Lab-Grown Meat, The Future Is Soon
Flipping to the resources page of the New Harvest website, a non-profit whose mission is to promote and advance meat substitutes, you find twice as many popular articles on the subject of lab-grown meat as there are technical articles on it. Test-tube meat, in vitro meat, cultured meat or whatever name you call it may have caught the attention (or the stomachs) of the populace, but research dollars are few and far between. In 2008, PETA tried to rectify this disparity by offering a $1 million dollar prize to the first group that makes the ethical meat commercially viable. But, since laboratories often need large sums of money to begin with, their offer has not instigated much investigation.
The idea of cultivating meat in labs dates back to the early 1900’s when Alexis Carrel kept tissue cultured from an embryonic chicken heart alive in a nutrient bath for over 20 years. But, it’s recent incarnation starts with one man’s journey to India in 2003. The environmentally conscious Jason Matheny visited what he thought was unthinkable in the traditionally vegetarian country of India: industrial sized chicken (factory) farms. All of the McDonald’s packed with people eating chicken sandwiches helped to explain the upsurge in chicken farming.
When he returned to the States, he found statistics confirming his observations. Poultry consumption in India had doubled in the previous five years. And it wasn’t just India: in China meat demand was doubling every ten years. Matheny considered the toll of skyrocketing meat consumption—the millions of acres of land needed, the water use, the fossil fuels required to power industrial-scale animal farms. Then there was animal waste and the mounting evidence that livestock production is a major source of greenhouse-gas emissions. Doing the math, he thought, “It just wasn’t sustainable in 50 years.”
A vegetarian since middle school (now 34), Matheny is comfortable with meat substitutes like tofu and seitan, but knew that switching to that kind of diet would be hard to, well, swallow for a lot of people.
So he turned to technology. Ever since he attended a 2001 Berkeley lecture series on the energy crisis, Matheny has believed that instead of getting people to take fewer showers or drive less, it was most effective to satisfy existing needs with more efficient technologies, like hybrid cars or the compact fluorescent light bulb, which has begun to replace the energy-hogging incandescent bulb. “What we needed was the compact fluorescent light bulb for meat production.”
Matheny didn’t know which way the thought would take him until he started doing research. There had been plenty of technological advancements in the science of fake meats, but the flavor and mouth feel is always a bit off. The switch to a different diet had to be easy and as tasty as it could be if the number of people changing over was to hit critical mass. He created New Harvest in 2004 to “support the development of meat substitutes, with the long-term goal of delivering economically competitive alternatives to conventional meat production.”
Then, he found a NASA-funded project where as a part of exploration into new food sources for long space missions bioengineers had grown chunks of goldfish meat. Just like Alexis Carrel, they had grown the tissue from live-muscle cells placed in a nutrient broth. Two-dozen other papers on tissue growth in humans and animals made the idea of lab-grown meat all the more possible. He emailed the authors of those papers, all experts on muscle-tissue engineering, a simple question, “Can this be tested as a food idea?”
Stem cell-grown meat substitutes minus the environmental damage, hormones, cruelty, antibiotics, e. coli, and the threat of mad cow disease, plus omega-3 fatty acids and vitamins are within range.
Long story short (too late!), he co-authored a theoretical paper that earned “Lab Grown Meat” the award for best science story of 2005 from Discover magazine, and dozens of mentions in other popular media. His research into in vitro meat also helped to encourage the Netherlands to grant 2 million Euros to a proposal they had just received on the same topic. “It was my happiest moment,” Matheny said. “We actually had a chance to see if this could work.”
In the future, Obama’s juicy burger could very well be made by scientists instead of farmers.
So, where is lab-cultured meat now? The Dutch laboratory could make a hamburger right now, but it would “cost thousands of dollars per pound”, says Matheny. Matheny’s non-profit , New Harvest , is funding a project that is evaluating the potential energy use of cultured meat in comparison to traditional meat production. After all, one of the points of a meat substitute is to reduce the impact of our diet on the environment. And, venture capitalists are looking at in vitro meat as a possible green technology investment.
If it’s tasty enough, if it’s cheap enough, this lab-grown meat could really save the world.
July 20, 2009
Tags: agriculture, bacon, Barack Obama, change, cows, farmers, food event, green, greenhouse gases, innovation Posted in: Fun Food Facts, Science & Technology
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