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What You Need to Know About Cultivated Meat

   

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01 Feb 2023

What You Need to Know About Cultivated Meat

What You Need to Know About Cultivated Meat

Cultured meat. Cultivated meat. Lab-grown meat. Cell-based meat. Whatever you call it, the newest addition to alternative protein is having a bit of a moment. Over the past few months, Singapore’s government wined and dined VIP guests with cultivated meat at COP27, lab-grown chicken passed its first hurdle with the US Food and Drug Administration and a landmark global agreement to protect biodiversity applied new pressure to rethinking how beef, pork, chicken and seafood are produced. 

 

Advocates of cultivated meat say it could be an answer to soaring agricultural emissionsdeteriorating biodiversity, and alarming food insecurity, while critics worry that the high cost of cultivated meat, alongside its regulatory hurdles and unproven scalability, make it mostly hype for now. Everyone agrees that many questions remain. For now, here’s what we know about the present and potential future of meat grown in a lab. 

 

What is cultured meat?

 

Cultured or cultivated meat is made by harvesting cells from live animals, “feeding” the cells with nutrients so they can grow in a bioreactor and turning the result into a product consumers can eat. 

 

Take fish maw, for example. The swim bladder of a fish, it’s considered a delicacy in many Asian countries. To create a lab-grown version of croaker fish maws, scientists from Hong Kong-based Avant Meats place fish cells in a culture medium containing dozens of different nutrients, and store them in a bioreactor connected to an oxygen tank. Within weeks, those cells proliferate into tissues the size of a grain of rice, at which point they’re ready for assembly into larger pieces. 

 

The science behind cultivated meat isn’t new — cell cultures were first used in medical research in 1907 — but applying that idea to meat gained traction after a Dutch pharmacologist presented the world’s first cell-based vitro hamburger on television in 2013. 

 

Today, more than 100 companies around the world are trying to create cell-based protein, ranging from lab-grown lamb to lab-grown oysters, and even lab-grown foie gras. Different proteins present different complications, though: Makers of cell-based seafood don’t have the advantage medical research gives those cultivating mammalian cells, for example. And meats made up of more complex tissue and texture can be more difficult to construct — a process known as “scaffolding” that holds together muscle, fat and connective tissue to recreate meat’s structure. 

 

How is cultivated meat different from plant-based meat?

 

Plant-based meat refers to meat that is made from soy or other non-meat ingredients — Impossible Foods Inc. and Beyond Meat Inc. are two of the more high-profile companies producing plant-based meat products. Cultivated meat, on the other hand, is produced by cultivating animal cells directly. It has the exact same nutrition as conventionally produced beef, pork, poultry and seafood — though both plant-based and cell-based meats are still perfecting the taste and texture. 

 

The other big difference between plant-based and cultivated protein is availability. Plant-based meat is still struggling to reach consistent price parity with regular meat — and commands less than 1% of the global market, according to an estimate from Good Food Institute Asia Pacific — but it is sold in restaurants and grocery stores around the world. For now, the commercial sale of lab-grown meat is only legal in Singapore, a country of 5 million that is focused on dramatically reducing its reliance on food imports. 

 

Experts say that’s unlikely to change anytime soon. Scaling up the production of cultivated protein from a pilot stage to a commercial level requires technological advances, industry observers say, and massive bioreactors required for mass manufacturing don’t exist yet.

 

Regulatory hurdles also remain. In the US, the FDA recently told Upside Foods that it had no questions about the safety of the company’s cell-based chicken for human consumption, but the California-based startup still needs more approvals, including from the US Department of Agriculture, which jointly oversees the rollout of cultivated meat. Elsewhere, policymakers in China, Israel and the Netherlands have signaled support for cell-based meat, but none have approved commercial sales.

 

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