Meat made in the lab

By Maore Ithula

In the next two weeks, millions of fish, poultry, cattle, goats and sheep will find their way to the dining table as meat.

And the tons of biomass waste that will be generated thereof, will soar up to deplete the already shrank ozone layer, thereby escalating global warming.

This will in turn affect rain patterns and livestock will die en mass so that come December next year, merry makers will pay for meat through their noses.

However, this vicious cycle will soon break if a Dutch researcher succeeds in producing meat in the laboratory using stem cell technology.

Also referred to as cultured in-vitro or lab-made meat, the meat made in Petri dishes is expected to provide the billions of tons of steak required to feed the world every year.

Proponents of this technology say this move will save the environment and spare the lives of millions of animals slaughtered annually.

The man behind this research is Prof Mark Post, a vascular biologist at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands, who hopes to unveil the delicacy soon.

Experts say the meat’s potential for saving animals’ lives, land, water, energy and the planet itself could be enormous.

"The first one will be a proof of concept, just to show it’s possible," Prof Mark told Reuters earlier this year in a telephone interview from his Maastricht lab. "I believe I can do this in the coming year."

It may sound and look like some kind of imitation, but in-vitro or cultured meat is a real animal flesh product, just one that has never been part of a complete, living animal — quite different from imitation meat or meat substitutes aimed at vegetarians and made from vegetable proteins like soy.

Stem cells

Using stem cells harvested from a choice animal carcasses from slaughterhouses post nurtures them with a feed of concocted of sugars, amino acids, lipids, minerals and all other nutrients they need to grow in the right way.

So far, he has produced whitish pale muscle-like strips, each of them around 2.5 cm (1 inch) long, less than a centimetre wide and so thin as to be almost see-through.

"Pack enough of these together — probably around 3,000 of them in layers, throw in a few strips of lab-grown fat and you have the world’s first ‘cultured meat burger’," he says. One such burger would cost about $345, 000 (Sh29 million) to produce.

"This first one will be grown in an academic lab, by highly trained academic staff," he said. "It is hand-made and it is time and labour-intensive, that is why it is expensive to produce." Since Mark’s in-vitro meat contains no blood, it lacks colour. Actually it is a little unappetising. "At the moment, it looks a bit like the flesh of scallops," he says.

Like all muscle, these lab-grown strips also need to be exercised so they can grow and strengthen rather than waste away. To do this Mark exploits the muscles’ natural tendency to contract and stretches them between Velcro tabs in the Petri dish to provide resistance and help them build up strength.

Supporters of the idea of man-made meat, such as Stellan Welin, a bio-ethicist at Linkoping University in Sweden, say this is no less appealing than mass-producing livestock in factory farms where growth hormones and antibiotics are commonly used to boost yields and profits.

And conventional meat production is also notoriously inefficient. For every 15 grammes of edible meat, you need to feed the animals on around 100 grammes of vegetable protein, an increasingly unsustainable equation. This means finding new ways of producing meat is essential if we are to feed the enormous and ever-growing demand for it across the world, Welin told Reuters in an interview.

"Of course you could do it by being vegetarian or eating less meat," he said. "But the trends don’t seem to be going that way. With cultured meat, we can be more conservative — people can still eat meat, but without causing so much damage."

According to the World Health Organisation, annual meat production is projected to increase from 218 million tonnes in 1997-1999 to 376 million tonnes by 2030, and demand from a growing world population is seen rising further beyond that.

"Current livestock meat production is just not sustainable," says Mark. "Not from an ecological point of view, and neither from a volume point of view. Right now we are using more than 50 per cent of all our agricultural land for livestock. It’s simple mathematics. We have to come up with alternatives," he says.

According to a 2006 report by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, industrialised agriculture contributes on a "massive scale" to climate change, air pollution, land degradation, energy use, deforestation and biodiversity decline.

The report, entitled Livestock’s Long Shadow, says meat industry contributes about 18 per cent of global greenhouse-gas emissions, and this proportion is expected to grow as consumers in fast-developing countries like China and India eat more meat.

Hanna Tuomisto, who conducted a study into the relative environmental impacts of various types of meat, including lamb, pork, beef and cultured meat, said the lab-grown stuff has by far the least impact on the environment.

Her analysis, published in the Environmental Science and Technology journal earlier this year, found that growing our favourite meats in-vitro would use 35 to 60 per cent less energy, emit 80 to 95 per cent less greenhouse gas and use around 98 per cent less land than conventionally produced animal meat.

Mark, who is financed by an anonymous funder, who is keen to see the Dutch scientist succeed and hopes to hand the world its first man-made hamburger by August or September next year. For the moment, however, he admits what he has grown is a long way from a mouth-watering meal.

Mark hasn’t yet sampled his own creation, but reviews from others are not great.