The race to make a laboratory-grown steak

Yet that one hamburger, paid for by Google co-founder Sergey Brin, was the earliest use of a technique called cellular farming to make edible meat products right from the start – no dead animals required. Cellular agriculture, the products of which are known as cultured or laboratory-grown meat, builds muscle tissue from a handful of cells taken from an animal. These cells are then fed on a jetty in a bioreactor and fed with a special food broth.

A little over five years later, startups are racing around the world to produce laboratory-grown meat that tastes as good as the traditional and costs about the same.

They are already catching up: ‘vegetable meat’, made from a mix of non-animal products that mimic the taste and texture of real meat, is already on the market. The biggest name in this area: Impossible Foods, whose faux meat is sold in more than 5,000 restaurants and fast food chains in the US and Asia and should be in the supermarket later this year. The research team of more than 100 scientists and engineers from Impossible uses techniques such as gas chromatography and mass spectrometry to identify the volatile molecules that are released when meat is cooked.

The key to their specific formula is the oxygen-carrying molecule heme, which contains iron that gives meat its color and metallic taste. Instead of using meat, Impossible uses genetically modified yeast to make a version of heme found in the roots of certain plants.

Impossible has a few competitors, namely Beyond Meat, that uses pea protein (among other ingredients) to replicate ground beef. The product is sold in supermarket chains such as Tesco in the UK and Whole Foods in the US, in addition to real meat and chicken. Both Impossible and Beyond released new, improved versions of their citizens in mid-January.

In contrast, none of the meat startups in the meat laboratory have announced a launch date for their first commercial product. But when that happens – some claim by the end of this year – the laboratory-grown approach could turn the traditional meat industry upside down.

“I suspect cultured meat proteins can do things that cannot be plant-based in terms of taste, nutrition and performance,” says Isha Datar, who heads New Harvest, an organization that helps fund research into cellular agriculture. Datar, a cell biologist and a fellow at the MIT Media Lab, believes that farmed meat will look more like real meat, both in terms of nutritional value and functionally, than the vegetable species. The idea is that a die-hard carnivore (like me) might not be so put off by the thought of giving up the real thing.

A global risk

Dingding Hu

You may wonder, why would anyone want that? The answer is that, in a very literal sense, our meat consumption habits are not sustainable.

Livestock raised for food already contributes around 15% to global greenhouse gas emissions. (You may have heard that if cows were a country, it would be the third largest channel in the world.) A quarter of the planet’s ice-free land is used to graze them, and a third of all arable land is used to grow food for them. A growing population will make matters worse. It is estimated that the population is expected to grow to 10 billion people by 2050 to eat 70% more meat. The greenhouse gases from food production will increase by no less than 92%.

In January, a committee of 37 scientists in The Lancet reported that the harmful effects of meat not only on the environment but also on our health make it a “global risk to people and the planet.” In October 2018, a study in Nature discovered that if we don’t want to irreparably destroy our planet’s natural resources, we need to change our diet significantly.

“Without changes towards more plant-based diets,” says Marco Springmann, a researcher in environmental sustainability at Oxford University and the lead author of the Nature paper, “there is little chance of preventing dangerous levels of climate change.”

The good news is that a growing number of people now seem to be reconsidering what they eat. A recent report from Nielsen discovered that the sale of vegetable food intended to replace animal products had increased by 20% in 2018 compared to a year earlier. Veganism, which not only avoids meat, but also products derived from greenhouse gases produced by dairy cattle, is now considered relatively mainstream.

That does not necessarily have to be more vegans. A recent Gallup survey showed that the number of people in the US who claim to be vegan has hardly changed since 2012 and is around 3%. Anyway, Americans eat less meat, even if they don’t cut it completely.

And now for the court cases

Memphis Meats CEO Ulma Valeti (center) and chief science officer Nicholas Genovese (right) see how a chef prepares one of their creations.

Memphis meat

Investors bet that this momentum will continue. Startups such as MosaMeat (co-founder of Mark Post, the scientist behind the £ 215,000 citizen), Memphis Meats, Supermeat, Just and Finless Foods have all raised healthy amounts of risk capital. The race must now be the first on the market with a tasty product at acceptable costs.

Eric Schulze, vice president of Memphis Meats, sees his product as a supplement to the meat industry. “In our rich cultural carpet as a species, we offer a new innovation to integrate into our growing list of sustainable food traditions,” he says. “We see ourselves as a” and “not” or “solution to help nurture a growing world.”

The traditional meat industry does not see it that way. The Beef Association of the National Cattlemen in the US rejects these new approaches as ‘fake meat’. In August 2018, Missouri passed a law banning the labeling of alternative products such as meat. Only food “derived from the harvested production of livestock or poultry” can have the word “meat” in any form on the label. Violating that law can lead to a fine or even a year in prison.

The alternative meat industry is fighting back. The Good Food Institute, which promotes regulations that favor vegetable and lab-grown meat, has joined forces with Tofurky (the makers of a tofu-based meat substitute since the 1980s), the American Civil Liberties Union and the Animal Legal Defense Fund to overthrow the law. Jessica Almy, policy director of the institute, says that the law in its current form is “nonsense” and an “insult” to the principle of free speech. “The idea behind the law is to make vegetable meat less attractive and to put farmed meat at a disadvantage when it comes on the market,” she says.

Almy says she is convinced that their case will be successful and expects a temporary order to be issued soon. But the fight in Missouri is just the beginning of a fight that could last for years. In February 2018, the American Cattlemen’s Association launched a petition calling on the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) to introduce a similar federal law.

We need to adjust our diet to prevent the planet from breaking.

Traditional groups from the meat industry are also very outspoken about how farmed meat and vegetable meat should be regulated. Last summer a group of the largest agricultural organizations in the US (nicknamed “The Barnyard”) wrote to President Trump requesting reassurance that the USDA will monitor farmed meat to ensure “a level playing field” (the USDA is tougher, stricter) safety inspections than the Food and Drug Administration.)

In November 2018, the USDA and the FDA finally released a joint statement announcing that the two supervisors would share responsibilities for monitoring laboratory-grown meat.

The bovine serum problem

Some cultured meat startups say that this confusion about regulations is the only thing that stops them. One company, Just, says it plans to launch a ground ‘chicken’ product this year and has fueled a partnership with a Japanese cattle farm to produce a ‘Wagyu beef’ product made from cells in the laboratory . The CEO is Josh Tetrick, who had previously founded the controversial startup Hampton Creek, the ancestor of Just. (The FDA once forbade the company to call its distinctive mayonnaise product because it didn’t contain eggs.) Talk to Tetrick, a bullish, confident young man, and you get a sense of the drive and excitement behind the alternative meat market. “The only (limit) for launch,” he says, “is regulatory.”

DINGDING HU

That is optimistic to say the least. The movement of laboratory meat still faces major technical obstacles. One is that making the product needs something called fetal bovine serum. FBS is harvested from fetuses taken during the slaughter of pregnant cows. That is a clear problem for an alleged cruelty-free product. FBS also happens to be dazzlingly expensive. It is used in the biopharmaceutical industry and in basic cellular research, but only in small quantities. However, farmed meat requires huge amounts. All lab meat start-ups will have to use less of it – or eliminate it altogether – to make their products cheap enough. Last year, Finless Foods (which wants to make a fish-free version of bluefin tuna) reported that it has halved the amount of FBS it needs to grow its cells. And Schulze says the Memphis Meats team is working on ways to eliminate it completely.

But there are other problems, says Datar, about New Harvest. She says we still don’t understand the fundamental processes well enough. Although we have a fairly deep understanding of animals used in medical research, such as laboratory mice, our knowledge of farm animals at the cellular level is quite thin. “I see a lot of excitement and VCs invest but not much in scientific, material progress,” she says. It becomes difficult to scale up the technology if we still learn how these complex biological systems react and grow.

Laboratory meat has another – more tangible – problem. By allowing muscle cells to grow all over again, pure flesh tissue is created, but the result lacks an essential part of every hamburger or steak: fat. Fat is what gives meat its taste and moisture, and its texture is difficult to replicate. Vegetable meat already circumvents the problem – to some extent – by using shear cell technology that forces the vegetable protein mixture into layers to produce a fibrous meaty texture. But if you want to make a meat-free “steak” all over again, some more work needs to be done. Farmed meat needs a way to make fat cells grow and somehow slide them into muscle cells to make the end result tasty. That has proved difficult so far, the main reason being that the first hamburger was so dry.

The scientists of the meatable meat-based startup based in the Netherlands may have found a way. The team participated in medical stem cell research to find a way to isolate pluripotent stem cells in cows by removing them from the blood in umbilical cord cords of newborn calves. Pluripotent cells, formed early in the development of an embryo, can develop into any type of cell in the body. This means that they can also be persuaded to form fat, muscle or even liver cells in meat from laboratory vegetables.

“I think there will be lines outside the store that are longer than for the next iPhone.”

Meatable’s work can mean that the cells can be adapted to produce a steak-like product whose fat and muscle content depends on what the customer prefers: the characteristic marble of a rib-eye steak, for example. “We can add more fat or make it slimmer – we can do whatever we want. We have new control over how we feed the cells, ”says Meatable CTO Daan Luining, who is also research director at the non-profit Cellular Agriculture Society. “Pluripotent cells are just like the hardware. The software you use changes it to the desired cell. It’s already in the cell – you just have to activate it. “

But the researchers’ work is also interesting because they have found a way around the FBS problem: the pluripotent cells do not need the serum to grow. Luining is clearly proud of this. “Bypassing the use of a different cell type was a very elegant solution,” he says.

He admits that Meatable is years away from launching a commercial product, but he has confidence in the final prospects. “I think there will be lines outside the store that are longer than for the next iPhone,” he says.

If you make it, will they eat it?

The way it looks now, lab-grown meat is not as virtuous as you might think. Although greenhouse gas emissions are lower than those of the largest villain, beef, it is more polluting than chicken or vegetable alternatives, due to the energy currently required to produce it. A whitepaper from the World Economic Forum on the impact of alternative meat showed that laboratory-produced meat as it is currently produced yields only about 7% fewer greenhouse gas emissions than beef. Other replacements, such as tofu or plants, gave a discount of up to 25%. “We will have to see if companies can really offer low-emission products at low costs,” says Marco Springmann of Oxford, one of the newspaper’s co-authors.

It is also unclear how much better your lab meat would be than the real thing. One reason why meat is linked to an increased risk of cancer is that it contains heme, which can also be present in farmed meat.

And will people even want to eat it? Datar thinks so. The little research that has been done on this supports that. A 2017 study, published in the PLoS One magazine, found that most US consumers would be willing to try laboratory-grown meat, and about a third were probably or certainly prepared to eat it regularly.

It is unrealistic to expect the entire world to become vegan. But a report in Nature in October 2018 suggested that if everyone switched to the flexitarian lifestyle (mostly vegetarian food, but with a little bit of poultry and fish and no more than one portion of red meat per week), we could halve greenhouse gas emissions food production and also reduce other harmful effects of the meat industry, such as the excessive use of fertilizers and the waste of fresh water and land. (It could also reduce premature death by around 20%, according to a study at The Lancet in October, thanks to fewer deaths from conditions such as cardiovascular disease, stroke and cancer.)

impossible foods

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Some of the biggest players in the traditional meat industry acknowledge this and subtly change themselves as ‘protein producers’ instead of meat companies. Just like Big Tobacco companies that buy startups for sheep, the meat giants also buy interests in this new industry. In 2016, Tyson Foods, the world’s second largest meat processor, established a venture capital fund to support alternative meat product producers; it is also an investor in Beyond Meat. In 2017, the third largest, Cargill, invested in Memphis Meats startup of farmed meat, and Tyson followed in 2018. Many other major food producers do the same; For example, in December 2018, Unilever purchased a Dutch company called the Vegetarian Butcher that makes a variety of non-meat products, including vegetable meat substitutes.

“A meat company does not do what they do because they want to degrade the environment and not love animals,” says Tetrick, the Just CEO. “They do it because they think it’s the most efficient way. But if you give them another way to grow the company that is more efficient, they will do it. “

At least some in the meat industry agree. In a profile for Bloomberg last year, Tom Hayes, then Tyson’s CEO, made it clear where he saw the company’s future. “If we can grow the meat without the animal,” he said, “why wouldn’t we?”