested in being able to provide astronauts on deep space missions with a continual source of fresh food rather than a supply of freeze dried meals, funded Morris Benjaminson at Touro College, New York, to investigate making meat from muscle cells. Benjaminson and his team of scientists cut chunks of muscle five to ten centimetres long from large goldfish, washed the chunks in alcohol, and immersed them in a vat of fetal bovine serum.
One week later Benjaminson and his team found the chunks had grown by 14 percent. They then dipped the fish in olive oil and flavoured it with lemon, garlic and pepper before frying it and presenting it before a panel of testers.
“We wanted to make sure it'd pass for something you could buy in the supermarket," said Benjaminson, "they (the testers) said it looked like fish and smelled like fish, but they didn't go as far as tasting it”. The inability to taste the food was due to laws by the US Food and Drug Adminstration which prevent the consumption of experimental food.
Public Acceptance
If the lab grown meat became certified safe for human consumption, it would have to overcome the fact that a steak soaked in a nutrient bath and grown in a petri dish probably wouldn't sound particularly appetizing to many people. This is complicated further because due to red tape nobody has ever tasted cultured meat, so nobody can comment on its flavor. Some people may express revulsion at the idea that scientists are going against nature by growing animal meat separate from a living animal.
Then there is price. Nobody knows exactly how much cultured meat would cost, but it's unlikely that it will be able to compete with the relatively cheap price of conventional meat. One estimate suggests it would cost $5 million to produce every kilogram of cultured meat. According to Post when the lab grown hamburger is ready by August-September 2012 it may cost 250,000 euros (approximately $340,000 Australian dollars), making it “likely the most expensive hamburger we will ever see”. However over time, as technical aspects of cultured meat production advance, efficiency will greatly improve and costs for the lab grown meat will drop considerably.
Animal welfare groups are generally supportive of cultured meat, with PETA offering one million dollars to the scientists who produce the first lab-grown chicken meat by June 2012.
In an interview with Reuters, Stellan Welin, a bioethicist at Linkoping University in Sweden, criticized conventional meat production as being unsustainable, as currently an animal needs to eat 100 grams of vegetable protein to produce 15 grams of edible meat. Welin also argued that cultured meat is no less appealing than the treatment of livestock being mass-produced in factory farms.
Several recent opinion polls have found that the majority of the public are not interested in eating lab grown meat. A survey conducted earlier this year by Sydney Morning Herald polled 8,042 people, 52 percent of whom said that they would refuse to eat cultured meat. On another opinion poll currently being run on news site stuff.co.nz,, which has so far polled 11,419 people, 63.2 percent of people have said "no way" to ever eating a lab grown sausage. Another current poll on The Week website has so far had 54percent of people reject lab-grown meat.
Molecular biologist Margaret Mellon from the Union of Concerned Scientists has criticized the idea of mass producing cultured meat in a factory, believing that all food should be grown on the land, using the Earth's resources and the power of the sun and not in a factory that may amount to massive energy consumption.
"Picture it: You've got a big compound of buildings with scientists running around tending big vats of cultured cells, making sure that they're all at a constant temperature, that the cells are being kept sterile," Mellon told National Public Radio in the U.S. "I mean, where does that energy come from? That's a lot of fossil fuel."
Mysterious Video with an Alternative Solution
Earlier this year Fox News in the US ran a story about Mitsuyuki Ikeda, a researcher at Japan's Okayama Laboratory, who began producing artificial meat from a different source: human faeces straight from the sewer. The meat consisting of 63 percent protein, 25 percent carbohydrates, 3 percent lipids, and 9 percent minerals is likely to be 10 to 20 times more expensive than conventional meat, due to the research costs. To refine the flavour of the artificial burger meat, Ikeda added soy protein.
Some commentators claim that the report is an elaborate joke, with CBS News suggesting it may have been put together by a news satire organisation like 'The Onion' whose fake and comedic news stories are occasionally mistaken as real reports. The online magazine, Salon, says that the story came from a mysterious news report uploaded to YouTube and that the international media have made nearly identical reports on Ikeda's work since 1993.
Sources:
Betti, M., Datar, I., "Possibilities for an in vitro meat production system", Innovative Food Science and Emerging Technologies. Vol. 11, 2010.
Bhat, Z.F. & Bhat., H. "Tissue-Engineered Meat: :The Future", Journal of Stored Products and Postharvest Research, Vol. 2(1), January 2011.
Churchill, Winston., "50 Years Hence", Strand Magazine, December 1931.
Coghlan, Andy., "Meat without slaughter: 6 months to bio-sausages", New Scientist, 31/8/2011
Cohen, David. "Grow your own meat", BBC News, 24/10/2011
Edelman, PE., McFarland, DC., Mironov, VA., & Matheny, J.G "In vitro cultured meat production", 2004, available from http://www.new-harvest.org/resources.htm
Goss, Terry., "Tube Burgers: The World of in Vitro Meat", National Public Radio (Fresh Air), 1/09/2011.
Kelland, Kate., "In-vitro meat: it's what's for dinner" Reuters, November 11, 2011.
Levine, Ketzel., "Lab Grown Meat a Reality, But Who Will Eat it?", National Public Radio (NPR), May 20, 2008.
Sample, Ian., "Fish Fillets Grow in Tank", New Scientist, March 2002.
Tuomisto, H.L & Teixeira de Matto, M.J., "Environmental Impacts of Cultured Meat Production", Environmental Science and Technology. June 2nd 2011.
Paul Campobasso - I live in Melbourne, Australia and recently graduated from university completing a Bachelor of Arts with Honours in Politics and a ...
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