In summer 2013, a handful of people gathered in London in what looked like a TV set for a cookery show.
A man in a white coat and chef's hat basted a burger. The camera filming him cut to a close-up as he spooned oil onto the minced patty. Food critic Hanni Ruetzler perched on a high stool at the end of the counter. At length, a plate with the meat, a side of salad and a rather dry-looking sesame-topped bun was placed in front of her.
Ruetzler was about to taste a £215,000 ($330,000) burger, grown in a lab by a scientist who had dedicated his career to the cause of cultivated meat. That scientist, Mark Post of Maastricht University in the Netherlands, was seated right next to her.
If that wasn't pressure enough, her reaction was about to be featured on news programmes across the world later that day.
The Climate Question
This story is based on a recent episode of The Climate Question, a podcast and radio show from BBC World Service, which is also available on Apple and Spotify. It is written by Graihagh Jackson, who hosts the podcast.
Ruetzler delicately cut into the burger, ignoring the bread, and placed a small browned bite into her mouth. She chewed. The room, crowded with journalists, waited.
As the cameras zoomed in for a close up, she gave the sense of trying to be polite. "There's quite some intense taste," she began, before pausing for a moment. "It's close to meat. It's not that juicy but the consistent [sic] is perfect." She then added that she "miss[ed] salt and pepper", much to the amusement of the studio audience.
Ten years later, as I watch the video of Ruetzler tasting the burger, I'm left wondering whether I will ever get the chance to try cultivated meat myself. Today, lab-grown meat remains far from widely available. But with scientific advice on the need to scale down on meat consumption sparking a wave of interest in meat alternatives in recent years, could it be poised to stampede into restaurants?
Cultivated meat is grown in bioreactors: metal vats full of a nutritious broth that contains all the ingredients that the meat needs to grow (Credit: Good Meat)
"So the industry is fairly new," says Tasneem Karodia, co-founder of Mzansi Meat Co, a South African cultivated meat firm. "The first burger was made in the Netherlands in 2013. And probably three to four years later, there was a handful of companies. Now, we're sitting at probably over 100 companies in the space." Between them, they're growing lamb, duck, beef, chicken, fish and more. They are also collectively receiving billions of dollars of investment, according to The Good Food Institute, an alternative protein think tank.
But what exactly is cultivated meat?
Cultivated meat essentially means "replicating the same process you'd find inside of a cow, outside of the cow", says Karodia. In other words, lab-grown meat is genetically indistinguishable from the real deal.
The first step in making it is to take a small, peppercorn-sized biopsy from a cow – leaving the animal "up and running afterwards", Karodia notes. The biopsy is taken back to the lab where it's put into a bioreactor – a metal vat not unlike those beer is brewed in. It's full of a nutritious broth that contains all the ingredients that cells need to grow and grow.
Karodia tells me her company's broth contains fetal bovine serum (FBS). This has become controversial as it's derived from the blood of a cow foetus – meaning a pregnant mother needs to be slaughtered to make it. For that reason, Karodia is looking to replace FBS entirely. Her team hasn't figured out how just yet, but even if Karodia doesn't find a way, using FBS will still result in fewer calves, lambs, pigs, ducks and chickens being raised and slaughtered for consumption.
That means you don't need to use a significant portion of the Earth's land to plant soy and corn to feed all the animals, according to Josh Tetrick, chief executive of another cultivated meat firm, Eat Just. That, he says, results in fewer emissions. "So it's a way of eating meat that makes sense for the future." Indeed, Tetrick sees it as replacing all conventional meat one day.
Several studies and reports from think tanks and consultancies have made similar assertions about lab-grown meat, finding that it could substantially reduce greenhouse gas emissions. One study found cultivated meat would produce 96% fewer greenhouse gas emissions than conventional meat. Another found it would reduce emissions by 74-87%. The gains are higher for highly polluting livestock like beef or lamb and less for poultry or fish.
Greenhouse gas emissions from different sources of meat and meat alternatives (Credit: BBC; Source: Santo et al, 2020)
However, all these studies agree that cultivated meat will still be higher impact than most plant-based meat alternatives. And other studies find that it could be worse for the climate than even conventional livestock, due to the large amounts of energy needed to grow the meat and produce the growth media. Much of the disagreement arises from the fact that the studies are all trying to model a system that doesn't yet exist at scale.
Regardless, there is broader recognition than ever in the scientific community that the scale of livestock farming is unsustainable. Raising animals for meat causes a plethora of environmental issues from acid rain to algal blooms and accounts for 14.5% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions. Despite these warnings, meat production is expected to double by 2050 as the world's growing population make more money, meaning they can afford more meat.
Cultivated meat could perhaps begin replacing some meat. But does the assertion that it might not be an alternative but the alternative to meat really stand up?
As it stands today, there's only a single country in the world where you can wrap your tongue around one type of lab-grown meat. Even there, it's only available in one restaurant, and only on Thursdays.
Since January 2022, curious diners have been able to book a table at Huber's Butchery in Singapore. There they can sample cultivated chicken strips on a "spring vegetable orecchiette" pasta, or in a sandwich with a side of fries for around $14 (£11). The meat was previously available at another Singapore restaurant, 1880, starting in 2020.
Singapore is a tiny island in southeast Asia home to just under 5.5 million people. Its interest in lab-grown meat can be ascribed in part to this geography. Land is scarce, with 90% of its food imported, and food security is a high priority for the authorities. Consequently, the government has given tax incentives and subsidies to companies like Eat Just, which grows the cultivated chicken for Huber's Butchery.
Despite that support, the company only grows around a couple of kilos of lab-grown chicken a week – roughly equivalent to the meat from a single chicken.
To make more, and cheaply, the company would need more and bigger bioreactors to grow it in, says Tetrick. "The ability to scale up from smaller vessels to larger vessels is both an engineering-technical challenge, and also a capital challenge," he says. "It's hundreds of millions of dollars, ultimately billions of dollars, to build many of these facilities."
Tetrick admits this scale-up may never work. But "we think it's a bet worth taking," he says.
Eat Just is one of several cultivated meat firms headquartered on the west coast of the United States. Here, the FDA recently deemed some brands of cultivated chicken "safe to eat". However, those companies still can't legally sell it until their facilities are inspected by the US Department of Agriculture, something expected in 2023. In India, the government is funding research into cultivated meats. In contrast, there are plans in Italy’s parliament to ban all forms of cultivated meat over concerns about the country's food heritage.
In many countries, regulators haven't kept pace with the science. That means there's no legal classification for lab-grown meat, which is needed for its sale in some countries. Companies also have to demonstrate that their product is safe to eat. Such regulatory hurdles will take time to overcome.
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Importantly, people do seem to want lab-grown meat, according to JingJing Liu. She's a meat researcher officer at Teagasc, the Republic of Ireland's Agriculture and Food Development Authority, and has been conducting surveys across the world to assess the acceptance of cultured meat. Liu has found that from China to Cameroon roughly half the people she has surveyed say they would try it, providing it was better for the planet than conventional livestock.
That caveat is going to be hard to prove until the industry scales up. As it stands today, every company has its own special way of making meat. But broadly speaking, the growth media or broth the meat cells are grown in is the same as used in the pharmaceutical industry for things like vaccine development.
A pre-print (not yet peer-reviewed) study suggests that using pharma-grade media could mean that the impact of cultivated beef on the climate is actually four to 25 times greater than the average for the farm-reared equivalent. Karodia of Mzansi Meats hopes that ingredients we already use in food, like soy derivatives, could one day be used to grow the cells. Moving away from such a pure pharmaceutical-grade growth media would have a much lower carbon footprint, she says. But not all experts are convinced that this would lead to lower emissions.
"It's not entirely divorced from conventional agriculture. You're still going to need probably some crops, or possibly some kind of sustainable algae production, to go in and get that initial nutrient source," says John Lynch, a postdoctoral researcher from the University of Oxford in the UK. "Is it going to be soy? How's it going to be grown? And is it actually going to be that much more efficient than livestock production?" Such questions are yet to be answered.
The other main climate impact of cultivated meat is how much energy it takes to grow meat in a lab and how that energy is produced. Last year, just under two-thirds of the world's electricity was produced by burning fossil fuels, releasing carbon dioxide. That may change, given many countries' pledges to reach net-zero emissions by the middle of the century. Already, grids are increasingly powered by renewables such as wind and solar.
Even so, we simply don't know how energy-efficient it will be to produce large quantities of cultured meat. If it ends up being highly inefficient, it may not outweigh the climate cost of conventional agriculture. Instead, it could put a huge strain on the grids as they try to transition to renewable energy, says Lynch. "If we have increased energy demand through novel food production processes, then we're never going to achieve any of our climate targets," he says.
Industry advocates argue that labs take up less land than agriculture, meaning freed-up land could be used to grow forests or restore other major carbon sinks. In theory, this is true. But in practice, Lynch questions whether this land would indeed be used in this way: it might instead become "just another golf course".
"It's not the cultured meat per se which is actively good for the climate," says Lynch. "It's just that if you eat less meat, then there's less emissions and less land use associated with that."
Carbon Count
The emissions from travel it took to report this story were 0kg CO2, as the story was reported initially for The Climate Question podcast. The digital emissions from this story are an estimated 1.2g to 3.6g CO2 per page view. Find out more about how we calculated this figure here.
In other words, we can't overlook the fact that there are already low-carbon alternatives to meat, like lentil burgers and soy sausages. Still, change is hard and meat consumption is only going up. It may well be that cultured meats are an easier sell than their plant-based alternatives.
There's still a long list of barriers for cultivated meat to become more widely available. They range from consumer acceptance and green credentials to the technical feasibility of scaling-up and the capital required to do that. Nevertheless, Eat Just's Tetrick is hopeful that simple cultivated products like ground beef, sausages and chicken nuggets will be "more widely distributed" in the next five to ten years.
Perhaps it won't be too long before we can find out if food critic Ruetzler was just being polite – or whether it's really good enough to replace the real deal.
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*This story is based on a recent episode of The Climate Question, a podcast and radio show from BBC World Service, which is also available on Apple and Spotify. It is written by Graihagh Jackson, who hosts the podcast.
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June 02, 2023 at 06:08AM
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Why cultivated meat is still so hard to find - BBC
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