Researchers around the world are racing to develop a commercially viable alternative to meat, without the inconvenience of raising and slaughtering millions of animals every year.
Lab-grown meat promises equivalent nutritional content to normal meat while requiring less energy and producing fewer emissions, but will people want to eat it once scientists work out the kinks?
The search for animal-free meat began more than a decade ago but has recently made serious advances. In 1999, Dutch inventor Willem van Eelen received patents for the “industrial production of meat using cell culture methods.” Eelen has been working on lab-grown meat ever since, sparking dozens of other labs to take up the cause over the past decade.
Scientists are now able to take cells from animals and entice them into reproducing in a nutrient-filled petri dish. The growing cells are then placed on a biocompatible scaffold, allowing the muscle tissue to further develop. The technology is still in its infancy, but it promises to not only change the way we eat meat but also benefit the environment.
A significant portion of land in the U.S. and around the world is used for raising livestock, particularly cattle. Farmers in the U.S. also use incredible quantities of land, fertilizer and fresh water to produce crops to feed these livestock. Lab-grown meat could make this wasteful process obsolete.
Eating organisms high on the food chain is an incredibly inefficient use of energy. Even livestock raised on a vegetarian diet represents a significant portion of lost energy because only a fraction of the energy an animal consumes will ever be passed on in the form of tasty meat.
Livestock also contributes significantly to global warming through emission of greenhouse gases via biological functions, as well as providing incentives for deforestation and other habitat destruction.
Lab-grown meat wouldn’t waste all of the energy and nutrients cows spend every day grazing, sleeping and doing whatever else it is cows do. It will also cut back on greenhouse gasses by reducing land requirements and cutting down on bovine flatulence.
A recent study by Oxford University and the University of Amsterdam estimated that replacing conventional livestock production with lab-grown meat could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by up to 96 percent while requiring between 7 and 45 percent less energy.
Unfortunately, by all accounts the meat looks terrible and tastes even worse. One researcher described it as “steak-flavored Jell-O.”
The best in vitro meat anyone has come up with so far still looks far from appetizing. The small white gummy strings of protein are hardly recognizable as meat and are only about the size of a contact lens.
Scientists will have to find a way to overcome these aesthetic hurdles either by mimicking the system of blood vessels that give real meat its coloration, or finding another way to make the meat more marketable.
This issue could be solved with dyes for the ground meat researchers are currently pursuing, but constructing a convincing steak would take significantly more time, energy and effort, and would almost certainly not be cost effective if it can be done at all.
As with many groundbreaking areas of research, the technical challenges of producing lab-grown meat will likely be dwarfed by the marketing challenge of convincing people to try the new meat alternative.
Consumers have traditionally been wary of genetically modified and cloned food, and I expect lab-grown meat to be met with the same skepticism.
With the way the technology is shaping up, I think we can hope for a reasonable facsimile of a hamburger sometime in the future, but we shouldn’t hold our breath waiting for the slaughter-free porterhouse.