Lab Grown Meat??? It’s Coming!

In 2013, the world’s first burger from a lab was cooked in butter and eaten at a glitzy press conference. The burger cost £215,000 ($330,000 at the time) to make, and despite all the media razzmatazz, the tasters were polite but not overly impressed. “Close to meat, but not that juicy,” said one food critic.

Still, that one burger, paid for by Google cofounder Sergey Brin, was the earliest use of a technique called cellular agriculture to make edible meat products from scratch—no dead animals required. Cellular agriculture, whose products are known as cultured or lab-grown meat, builds up muscle tissue from a handful of cells taken from an animal. These cells are then nurtured on a scaffold in a bioreactor and fed with a special nutrient broth.

Impossible has a few competitors, particularly Beyond Meat, which uses pea protein (among other ingredients) to replicate ground beef. Its product is sold in supermarket chains like Tesco in the UK and Whole Foods in the US, alongside real meat and chicken. Both Impossible and Beyond released new, improved versions of their burgers in mid-January.

Livestock raised for food already contribute about 15% of the world’s global greenhouse-gas emissions. (You may have heard that if cows were a country, it would be the world’s third biggest emitter.) A quarter of the planet’s ice-free land is used to graze them, and a third of all cropland is used to grow food for them. A growing population will make things worse. It’s estimated that with the population expected to rise to 10 billion, humans will eat 70% more meat by 2050. Greenhouse gases from food production will rise by as much as 92%.

And now for the lawsuits

Memphis Meats’ VP of product and regulation, Eric Schulze, sees his product as complementing the real-meat industry. “In our rich cultural tapestry as a species, we are providing a new innovation to weave into our growing list of sustainable food traditions,” he says. “We see ourselves as an ‘and,’ not ‘or,’ solution to helping feed a growing world.”

The traditional meat industry doesn’t see it that way. The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association in the US dismissively dubs these new approaches “fake meat.” In August 2018, Missouri enacted a law that bans labeling any such alternative products as meat. Only food that has been “derived from harvested production of livestock or poultry” can have the word “meat” on the label in any form. Breaking that law could lead to a fine or even a year’s jail time.

The alternative-meat industry is fighting back

The Good Food Institute, which campaigns for regulations that favor plant-based and lab-grown meats, has joined forces with Tofurky (the makers of a tofu-based meat replacement since the 1980s), the American Civil Liberties Union, and the Animal Legal Defense Fund to get the law overturned. Jessica Almy, the institute’s policy director, says the law as it stands is “nonsensical” and an “affront” to the principle of free speech. “The thinking behind the law is to make plant-based meat less appealing and to disadvantage cultured meat when it comes on the market,” she says.

Some cultured-meat startups say this confusion over regulations is the only thing holding them back. One firm, Just, says it plans to launch a ground “chicken” product this year and has trumpeted a partnership with a Japanese livestock firm to produce a “Wagyu beef” product made from cells in the lab. Its CEO is Josh Tetrick, who’d previously founded the controversial startup Hampton Creek, Just’s forebear. (The FDA had at one time banned the firm from calling its signature product mayonnaise, as it did not contain any eggs.) Speak to Tetrick, a bullish, confident young man, and you get a sense of the drive and excitement behind the alternative-meat market. “The only [limit] to launching,” he says, “is regulatory.”

But there are other issues, says Datar, of New Harvest. She says we still don’t understand the fundamental processes well enough. While we have quite a deep understanding of animals used in medical research, such as lab mice, our knowledge of agricultural animals at a cellular level is rather thin. “I’m seeing a lot of excitement and VCs investing but not seeing a lot in scientific, material advancements,” she says. It’s going to be tricky to scale up the technology if we’re still learning how these complex biological systems react and grow.

Lab-grown meat has another—more tangible—problem. Growing muscle cells from scratch creates pure meat tissue, but the result lacks a vital component of any burger or steak: fat. Fat is what gives meat its flavor and moisture, and its texture is hard to replicate. Plant-based meats are already getting around the problem—to some extent—by using shear cell technology that forces the plant protein mixture into layers to produce a fibrous meat-like texture. But if you want to create a meat-free “steak” from scratch, some more work needs to be done. Cultured meat will need a way to grow fat cells and somehow mesh them with the muscle cells for the end result to be palatable. That has proved tricky so far, which is the main reason that first burger was so mouth-puckeringly dry.

The scientists at the Netherlands-based ­cultured-meat startup Meatable might have found a way. The team has piggybacked on medical stem-cell research to find a way of isolating pluripotent stem cells in cows by taking them from the blood in umbilical cords of newborn calves. Pluripotent cells, formed early in an embryo’s development, have the ability to develop into any type of cell in the body. This means they can also be coaxed into forming fat, muscle, or even liver cells in lab-grown meat.

As it stands, lab-grown meat is not quite as virtuous as you might think. While its greenhouse emissions are below those associated with the biggest villain, beef, it is more polluting than chicken or the plant-based alternatives, because of the energy currently required to produce it. A World Economic Forum white paper on the impact of alternative meats found that lab-grown meat as it is made now would produce only about 7% less in greenhouse-gas emissions than beef. Other replacements, such as tofu or plants, produced reductions of up to 25%. “We will have to see if companies will really be able to offer low-emissions products at reasonable costs,” says Oxford’s Marco Springmann, one of the paper’s coauthors.

Expecting the whole world to go vegan is unrealistic. But a report in Nature in October 2018 suggested that if everyone moved to the flexitarian lifestyle (eating mostly vegetarian but with a little poultry and fish and no more than one portion of red meat a week), we could halve the greenhouse-gas emissions from food production and also reduce other harmful effects of the meat industry, such as the overuse of fertilizers and the waste of fresh water and land. (It could also reduce premature mortality by about 20%, according to a study in The Lancet in October, thanks to fewer deaths from ailments such as coronary heart disease, stroke, and cancer.)

Some of the biggest players in the traditional meat industry recognize this and are subtly rebranding themselves as “protein producers” rather than meat companies. Like Big Tobacco firms buying vape startups, the meat giants are also buying stakes in this new industry. In 2016, Tyson Foods, the world’s second biggest meat processor, launched a venture capital fund to support alternative-meat producers; it’s also an investor in Beyond Meat. In 2017, the third biggest, Cargill, invested in cultured-meat startup Memphis Meats, and Tyson followed suit in 2018. Many other big food producers are doing the same; in December 2018, for example, Unilever bought a Dutch firm called the Vegetarian Butcher that makes a variety of non-meat products, including plant-based meat substitutes.

“A meat company doesn’t do what they do because they want to degrade the environment and don’t like animals,” says Tetrick, the Just CEO. “They do it because they think it’s the most efficient way. But if you give them a different way to grow the company that’s more efficient, they’ll do it.”