November 18, 2011
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Vegetarian or vegan readers, would you have a problem with eating meat is the protein was grown in a lab? There would be no* animal cruelty involved, and no living breathing animals would have to die to end up on your plate. Would it be much different to eating Quorn?
Will our meat be grown in the lab in future? And will we be able to tell the difference?
What about if we could call it zombie burger, zombie sausage or zombie ragu – does that sound more appealing? Sociologist Neil Stephens, who is researching the in vitro meat proposition at ESRC Cesagen at Cardiff University, has a really cute turn of phrase about the engineered meat in his introductory paper:
“This is a fascinating technology… characterised as the ‘zombification’ of meat products… While metaphors of zombies usually lead one to think of the ‘living-dead’, in vitro meat is perhaps best categorised as the ‘dead-living’, or perhaps the ‘living-never born’.”
If zombie meat were no longer the stuff of science fiction, but was something you actually chowed down on, there could be benefits both to your health and to the environment. For a start, it is known that eating meat that has been reared on cereal crops is a really inefficient way to get your energy, livestock contribute to global warming with their methane emissions, and the deforestation of valuable forests can be attributed (partly) to livestock farming. So, how would zombie meat compare? Would it be better just to stick to the veg?
New Harvest, a meat substitute advocate group, published a report earlier this year addressing the environmental impact assessment of cultured meat, claiming that there would be important benefits to land use, water use and green house gas emissions, and also energy use to a lesser extent. However, much is still unknown, as in vitro meat is in the early stages of development. This makes it difficult to compare to regular meat or plant-based proteins.
What certainly would be needed for zombie meat to live up to its promise as a ‘green’ product is: economies of scale. This would reduce the environmental impact per unit. Stephens reckons this means producing: “Literary tonnes and tonnes of tissue engineered muscle month after month.” We’re looking at the creation of a whole new industry, if this prediction manifests.
Another possible upside of eating zombie kebab (most in vitro meat is grown from from pig or cow stem cells) rather than one from a farmed animal is the potential healthiness of it. Meat could be engineered to be fat free, for instance, and it probably would not contain traces of vaccines or steroids that meat from live animals sometimes does.
But do in vitro meats taste any good? Scientists have been striving to grow meat that tastes okay since the 1990s. Apparently they are still not particularly successful yet. Stephens writes:
“Oron, Catts and Ionat Zurr – Harvard University tissue engineers – were bringing together laboratory work and art through in vitro meat technology, initially using pre-natal sheep cells to grow a piece of muscle tissue three centimetres in diameter. In 2003, their work became publicised when they staged an art exhibition in Nantes, France: muscle tissue grown from frog cells was served to banquet guests in a gallery under public view. Apparently the dinner guests did not like the taste of the meat.”
Christopher Mims reports in Smart Planet that Mark Post, a biologist at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands, claims he can create a palatable “proof of concept burger” within a year, which will cost about $345,000.
Stephens says that the cost of the meat needs to be driven down with industrial-scale production, but it is also a case of demand. There are alternatives to cultured meat, ie real meat or plant-based meat substitutes. And, as he says: “People are willing to pay significantly more money for that small quantity of tissue engineered muscle that goes into their heart to restore cardiac function than they are for the much larger quantity of tissue engineered muscle that would allow them to invite their friends round for an In Vitro Meat barbeque.”
Emma King, a researcher into regulation and innovation in stem cell therapies at the University of Edinburgh, adds:
“At this stage I think it is more a question of funding rather than regulatory approval around these types of products [in vitro meat]. Getting any stem cell product to market costs a lot of money, and funding is always going to be targeted at the most needed causes. If scientists did want to produce them then they would have to overcome the same hurdles as the therapies. They would have to justify why this product is needed and that it is as safe, or safer, than conventional products. They also have the added problem that we already have very safe meat - from animals.”
Nevertheless, zombie meats are a fascinating proposition that I wouldn’t rule out just yet. And they’re really not that icky – especially in comparison to the idea of living in a home made of synthetic meat. Watch urban architect Michell Joachim explain why he thinks meat houses might be a good innovation:
*Okay, not exactly ‘no’. Stephens says: “If the technology is being developed to improve animal welfare issues then consideration has to be given to the cell donor animal and the culture medium the cells are grown on. Today most cell culturing uses animal products – fetal bovine serum – as a culture medium.” Though these probably don’t compare with the large-scale slaughter of animals for our consumption, it might be a turn off for the most ardent animal lovers.
About the Author: Christine Ottery is a freelance journalist with a lust for the arts and a love for science. Follow her @christineottery Follow on Twitter @creatologyblog.
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I don’t know about this. Goofy UK scientists have been trying to come up with synthetic food since the end of WWII. They haven’t succeeded yet. Why expect them to do so now? And as for those who, reasonably enough, believe that the closer to the earth the things you eat are, they better they are for you, this is a nightmare in a petri dish.
Link to thisSynthetic meat would likely be worse for animals than normal meat.
Food production includes producing fertilizer, machinery, fuel for transport to the supermarket etc. Many times more animals are killed during these processes than directly eaten.
Synthetic meat must be supplied with nutrients, energy and machinery. They all would be highly intensive industrial processes, requiring lots of energy and resources. They will cost lives of many times more animals than save few cows.
That synthetic meat is friendly to animals, is unfortunately, a fallacy coming from not thinking about the whole process of food producing.
In fact, animal lover should eat beef from low intensity local farmland supporting rabbits, foxes, birds etc., instead of soybean produced by highly intensive farming and imported using lots of resources.
Link to thisWhen I did my little vegan challenge I spoke to some other vegans about this. While many raised the same concerns as ‘Jerzy New’ some others said they were vegans for ethical reasons so synthetic meat would be okay. The other cruelty free meat they highlighted was a previously pregnant woman eating her own placenta…
Link to thisI think the post about more animals dieing due to meat produced without killing animals is very wrong. Animals are currently transported from a farm, to a meat works, to a packing facility, to supermarket. Synthetic meat could be grown in any city instead of a outlying farm, reducing local and global transportation of meat. For example Hong Kong will never have enough land to supply all its own meat in a traditional sense but could grow enough meat with just a few multistory buildings for synthetic meat production.
Also we do not use animals to transport our goods anymore we use fossil fueled vehicles.
The energy point is also invalid as we use energy to power our cities regardless of where we produce our meat. The energy saved from transporting and spreading fertilizers and food for meat animals would probably offset what energy is used to produce synthetic meat. As for resources Cattle farms consume 8% of the global water usage and are a big polluter of waterways due to urinating and crapping. Livestock also produce 13% of global green house emissions which fuels climate change. Climate change is considered one of the biggest dangers to biodiversity along with Humans. Livestock consume 1/3 of the global grains produced each year. Those monocrops also kill thousands of animals due to farms increasing in size and destroying native habitats.
Synthetic meat from an environmental and ethical point is most likely better. Whether or not it will be better for human health to eat that meat is debatable but I would think it could be grown without risk of salmonella and swine flu making it a better choice in that respect.
Link to this@Jerzy New: Clearly you haven’t thought this through.
Consider that cows are no longer just fed on grass. They are given all sorts of chemicals and plants, the optimum nourishment to grow beef economically. The plants (soy and corn mostly) that go into their feed are taking up far too much space, for example in the Amazon basin – and the indigestible stuff is excreted and ends up as pollution. As well as the space we have to make for growing the plants, there is also the space for growing cows. You can feed a lot more people with a field full of corn than a field full of cows.
Of course, during the production of cattle feed and during the production of the chemicals to feed synthetic meat, invertebrates will have to die because we will out-compete them. That will be the next challenge to overcome. It is not made worse by synthetic meat and more animals will not die because of synthetic meat, contrary to your delusions.
What synthetic meat does effectively is take out the middle man. It makes meat production efficient. We are never going to turn the world into vegetarians but if we can get people to eat synthetic meat it will take up much less space and cause much less cruelty. The same number of animals will die – but these will be invertebrates, which while important do not have such advanced nervous systems. Since we are getting here a few advantages and no different disadvantages than what we are experiencing at the moment, it is called progress.
I’d also like to add that you have a very dewy-eyed vision of low intensity farming. It may well be quaint and pretty but this beauty is only skin deep. If the world turned to low-intensity farming we would have no wilderness, much lower global biodiversity and famines in every country.
Link to this