In fact, using ‘cellular agriculture’, there’s no reason why scientists couldn’t grow artificial meat with characteristics from a combination of animals, or enhance lab-grown meat with healthier fats, vitamins or vaccines. We could even taste the flesh of rare animals that nobody would dream of slaughtering for food. Panda burger, anyone?
Why stop with animals ? Cannibalism : it's the new veganism. We'll get arseholes in restaurants demanding the cannibal option or that the staff should change their gloves to handle the human-meat generator...
Achieving a taste and texture that rivals real meat seems to be the easy bit. Following a comment from the critics who tasted his original burger and said it was a bit dry, Post has started to culture fat cells and tissue from cows, which add moisture when mixed in with the muscle fibres. He has also discovered that starving the cells of oxygen can increase the amount of flavour-giving proteins in the final product.
The challenge facing Post and others in the field is upscaling the process. To grow cells industrially requires a large ‘bioreactor’ – a high-tech vat that can provide the perfect conditions for growth but also the movement and stimulation to exercise the cells. The largest existing bioreactor capable of doing this has a volume of 25,000 litres (about one-hundredth the size of an Olympic swimming pool), which Post estimates could produce enough meat to feed 10,000 people. It’s likely that many more of these would be needed to make a viable meat-processing plant.
That's a tiny volume, and much is made of the possibility of reducing the amount of livestock and their huge associated costs. But what about artificial plants ? Vast areas of land are currently dedicated to crops which would otherwise be ecologically diverse forests. Suppose you just need a few large bioreactors to feed a small town - the implications are every bit as big as the first agricultural revolution.
The first crop of cultured meat products will inevitably take the form of burgers, nuggets and other processed meats – unprocessed meat has a complex structure of bone, blood vessels, connective tissue and fat, and grows in specific shapes. Yet it should eventually be possible to grow complex tissue like this too, says Dr Paul Mozdziak, Gibbons’s colleague at North Carolina State University. He and scientists at various cellular agriculture organisations (such as New Harvest, SuperMeat and Future Meat) are keeping an eye on developments in regenerative medicine, the branch of biomedical science concerned with growing replacement organs and tissue for procedures such as skin grafts.
People will always be extremely sensitive about what is on their plate. Despite the welfare and environmental justifications for cultured meat, the thought of your burger coming from a lab rather than a farm is a strange idea. But if artificial meat lives up to its promise and becomes the environmentally friendly, safer, cheaper, and even tastier way to eat meat, the concept of raising animals in their millions for slaughter could very quickly seem much stranger.
Like the idea of getting a human being to drive a car, the prospect of eating meat from a living, emotional animal that's been raised in a muddy field fertilized by its own excrement is likely to eventually seem like a ridiculous thing to do.
Originally shared by BBC Focus Magazine - science and technology
Lab-grown beef burger anyone? #FoodFocus
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One of the things which interests me isn't just the previously-unethical but also the previously-impractical. Tiny things or things that are far too much effort to source more than once to get a cell sample could be a goldmine of tastiness. Dolphin nuggets might be amazing but what about spider sausages? Anglerfish-onna-stick?
ReplyDeleteI did ask a few vegans I know how they felt about eating themselves but they got a bit cross. Probably just hungry, poor things.