I like meat, but I know there are problems with the way we produce, package and consume it.
Wouldn’t it be great if we could enjoy meat without having to grow and butcher animals to get it?
Well, maybe we can. The first peer-reviewed discussion of the prospects for creating “cultured meat” on an industrial scale has just appeared, in the June 20 issue of Tissue Engineering.
Pieter Edelman of Wageningen University, Netherlands, Douglas McFarland of South Dakota State University, Vladimir Mironov of the Medical University of South Carolina and Jason Metheny, a University of Maryland doctoral student, have proposed two tissue-engineering techniques that could some day lead to affordable lab-grown meat.
The concept of growing meat in the lab dates back at least 70 years, but actual research has been scarce. However, there was a NASA-funded project led by Morris Benjaminson at
(The researchers even fried up their lab-grown fish in olive oil, garlic, lemon and pepper. Fellow staff members confirmed it looked like fish and smelled like fish, but didn’t actually taste it.)
The
There’s another problem. Good meat isn’t just muscle cells, its muscle cells that have been stretched, over and over, through the normal exercise of the animal. The “mouth feel” we associate with meat is a product of the complex structure of muscle and connective tissue that results.
The paper in Tissue Engineering suggests two ways to “exercise” cultured meat. One is grow the cells in large flat sheets on thin membranes. The sheets could be repeatedly stretched, then, when ready, removed from the membranes and stacked on top of one another to increase thickness. The thinness of the sheets would also allow nutrients to reach all the cells. The second method would be to grow the muscle cells on small beads (suspended in a nutrient bath) that stretch with small changes in temperature.
The result in either case would be processed meat, something like hamburger or sausage, which could then be formed into any shape you wanted. (Vladimir Mironov envisions a future sausage maker that will grow and cook fresh sausage overnight, rather like a breadmaking machine makes bread.) Producing something indistinguishable from a steak or a slice of ham would be more difficult, requiring some kind of artificial blood supply system (perhaps a branching network of hundreds of tiny edible tubes), the proper mixture of muscle and connective tissue, and some way to ensure it all forms the appropriate three-dimensional structure.
The first cultured meat to appear on our menus, then, is more likely to be hamburgers, hot dogs or sausages rather than filet mignon or prime rib. Theoretically, at least, such a menu item offers a number of benefits.
Even without genetic modification, the fat content of the cultured meat could be better controlled. The risk of foodborne disease would be minimized. Land use and the resulting environmental degradation would be curtailed; so would much of the pollution produced by the meat industry as it now stands. And, of course, cultured meat could be produced without any animals being harmed.
Even a single cell could theoretically be cultured into enough meat to satisfy the current global demand. (That demand keeps growing–
Several scientists have joined together to create a non-profit organization called New Harvest to advance the technology of meat substitutes (not just cultured meat, but various plant-based substitutes, as well).
The big question in all of this, of course, is whether anyone will want to eat cultured meat.
Me? I say, “Bring it on!”
But then, I even like haggis.
