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Last month, Memphis Meats cooked and served the world’s first cultured meatball. It was made of real beef, but was produced without slaughter through the culturing of cells. In this process a small amount of muscle tissue is harmlessly taken from a living animal and placed in a nutrient-rich serum in which the cells multiply and grow to be harvested as meat. This exciting development holds much promise for offsetting many of the problems associated with livestock production, such as climate change, antibiotic resistance, and animal welfare.
Welcome to the dawn of the post-animal bioeconomy: an industry built around the creation of animal products produced through biotechnology that does not require the killing of animals, and New Harvest is playing a central role in its development.
Cellular agriculture offers a way in which consumers can continue to enjoy the exact same animal products they know and love- meat, milk, eggs, leather, gelatin, and even rhino horn – without the negative impacts associated with conventional animal agriculture. These products would taste and be cooked the same way that they are today, but with benefits including being free of antibiotics and the risk of fecal contamination, as well as a longer shelf life (in the case of milk) and the ability to be customized for specific culinary purposes such as egg proteins that can be tailored to produce fluffier cakes.
There are a number of reasons to support the post-animal bioeconomy, whether out of concern for the billions of animals killed each year in factory farms, environmental problems like deforestation and water use, public health, food safety, or simply sheer excitement for the new culinary possibilities that cellular agriculture will bring. Consumers are becoming increasingly conscious of the threat that climate change poses to our way of life, and the alarming facts that 70 per cent of all agricultural land is used for livestock production; nearly 30 per cent of fresh water is used for the production of animal products; and 18 per cent of all greenhouse gas emissions comes from livestock production – more than all of global transportation combined.
Cellular agriculture is the next step in the evolution of agriculture. Like domestication, fermentation and industrialization before it, this new method of production has the potential to change the way we feed a rapidly expanding global population.
That said, we may be a long way from seeing cultured meat on grocery store shelves. It’s still cost prohibitive, though production costs are decreasing considerably. Since the creation of the world’s first cultured beef hamburger in 2013, the costs of cellular production have declined from nearly $300,000 to approximately $18,000 per pound. Beyond economics, translating successes in a laboratory setting to repeatable, scalable processes that can meet large-scale consumer demand requires further research and development.
Currently, cellular agriculture sits in an academic no man’s land at the intersection of medical science and food production. It must be formalized as an academic discipline so that the necessary research can be accelerated. Further research in cellular agriculture will accelerate the availability of post-animal bioeconomy products by finding new ways to reduce cost, time and inputs. An analogy can be made to computer science, which took decades of research and many commercial failures before the advent of the personal computer.
As the foundation of science and research for cultured meat develops, it will pave the way for companies to emerge and commercialize new discoveries. Memphis Meats’ CEO and former New Harvest board member Uma Valeti emphasized the need for eventual competition in this space when he was quoted in Newsweek, saying, “We need to have about 1,000 cultured meat companies in the world.” Our hope is that once a strong scientific foundation exists, the post-animal bioeconomy can become a thriving industry rich with diversity and options catering to consumer choices.
New Harvest has long been inspired by the words of American architect and visionary Buckminster Fuller when he stated that “the best way to predict the future is to create it.” Indeed, we have been working since 2004 to make a better food system a reality. And we can’t wait to see what comes next.
© The Mark News
16 Comments
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fds
but what does it taste like?
Linda Joyce
ChickieNobs Bucket'O'Nubbins!
lostrune2
PETA like
shonanbb
Hasn' Kentucky Fried Chicken and all those Gyudon places done this already?
GW
While in theory I can see why its being looked into............but it also seems incredibly creepy & I bet there would be some issues that could wreak havoc on those that eat this stuff.
hopefully I will be dead & gone before/if this becomes reality........
With all the tech etc going on I shutter to think what LIFE will be like down the road a few decades, or a 100yrs from now, I don't think I would want to participate, the natural world is playing less & less in our lives & there will likely be a price to be paid, but who knows what that will be...........kinda scary
katsu78
This is really the only culinary hope for the future for anyone who eats meat. There quite simply is no possible way to produce meat at quantities to feed the whole population the way the first world consumes in an ecologically-sustainable way. There will be those who don't understand the science who turn up their noses at it, but in the long run our options are this; massive, potentially catastrophic de-populization; or everyone learns to basically eat little other than beans.
cleo
As creepy as eating dead bodies?
This would be real factory farming, and a lot preferable to the factory farming we have today. But having the world's scientists spending time, money and brain power on making fake dead bodies seems to me as crazy as taking all the amazing power of the Internet and using it to play Candy Crush and watch kittens jump in and out of boxes.
As for 'basically eaten little other than beans'...someone perhaps has no idea of the variety available in a vegetarian diet.
Fadamor
Typical baseless fear spawned by the belief that if it's made by man, it must be poison.
Unless you typed this as a ghost, your hopes are dashed. I guess you missed the first sentence where it says this became a reality a month ago.
lostrune2
They need this when they go to Mars.
Can't grow livestock there.
Black Sabbath
Cool.
GW
cleo,
You do realize this wont be just for meat but will apply to veggies too, do you want to eat from a petri dish so to speak?
Look I am not saying the world is sustainable food wise for meat or veggies they way it is, clearly its NOT!
But eating manmade stuff from cells, yeah it does kinda creep me out whether its "meat" or "veggie", just saying
cleo
For veggies? It wouldn't bother me. Lots of plants are clones, i.e. grown from cuttings not seeds, also transplanted onto the root stocks of other plants. I don't see the problem.
But growing mammal body parts without the spark of life that makes it an animal? For food? There's definitely a franken-factor in there, it is 'kinda creepy'.
Personally I wouldn't eat it, not interested, but if they really cannot do without their flesh fix, I'd much rather my carnivorous friends tucked into this kind of factory-farmed 'meat' than the real flesh of real animals tortured in today's factory farms.
GW
Cleo,
I mean from a PETRI dish is you will, not clones or grafts from a field, from the LAB ie it will likely look like algae or something, planting veggies also has a LOT of issues in the agricultural world not just meats, just saying!
Fadamor
The ability to grow animal muscle tissue from cells has benefits in the medical world as well. Reconstructive techniques could conceivably incorporate lab-grown muscle fiber as part of the process.
The problem with "red" meat grown in a lab will mainly be taste - muscle fiber basically tastes the same to humans regardless of the animal the fiber came from. The individual taste of a meat comes from the fat content and what diet was consumed. There's a reason why most lean wild game "tastes like chicken". It would be more accurate to say "Chicken tastes like muscle fiber without fat". The same would be true for lab-grown fat-free muscle fiber... "tastes like chicken".
John-San
I can just imagine the menu,s in the future. Culture grown Tenderloin, in organic glass beaker and aged in 800m deep underground climatic control cellar.