Scientists grow “healthy” meat in labs
Scientists and businesses working full steam to produce lab-created meat claim it will be healthier than conventional meat and more environmentally friendly. But how much can they improve on old-school pork or beef?
In August 2013, a team of Dutch scientists showed off their lab-grown burger and even provided a taste test. Two months ago, the American company Memphis Meats fried the first-ever lab meatball. Those who have tasted these items say they barely differ from the real deal.
The Dutch and the Americans claim that within a few years’ lab-produced meats will start appearing in supermarkets and restaurants. And these are not the only teams working on cultured meat (as they prefer to call it). Another company, Modern Meadow, promises that lab-grown "steak chips" – something between a potato chip and beef jerky – will hit the stores in the near future, too.
For some people there's an ick factor to the idea of lab-grown meat, but its backers say that cultured meat may help alleviate the environmental and health challenges posed by the world's growing appetite for conventional meats. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development estimates that the demand for meat in North America will increase by eight per cent between 2011 and 2020, in Europe by seven per cent and in Asia by 56 per cent.
Meanwhile, a 2011 study calculated that growing meat in labs would cut down on the land required to produce steaks, sausages and bacon by 99 per cent and reduce the associated need for water by 90 per cent. What's more, it found that a pound of lab-created meat would produce much less polluting greenhouse-gas emissions than is produced by cows and pigs, even poultry.
Yet a 2015 life-cycle analysis of potential cultured meat production in the United States painted a less rosy picture if one includes the generation of electricity and heat required to grow the cells in a lab.
"It's really too soon to say what the environmental impacts of the first cultured meat products will be," says the lead author of that analysis, Carolyn Mattick, an environmental engineer at Arizona State University. "However, new technologies often come with trade-offs. Take automobiles, for example. They provided huge advantages over horses in the early 1900s, but all of the cars on the road today cumulatively emit a lot of carbon dioxide. That is not to say we should give up our cars or stop researching cultured meat, but rather that we should be prepared to manage the downsides."
Yet Mark Post, the Dutch scientist behind the 2013 cultured hamburger, believes the energy demands could be quite easily reduced. "One of the big energy expenditures is cleaning the tanks with heat, but simple soap might be very, very efficient," he says.
The health benefits of cultured meats are still not completely clear, either.
In some aspects, researchers say, lab-grown meat might be better for us. Because cultured meats would be produced in sterile environments, they would be free of such dangerous bacteria. The Centres for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that pathogens in conventional meat are the most common sources of fatal food-related infections.
The final verdict is still a few years off. "We're not there yet," acknowledges Uma Valeti, a co-founder and the chief executive officer of Memphis Meats, "but in just a few years, we expect to be selling protein-packed pork, beef and chicken that tastes identical to conventionally raised meat but that is cleaner, safer and all-around better than meat from animals grown on farms."
At that point we'll be able to decide if it also tastes good.
Written by Marta Zaraska, first appeared on Stuff.co.nz.
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