How ‘lab-grown’ meat could help the planet and our health

How ‘lab-grown’ meat could help the planet and our health

Updated: 9:32 PM CDT Jun 6, 2022

What if there was a way to eat meat without farming and killing billions of animals per year, contributing to the climate crisis and risking high cholesterol levels?”Cultivated meat is real meat grown directly from animal cells,” Uma Valeti, founder and CEO of Upside Foods, said via email. “These products are not vegan, vegetarian or plant-based－they are real meat, made without the animal.””The process of making cultivated meat is similar to brewing beer, but instead of growing yeast or microbes, we grow animal cells,” Valeti added.Scientists start by taking a small cell sample from livestock animals such as a cow or chicken, then identify cells that can multiply.”From there, we put these cells in a clean and controlled environment and feed them with essential nutrients they need to replicate naturally,” Valeti said. “In essence, we can re-create the conditions that naturally exist inside an animal’s body.””It’s meat without slaughter,” Christiana Musk, founder of Flourish*ink, said at the Life Itself conference, a health and wellness event presented in partnership with CNN. Flourish*ink is a platform for curating and catalyzing conversations on the future of food.Progressing from lab production to making products in commercial facilities, some companies are moving away from the term “lab-grown meat,” said a spokesperson for Mosa Meat, a Netherlands-based food technology company. Instead, these companies refer to it as cultivated meat, cultured meat, cell-based or cell-grown meat, or non-slaughter meat.In addition to mitigating animal slaughter, cultivated meat could also help slow climate change driven by greenhouse gas emissions such as carbon dioxide and methane. The food system is responsible for about a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions, most of which are from animal agriculture. The transport needed for agriculture emits both methane and carbon dioxide, and clearing land and forests－including for agriculture－emits carbon dioxide, according to the United Nations.”The presumption is we’re going to do better because of the sustainability element here－to reduce the land footprint, reduce the water needs and reduce some of the waste streams that go out from feedlots,” said David Kaplan, a professor of biomedical engineering at Tufts University. Waste streams containing carbon dioxide and methane are responsible for large flows of emissions into the atmosphere.The industry is about 10 years old, so cultivated meat is still a few years away from being commercially available to U.S. consumers in grocery stores or restaurants－and maybe up to 20 years more for it to replace a substantial portion, or all, of the traditional meat industry, Kaplan said. At this time, Singapore is the only country to have approved cell-based meat for consumer consumption.Until then, cultivated meat and its potential benefits for animal, human and environmental health are more hope than promise.How it worksMaking cultivated meat is based on the field of tissue engineering－growing human tissues in a lab for medical repairs and regeneration, Kaplan said.Scientists get cell samples from animals by harvesting a tiny piece of tissue taken via biopsy, isolating cells from eggs or traditionally grown meat, or obtaining cells from cell banks. These banks already exist for purposes such as medication and vaccine development, said Josh Tetrick, CEO of Eat Just, Inc., a California-based company that makes plant-based alternatives to eggs. GOOD Meat is the cultivated meat division of the company.The biopsy method is “just like a human biopsy,” Kaplan said. “In principle, the animal’s fine afterwards.”The second step is identifying nutrients－vitamins, minerals and amino acids－for the cells to consume. In the same way that a traditionally grown chicken has cells and gets nutrients from the soy and corn it’s fed, isolated cells can absorb the nutrients they’re fed in a lab or facility, Tetrick said.Those cells go in their nutrient bath in a bioreactor, a large stainless steel vessel “that has an internal process by which it agitates cells under a particular pressure to create an environment that allows cells to grow efficiently and safely,” Tetrick said. “That can be used for vaccine production or drug production, therapeutics－or, in our case, can be used to feed people.”This process is basically making raw meat, he added.The cell sample takes roughly two weeks to grow into the desired size, Tetrick said which is “about half the amount that a chicken would take.” Next is converting the meat into the finished product, whether that’s a chicken breast or nugget, or beef burger or steak.”What’s cool about it is you can start to tweak the texture,” Kimbal Musk, a chef, philanthropist and cofounder and executive chairman of The Kitchen Restaurant Group, said at Life Itself. “Alternative meats can be too spongy or they can be too firm and, frankly, even bad chicken can be, too. With this technological approach to things, you have the ability to adjust that and really tweak it for a palette that matters to you.””The first time I cooked this was probably two years ago and I tried it again this morning,” he said during a June 2 session of Life Itself. “It is remarkably better, which means it’s technology that you’re constantly improving.”