How does lab-grown meat with the aroma, texture and taste of the real thing strike you? It looks like it may be on our plates in a few years. Really the technology already exists now, and scientists have been growing small quantities of muscle cells to do experiments for some time.
The trick now is to mass-produce meat in this manner grown from stem cells.
"All of the technology exists today to make ground meat products in vitro," says Paul Kosnik, vice president of engineering at Tissue Genesis in Hawaii. Kosnik is growing scaffold-free, self-assembled muscle. "We believe the goal of a processed meat product is attainable in the next five years if funding is available and the R&D is pursued aggressively."
A single cell could theoretically produce enough meat to feed the world's population for a year. But the challenge lies in figuring out how to grow it on a large scale. Jason Matheny, a University of Maryland doctoral student and a director of New Harvest, a nonprofit organization that funds research on in vitro meat, believes the easiest way to create edible tissue is to grow "meat sheets," which are layers of animal muscle and fat cells stretched out over large flat sheets made of either edible or removable material. The meat can then be ground up or stacked or rolled to get a thicker cut.
Much waste would be also cut out of the process of producing meat. Most of what we feed animals raised for meat is wasted. Not only passed through and not adding meat mass, but adding non-edible stuff like hair/fur, bones, skin, organs etc.
While in vitro meat would presently be way too expensive, finding the right nutrients could eventually make the production price competitive or below conventional meat.
The sheets would be less than 1 mm thick and take a few weeks to grow. But the real issue is the expense. If cultivated with nutrient solutions that are currently used for biomedical applications, the cost of producing one pound of in vitro meat runs anywhere from $1,000 to $10,000.
Matheny believes in vitro meat can compete with conventional meat by using nutrients from plant or fungal sources, which could bring the cost down to about $1 per pound.
If successful, artificially grown meat could be tailored to be far healthier than any type of farm-grown meat. It's possible to stuff if full of heart-friendly omega-3 fatty acids, adjust the protein or texture to suit individual taste preferences and screen it for food-borne diseases.
I must admit my mouth doesn't water over the prospect of meat grown from a swirling mass of goo in a bioreactor. But then a only a few years ago hothouse tomatoes were pretty tastless too, but now have been improved to be about as good as home grown. Is this really any different?
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- Real Meat Grown in Labs Coming to a Table Near You
- Quorn - Tastes Like Chicken (or beef)
