Cutlet from a test tube
Is there a future for "pure meat"
Daria Spasskaya, N+1
Meat consumption is unethical in relation to animals and leads to a significant increase in harmful emissions into the atmosphere, affecting global climate change. Is it possible to change this situation? It is unlikely that all people on Earth will become vegans, but meat can be grown artificially from animal stem cells. So, a way out has been found? Yes, scientists say. Not really, environmentalists and technologists object. The production of artificial meat is still too expensive economically – and, oddly enough, leaves a more abundant carbon footprint than growing conventional meat. Nevertheless, the supporters of the new product do not lose hope to bring it to the market on an industrial scale.
In September, Russian producers announced that they were joining the global trend of producing "cultured meat". According to the ideologists of this business, instead of killing animals for meat, muscle fibers can be grown in a bioreactor from stem cells in a special nutrient medium.
Such a product is also known under the names "test tube meat" and "clean meat". The latter term implies that your cutlets will be clean from both an ethical and an ecological point of view.
Fasting and its meat
The idea of producing meat in a test tube (or rather, in a Petri dish) came from biomedicine: advances in stem cell cultivation, three-dimensional organ printing inspired food technologists as well. Indeed, if it is possible to grow tissue for transplantation in the laboratory, why not grow it for food?
The principle of growing meat in a simplified form repeats the principle of growing any tissue: stem cells are isolated from an animal muscle sample, which are then multiplied in a special nutrient medium containing hormones and growth factors, and forced to differentiate into muscle fibers.
The process of cooking artificial meat in the laboratory of the Ochakov Food Ingredients Plant
Similar experiments have been carried out in laboratories since the 1990s with the aim of obtaining an edible product, but the popularization of the idea is largely the merit of scientist Mark Post from the University of Maastricht (the Netherlands). In 2013, he presented to journalists the first burger with a cutlet made from cow muscle cells grown in his laboratory.
At the presentation, the cutlet was prepared by the chef and solemnly eaten by culinary critics. Judging by the reviews, the product in all respects resembled "traditional" meat, except that it was not so juicy. In 2015, Post founded the company Mosa Meat, which optimizes the production of meat in the laboratory in order to release the product to the market by 2021.
The first cutlet was grown for three months and cost the creators three hundred thousand dollars. However, the presentation spurred the interest of businessmen and investors in "clean meat", which led to the emergence of many startups aimed at optimizing the process. Already in 2017, the cost of muscle fibers from the laboratory was 5 thousand dollars per kilogram, and by today it has fallen several times more.
According to Forbes, at least 26 companies are currently engaged in the development of "pure meat" in the world, whose goal is to make a product accessible to the mass consumer.
How much does it cost to cultivate
Imagine that we want to grow a piece of such meat from scratch. To begin with, we need to equip a laboratory: to purchase centrifuges, a microscope, a laminar box for sterile work, an autoclave, a CO2 incubator to maintain the desired concentration of carbon dioxide in the starting culture and several bioreactors of different volumes in order to grow biomass at different stages of "ripeness".
Then you need to get stem cells from which the culture will be grown. They are best isolated from a muscle sample of a young animal (for example, a newborn calf) using a special technology that includes tissue lysis and cell selection.
Scientists involved in optimizing the technology are discussing the creation of a stem cell biobank from which it will be possible to take the sample needed for production – this should slightly reduce the cost of the process.
Next, the cell culture must be grown in a culture bottle, and then sequentially grown in several bioreactors with mixing and aeration in a nutrient medium (if we want to grow really many cells). After that, the cells will need to be extracted from the bioreactor and sown on an edible framework (for example, from collagen), which will give the product the appearance of a piece of meat.
The whole process will take about 40 days, during which it will be necessary to monitor the sterility of the process.
The scheme of the proposed technological process of growing meat in the laboratory. The Good Food Institute, 2019
The cost of the nutrient medium will make up the lion's share of the final cost of the final product, it will be consumed by hundreds of liters in production. Analysts have calculated that the cost of "pure meat" will be compared with the cost of traditional meat, when the price of one liter of medium will not be much higher than one dollar.
In the meantime, it costs more than three hundred dollars per liter in the cheapest version.
How to optimize the environment
The medium has a complex composition and must contain the necessary proteins, lipids, salts, amino acids, vitamins and hormones. The developers set themselves the task, firstly, to get rid of animal sources (for example, blood serum from calf embryos, which is often added to the medium to ensure the desired composition), and secondly, to make the medium as cheap as possible.
To do this, scientists try to minimize the number of components, collect media from recombinant proteins (that is, produced in microorganisms such as E. coli and yeast) and look for suitable components of plant origin.
According to the calculations of experts from The Good Food Institute, the culture medium can be reduced in price by another 10-1000 times if we optimize the production of recombinant growth factors – the most expensive components of the medium, without which stem cells simply will not grow and differentiate.
The list of components of the medium with the specified cost for 20 thousand liters. The Good Food Institute, 2019
The Ochakov plant of food ingredients, which was discussed at the beginning of the article, reported that the first 40-gram piece of "meat" cost them 900 thousand rubles. This amount did not include laboratory equipment, for which another 9 million rubles were spent.
The director of the enterprise, Alexander Savkov, confirmed that the main costs associated with growing cells fell on the growth medium. However, his laboratory used imported Swiss-made media used in biomedicine. The main efforts of the company's technologists, as well as their foreign colleagues, will be directed to the creation of a cheap analogue.
Technologists are facing really difficult tasks, because "clean meat" will have to be grown on a huge scale – much larger than mammalian cells are grown in industry now, which, for example, are used to produce antibodies.
What's wrong with cows
In addition to the obvious ethical aspect (killing animals), which forces many people to become vegetarians, animal husbandry causes significant damage to the environment. Livestock farming supplies 14.5 percent of the total greenhouse gases emitted to the atmosphere, and pastures and fields sown with forage crops occupy 80 percent of agricultural land.
At the same time, animal husbandry supplies only 37 percent of dietary protein. Among the greenhouse gases, the source of which are farm animals, methane emitted by cattle prevails. In terms of accelerating global warming, it is 28 times more dangerous than carbon dioxide.
However, the greatest contribution to emissions is made not by the cattle itself, but by operations for its maintenance – manure utilization, fertilizer production, plowing of land, feed production. According to forecasts of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, by 2050 the need for livestock products will increase by 70 percent. It seems that this industry really needs optimization.
These facts are used by the developers of "pure meat" when they turn to investors for financing. They promise that if successful, the share of "traditional" meat on the market will fall to 40 percent in the next 20 years, and the number of cattle will decrease from one and a half billion to several tens of thousands.
Mosa Meat, in particular, claims that the production of its product will require 99 percent less land and 96 percent less water than in conventional livestock farming, and greenhouse gas emissions will be reduced by 96 percent.
Whose trail is worse
However, scientists are already questioning the unconditional environmental friendliness of meat from a test tube. Researchers from Oxford have calculated what carbon footprint will be left by the production of "pure meat" in a bioreactor on a nutrient medium containing cyanobacteria extract and growth factors produced in E. coli cells.
The calculations included not only factors such as the production of fertilizers for the cultivation of cyanobacteria, but even the electricity spent on the sterilization of the components of the medium. The model was compiled for three locations with different "carbon cost" of electricity production – Thailand, Spain and California.
Depending on the production technology, the spread of results ranged from 1.7 to 25 kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalents per kilogram of product. At the same time, scientists estimated the spread of carbon footprint values for the production of a kilogram of beef at 28-43 kilograms of CO2 equivalents.
Comparison of the impact on global warming of traditional beef production (Sweden, Brazil, USA) and cultured meat under different scenarios in the long term. The diagram implies that cultured meat will replace beef (John Lynch and Raymond Pierrehumbert / Front. Sustain. Food Syst. 2019)
Although at first glance, cultured meat does have an environmental advantage over beef, the authors of the work remind that methane makes the main contribution to the carbon value of beef. Its lifetime in the atmosphere is 12 years, while carbon dioxide does not go anywhere from there. Thus, in the long term, cultured meat may be even more dangerous for global warming due to the "pure" carbon contribution.
However, Alexey Kokorin, director of the Climate and Energy program of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), believes that in the short term, methane produced mainly by dairy cows should not be discounted. "The energy from the decomposition of methane eventually accumulates in the upper layers of the ocean anyway. The result of this, among other things, is an increase in extreme natural phenomena, such as hurricane winds – what we are seeing right now," the climatologist comments.
It is also worth considering that beef production is the most expensive compared to other types of meat. The production of a kilogram of chicken costs us about five kilograms of CO2 equivalents, which is already quite comparable to the production of "pure meat", the carbon footprint of which does not depend on whose meat grows in the bioreactor.
The cost of a kilogram of agricultural products in carbon equivalent. The minimum values belong to root crops, and the maximum values belong to beef and lamb (Stephen Clune et al /Journal of Cleaner Production 2016)
What is meat
"Pure meat" has not yet appeared on the market, but traditional meat producers are already taking measures to protect their products from competitors. Last year, the American Cattleman's Association filed a petition with the State Agricultural Inspectorate (FSIS) with a request to prohibit calling meat all products of other origin, except those obtained directly from animals.
Livestock breeders are concerned not only about muscles grown in the laboratory, but also a variety of vegan products made from vegetable protein, which are positioned as meat substitutes. Unlike cultured meat, their products are already available in stores and restaurants.
Impossible Foods, founded by Stanford biochemistry professor Patrick Brown, has done a lot of research to make a product that is similar to meat in all respects. The researchers realized that hemoglobin (heme-containing blood protein) gives many properties to meat, and replaced it with legoglobin isolated from nodules on the roots of soybean plants.
For the mass production of "vegetable meat", the company has established the production of recombinant legoglobin in yeast cells. The American Administration for the Control of Medicines and Food has already recognized the prepared legoglobin as a safe product, and currently Impossible Burger with a vegan cutlet, allegedly indistinguishable from beef, can be tasted in several restaurant chains in the United States, including the popular Burger King chain.
Founded in 2009, Beyond Meat sells vegetable imitation chicken nuggets, beef burgers and pork sausages all over the world. The development of their products was also sponsored by Bill Gates and Tyson Foods Corporation. The basis of the burger patty is pea protein extract, as well as rice protein, coconut oil, starch, lecithin and other components of non-animal origin.
If such products are still focused on vegans, "pure meat" is positioned as a full-fledged replacement for ordinary meat. Nevertheless, according to surveys, potential consumers are roughly equally divided into two camps: some are enthusiastic about the idea and are even willing to overpay, while others declare that they will not eat anything that is grown in the laboratory.
Technologists, of course, are a little cunning: unlike a traditional piece of meat, which contains fat and other components, for which many people like the taste of shish kebab, cultured meat is a "dry" muscle.
Regulatory authorities are also suspicious of the new product for the time being: according to experts, "pure meat" may contain an excessive amount of hormones or growth factors due to production technology, and a plant-based nutrient medium can cause allergies in consumers.
It is necessary to eat less
Given the technological difficulties described above and the need to undergo product certification procedures, it is unlikely that we will try "clean meat" in the near future. While plant-based "meat dilators" are entering the growing Asian market, scientists confirm that a plant-based diet is indeed the most environmentally friendly.
"The latest IPCC report shows that greenhouse gas emissions from the production of all food on the planet account for about 30 percent of the total emissions. At the same time, if humanity completely switches to a vegan diet, the share of food emissions can be reduced by 15-20 percent. Even if you switch to a Mediterranean diet that contains enough meat and fish, emissions will be significantly reduced," says Alexey Kokorin.
The process of cooking artificial meat in the laboratory of the Ochakov Food Ingredients Plant
According to a recent study published in Science, the rejection of traditional meat and dairy products will reduce the amount of agricultural land by 75 percent, while there will be enough food for everyone.
For those who are not ready to completely abandon animal products and switch to soy protein, Nature magazine recommends a still very eco-friendly flexitarian diet containing a little chicken, fish and eggs.
However, statistics show that in developed countries at least a third of food is thrown away, and the population is rapidly gaining weight, so the first step in the fight against climate change can be a simple rule "eat less" – no matter what.
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