Earlier this year MIT Technology Review published its annual Ten Breakthrough Technologies report featuring an article by Bill Gates entitled: How we’ll invent the future. In it, he lists “cow-free burger” as one of the key technologies of the future and discusses how “lab-grown meat improves our quality of life.”
Says Gates: “Growing animal protein in a lab isn’t about feeding more people. There’s enough livestock to feed the world already, even as demand for meat goes up. Next-generation protein isn’t about creating more - it’s about making meat better. It lets us provide for a growing and wealthier world without contributing to deforestation or emitting methane. It also allows us to enjoy hamburgers without killing any animals.”
Of course, in an ideal world everybody could turn vegetarian. Then there’d be no need for industrial farming, which is harmful to the environment and brings suffering to animals. But humans are carnivores and meat-eating isn’t about to end soon. One solution is to create meat in a lab, or what’s called cultivated meat, which is a more efficient and less wasteful process of creating meat.
The meat we get from the butcher or grocer’s comes from animals. But animals aren’t composed just of meat. They have skin, bones and organs, which are often not consumed. Yet, food, water and space are needed to grow a whole animal just to get the meat. It would obviously be less wasteful if meat could be produced without the bones, organs and so on.
So far, scientists have managed to cultivate cells that could be turned into processed meat (minced meat) that can be used to create a burger or some sausage. The bigger challenge would be to create meat that looks, feels, and tastes like an actual steak.
A slab of steak consists of muscles and fat cells interlaced with blood vessels and connective tissue. The blood vessels supply the tissue with nutrients and oxygen while the connective tissue organises the muscle fibres into aligned bundles. This is what gives texture to the steak.
So far, most of the cultivated meat companies out there have focused on creating minced meat rather than steaks. That’s because emulating the complexity of piece of steak is a lot harder than creating a burger.
PLATFORM TO GROW MEAT
To grow cultured steaks or filets, you’d need some kind of scaffolding upon which meat cells can grow. These can be made from materials such as hydrogels, silk, chitosan (made from shrimp), zein (corn) and alginate (seaweed). Another approach would be to use plants.
Glenn Gaudette, a professor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts is trying to make that happen. He’s attempting to grow cow muscle cells on spinach leaves. The reason for using plants is that plants feed their cells with blood vessel-like structures with the same branching patterns seen in animal tissue.
Gaudette’s process involves using detergents to strip the plant cells away from the leaves. This process is called decellularisation. The plant’s DNA and all the other stuff inside its living cells get washed away during the decellularisation process. What’s left is a scaffolding of sorts that theoretically could be a platform to grow meat.
Drawing on the techniques developed in Gaudette’s lab, many researchers are now attempting to grow animal cells on decellularised plants— not just on spinach leaves but celery, artichoke, mushrooms and jackfruit. For example, Marie Gibbons, a graduate student at Harvard Medical School has successfully cultured turkey muscle cells on artichoke and jackfruit.
CULTIVATED MEAT A REALITY
A chemical engineering research group at the University of Bath has come up with a method of formulating a suitable scaffold for cell-cultured meat using blades of grass. The researchers used stem cells extracted from an animal and feed it with a mixture of glucose, vitamins, minerals and amino acids. The cells are then transferred to a bioreactor containing grass as a scaffold, on which they can attach and grow.
A key challenge for researchers working on plant-based scaffolds is getting the animal cells to penetrate the cellulose plant walls, and fill out the empty spaces rather than clinging to the edges. If existing plants don’t have quite the right structure to do this, there’s a potential solution courtesy of genetic engineering. Gaudette, for example, is working with botanists to develop specialised spinach leaves to increase their suitability for scaffolding. For example, by introducing genes for proteins that would facilitate animal cell binding and growth.
Cultivated meat is a reality. Minced meat grown in labs in an economical way will soon become a reality. Commercialisation of this technology is just around the corner. It will happen.
What’s next, and still unproven, is to grow actual slabs of steak that can deliver the look, feel and taste of an actual steak. When that happens, it will be the beginning of the end of industrial farming - and the world would be better off for it.
Oon Yeoh is a consultant with experiences in print, online and mobile media. Reach him at oonyeoh@gmail.com.