An alternative for the world’s insatiable demand for meat?
The idea of culturing flesh for meat and other animal products is more than a gee-whiz moment for technology geeks—whoever can bring the food technology to market will take a major step toward alleviating one of the key factors fueling humanity’s large looming crises. Forgacs and others who are pursuing engineered meat are hopeful that it will be a viable alternative protein in the world’s food supply within a couple of decades.
Here’s a number to think about for a moment: 122 billion lbs. That’s how much beef and veal the world consumed in 2011, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and it is only a fraction of the 1.5 billion cattle alive on the planet. Meanwhile, the world consumed another 223 billion lbs. of pork the same year. The Economist says overall global demand for meat will double by 2050.
All those animals put a huge burden on the environment, consume vast amounts of resources and energy, expose people and other animals to infectious diseases and cause many distress over livestock welfare.
Looking at the environmental impacts of meat production, researchers from the universities of Oxford and Amsterdam found that cultured meat expends 7-45 percent less energy than conventional farming methods; produces 78-96 percent fewer greenhouse gas emissions; uses 99 percent less land; and requires 82-96 percent less water, depending on the meat types they compared. “Despite high uncertainty, it is concluded that the overall environmental impacts of cultured meat production are substantially lower than those of conventionally produced meat,” the authors said in their July 2011 Environmental Science & Technology journal paper.
Forgacs says, “We got into this for several reasons—because it’s possible, it’s new, it’s exciting and it’s important. We love technological innovation and its ability to enable social benefit.”
Helping the world is a noble goal, but there are also very large economic incentives to their work. Analysts at business information provider MarketLine report that the international meat, fish and poultry market generated revenues of $527.6 billion in 2010, which represented a compound annual growth rate of 3.8 percent for 2006-2010.
Modern Meadow’s meat and leather would be competing for a share of a combined $2.5 trillion market, Forgacs says.
“If we can come up with a very good product that can be technically superior in some ways and at the same time environmentally more conscious and animal friendly, then that could mean a significant portion of the global market,” he says, noting that any cultured meat that makes it to market is unlikely to take a significant share for some time to come. “This isn’t something to make anybody in the animal farming industry quake in their boots for the next decade.”
Modern Meadow isn’t the only group looking for a solution to all the problems associated with raising livestock.
For the last several years, Dr. Mark Post, the head of the physiology department at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, has been working to grow meat in his laboratory. He’s using a different approach—breeding bovine adult stem cells, turning them into muscle cells and then growing them in a medium containing fetal calf serum. Post and his team are also growing fat using a similar process. They will mix the two together to create a hamburger patty Post expects to serve in October. The burger is projected to cost more than $350,000.
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13 Comments
Add CommentIf this saves animal lives and their lot in the world, I am all for this.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisthis reminds me of the movie Soylent Green! (1973)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf this technology is so far advanced,why is it not being applied to regenerating human tissue for burn victims?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Soylent Green is people!" lol
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI think it is, actually.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSo if engineered meat was to become mass produced at a cost lower than standard meat (in a century or so), what happens to all the cows and pigs? I would figure any left overs would be slaughtered and the herd not replenished. If there is no money in livestock, there will be no livestock.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisGuess they'll just start throwing away all that cowhide that now ends up as leather? Can't really see any reason to do this, if it lead to fewer animals being killed it would be nice. However, cowhide is a byproduct of our lust for red meat and as long as we kill to eat there will always be a ready supply of hides.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI read a prediction in a Nostradamus book about artificial meat. It will become reasonable priced. This will happen after the destruction of ruminants and people. Artificial meat has already been invented. The engineers used sewage as an ingredient.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisdon't hold your breath waiting for it. Even if they get the issues worked out to permit industrial manufacture, the political and social resistance will be substantial. Rural states will lobby to block it and the GMO freaks will have a coronary.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt is. Do some research before commenting. There are quite a few studies of "artificial skin", from types grown like those procedures shown here, to fully-artificial versions.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this@unksolder, you are absolutely right. It will not make business sense, the animals get slaughtered anyway, and anything for a hide will be better than nothing. Quite a couple of years ago a friend of mine got a breakdown from the abattoir where he sent a herd of goats to slaughter. They paid for a skin 8 cents. Hardly anything but still more than nothing.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisJust that much closer to replicated meat. I think it will just be a matter of time before we regard the idea of killing animals for their meat as an abhorrent practice of the past, even while enjoying a nice fabricated steak from the ol' Nutri-Mat 3000. As for the livestock animals, yes, they'll largely go extinct. No way that a lot of those animals can survive on their own.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis is great news. So it not only makes us humain meat eaters, but it stops the suffering of these animals that are treated poorly. It's only a matter of time before they perfect this technique of making leather and meat to be exactly like the real thing.
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