Image: Photograph by Kevin Van Aelst
In Brief
- Meat grown in a laboratory could provide high-protein food sources free of the environmental and ethical concerns that accompany large-scale livestock operations.
- Yet progress has been slow, in no small part due to the difficulty scientists have securing funding for their research.
- One promising strategy involves growing embryonic stem cells from livestock in a culture, then coaxing them to transform into muscle cells.
- Even if research is successful, some people question whether the public would ever develop a taste for meat engineered in the lab.
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Editor's note: This article appears in print with the title "Inside the Meat Lab."
It is not unusual for visionaries to be impassioned, if not fanatical, and Willem van Eelen is no exception. At 87, van Eelen can look back on an extraordinary life. He was born in Indonesia when it was under Dutch control, the son of a doctor who ran a leper colony. As a teenager, he fought the Japanese in World War II and spent several years in prisoner-of-war camps. The Japanese guards used prisoners as slave labor and starved them. “If one of the stray dogs was stupid enough to go over the wire, the prisoners would jump on it, tear it apart and eat it raw,” van Eelen recalls. “If you looked at my stomach then, you saw my spine. I was already dead.” The experience triggered a lifelong obsession with food, nutrition and the science of survival.
One obsession led to another. After the Allies liberated Indonesia, van Eelen studied medicine at the University of Amsterdam. A professor showed the students how he had been able to get a piece of muscle tissue to grow in the laboratory. This demonstration inspired van Eelen to consider the possibility of growing edible meat without having to raise or slaughter animals. Imagine, he thought, protein-rich food that could be grown like crops, no matter what the climate or other environmental conditions, without killing any living creatures.
If anything, the idea is more potent now. The world population was just more than two billion in 1940, and global warming was not a concern. Today the planet is home to three times as many people. According to a 2006 report by the Food and Agriculture Organization, the livestock business accounts for about 18 percent of all anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions—an even larger contribution than the global transportation sector. The organization expects worldwide meat consumption to nearly double between 2002 and 2050.
Meat grown in bioreactors—instead of raised on farms—could help alleviate planetary stress. Hanna Tuomisto, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Oxford, co-authored a study last year on the potential environmental impacts of cultured meat. The study found that such production, if scientists grew the muscle cells in a culture of cyanobacteria hydrolysate (a bacterium cultivated in ponds), would involve “approximately 35 to 60 percent lower energy use, 80 to 95 percent lower greenhouse gas emissions and 98 percent lower land use compared to conventionally produced meat products in Europe.”
As it is, 30 percent of the earth’s ice-free land is used for grazing livestock and growing animal feed. If cultured meat were to become viable and widely consumed, much of that land could be used for other purposes, including new forests that would pull carbon out of the air. Meat would no longer have to be shipped around the globe, because production sites could be located close to consumers. Some proponents imagine small urban meat labs selling their products at street markets that cater to locavores.
The Only Choice Left
Even Winston Churchill thought in vitro meat was a good idea. “Fifty years hence, we shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing by growing these parts separately under suitable medium,” he predicted in a 1932 book, Thoughts and Adventures. For most of the 20th century, however, few took the idea seriously. Van Eelen did not let it go. He worked all kinds of jobs—selling newspapers, driving a taxi, making dollhouses. He established an organization to help underprivileged kids and owned art galleries and cafes. He wrote proposals for in vitro meat production and eventually plowed much of his earnings into applying for patents. Together with two partners, he won a Dutch patent in 1999, then other European patents and, eventually, two U.S. patents. In 2005 he and others finally convinced the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs to pledge €2 million to support in vitro meat research in the Netherlands—the largest government grant for such research to date.
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14 Comments
Add CommentSlaughtering other creatures so we can eat them is horribly barbaric. I look forward to doing away with that practice.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"According to a 2006 report by the Food and Agriculture Organization, the livestock business accounts for about 18 percent of all anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions" This 18% figure has been widely debunked. It was based on false assumptions about land use. The real percentage is about half that. While 9% is still significant, even that can be mostly eliminated if the animals were raised in an appropriate (but more expensive) way.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI do hope growing meat in a dish does eventually work. Unfortunately, such meat would probably need antibiotics, which is the only reason why I wouldn't eat it. For health reasons I don't eat much meat anyway, so it isn't much of an issue.
While making choices that reduce greenhouse gases is a good thing and everyone should do it, realistically there's no way it'll be enough to stop global warming. It may be enough to slow it down a bit, which has some value, but not stop it. Humanity will survive, as we always adapt to new changes, but many other species will go extinct, and it will cost us a lot of money.
It seems to me that the idealism of being able to duplicate nature's steaks is misguided and counter productive.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWe don't need to limited ourselves to creating product identical to nature's own. We need to start with creating as close a product as possible and using other methods of processing to then shape it into something like 'meat.
Then we can move forward in steps to the possibility of getting closer to the 'real' thing, IF the intermediary product is not good enough.
Who knows ? People might well be more than satisfied with an intermediary product.
By limiting this research work to only duplicating nature, we are holding back the core goal of this whole research process - to produce a product that enables us to reduce the numbers of animals we slaughter for meat.
I invite people to look for and read a scifi story involving "chicken little."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisReading about food in Sci Am lately one might think there is an implicit assumption that meat and other animal protein is essential for human health. Nothing could be further from the truth. Most Americans get far too much protein as it is and would be much healthier eating only plant-based foods. There is a protein myth propagated by the meat dairy industry and it's virtual proxy, the USDA. Their propaganda is based on no research, in fact, ignores research to the contrary. Fact: there is no need for animal protein. We would be far healthier without it. For a great review of this topic read T. Colin Campbell's "The China Study". It changed my life. What I learned in grade school and medical school about nutrition was paid for by industry and just plain wrong.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisReplacing real meat with cultured meat, while maybe reducing animal cruelty, would likely consume huge amounts of energy to grow and contribute at least as much to global warming. There is far too much industrial food as it is now. Let's just eat plants and live low on the food chain. We would all live longer and the planet would be better off.
George T, MD
Plant based diets are the most effective, but lab grown meat could be of use in deterring murder (murder should be illegal outright)... similarly, sex robots could be made to stop rapists (no joke there).
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou wrote:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Replacing real meat with cultured meat, while maybe reducing animal cruelty, would likely consume huge amounts of energy to grow and contribute at least as much to global warming."
Well I don't know how ultimately accurate this article is ... but they claim the following in the article above:
"if scientists grew the muscle cells in a culture of cyanobacteria hydrolysate (a bacterium cultivated in ponds), would involve “approximately 35 to 60 percent lower energy use, 80 to 95 percent lower greenhouse gas emissions and 98 percent lower land use compared to conventionally produced meat products in Europe.”"
That seems to be the answer to your concern.
As the article mentioned, the concept of slaughter-free meat was originally brought into the public eye by PETA’s $1 million prize offering to the first R&D team to produce commercial quantities of meat grown in vitro. It is also important to note that, in the absence of Federal funding for cultured meat development in the United States, PETA is directly supporting the only currently active academic research toward this emerging technology. In both concept and implementation, PETA has taken on a pioneering role in cultured meat development.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI think that the idea of growing protein in bioreactors is a good one.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHowever the idea that "much of the 30% of ice free land can be converted to other uses" needs looking at. Quite a lot of it is desert. Quite a lot is semi-arid, and only suitable for extensive livestock grazing.
On the other hand a lot of the meat that is consumed in advanced countries such as the USA is raised in feed lots, sometimes in appalling conditions, on grains which are suitable for human consumption.
I myself really like the idea of creating muscle in a vat...who knows whats next...a heart..a kidney(etc.)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFor the vegetarians posting...not interested..don't get me wrong, I love my veggies and my fruit, but I also love a great steak or even a great hamburger...
ps..the hearts and kidneys would be for transplants not eating...yech;-)
And what if the only line that can efficiently produce edible, nutritious, and tasty flesh is human? No animals (humans included) would have to be slaughtered. Except for the “yuck” factor, this would be humane. A question for the ethicists.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere is really only one word for "Inside the Meat Lab" written by journalist Bartholet (as unfortunately are so many of your articles these days); silly.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhile the author correctly points out how wasteful traditional production of beef is, the discussion of growing meat in a lab is very poorly reported. There is no discussion of the possible conversion rate (the ratio of feed input to meat output – typically over 6 for beef today) of the mythical process, nor where the "culture of cyanobacteria" comes from or how much it would cost or what the inputs for it would be.
As every vegan knows (and I know some quite chubby ones) there are many very acceptable meat substitutes commercially available today that do a creditable job of mimicking meat with a conversion rate of 1. Farmed fish produce marketable fish with conversion rates below 1.5 and a GMO salmon awaiting FDA approval can bring that ratio to close to 1.25. Why waste scarce research dollars on pie in the sky ideas such as lab grown meat? To what advantage even if it could be made to work?
The one bit of good news in the article is that NASA, which often pursues some pretty nutty ideas, at least was smart enough to stop throwing money on this one!
This is bizarre. Just as factory farming of all kinds lowers the costs and the nutritional density of our foods this is just another step backwards. We've already lowered the variety of the foods we eat to an all time low. Having beef from one genetic line (the one that produces the best) is not going to improve nutrition, I'm thinking.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAre you on crack?
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