Meat Without The Animals

Muhamad Yehia & sahar ragab

More than 150 startups are chasing an ambitious goal: meat that doesn’t require raising and killing animals that is affordable and tastes and feels like the meat we eat now. They are part of a young industry aiming to use cell biology to reduce the environmental impact of the world’s ever-increasing demand for meat and change global protein production the way electric cars are shaking up the auto industry.

“We are addicted to meat as a species. It’s part of our evolution. It’s part of our culture,” said Believer founder Yaakov Nahmias, whose country, Israel, is an industry hub along with California and Singapore. But “we thought about quantity rather than the environment, rather than sustainability.”

Companies making so-called “cultivated,” or “cultured” meat, which is also popularly known as “lab-grown” meat, are trying to scale up quickly — partnering with traditional meat companies, drawing more and more investors and breaking ground on new production facilities in the U.S. and elsewhere.

And while many people who have tried it say they like it, others find the idea distasteful. A recent poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that half of adults in the meat-hungry U.S. would be unlikely to try it. A majority of those who said they wouldn’t said “it just sounds weird.”

Even Nahmias’ 10-year-old son Oren says he will only eat traditional meat. “I feel bad” for the animals, he said, “but they are yummy

Producing meat this way could also dramatically reduce the impact of meat on the environment because it would reduce the need for land for the animals and for feed. Multiple studies show that traditional livestock production is responsible for about 10% to 20% of greenhouse gas emissions.

Scientists and industry experts say cultivated meats have a way to go before they’re indistinguishable from conventional meats, especially when it comes to the texture of products other than burgers or nuggets.

Price is also a problem. Production costs for the first cultivated beef burger, created a decade ago by Mark Post at Maastricht University in The Netherlands, were estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Now, the university says, the company he helped found, Mosa Meat, has reduced that to about $10 as it works toward commercialization.

For cultivated meat to take hold, such trends must continue, said Bruce Friedrich, president and founder of the Good Food Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit advocacy group focused on plant-based and cultivated proteins. “If we don’t have products that taste the same or better and cost the same or less, people are not going to switch,” he said.

But there are vexing scientific hurdles. Gaudette said scientists are still trying to find the best scaffolds for structured meat, which must include a way for oxygen to get to all the cells. Options include animal-based scaffolds such as gelatin and, increasingly, decellularized vegetables like spinach. Gaudette said scientists are also working on challenges like getting the cells to adhere to scaffolds and align in the right way.

Experts expect scientists to overcome the remaining scientific hurdles. But they say shaping human perception may be more difficult. 

In the AP-NORC poll, just 18% of U.S. adults said they are extremely or very likely to try cultivated meat, and 30% said they are somewhat likely. Those under 45 years old are more likely than older adults to try it and men are more likely than women. When those unlikely to try it were asked to choose from a list of reasons why, half said they didn’t think it would be safe.

That’s a concern for respondent Nora Bailey, 31, a mother of three in rural Arkansas.

“I would obviously want to do more research as far as the long-term effects,” since early products deemed safe may later be found to be unsafe, she said.

A World Health Organization report noted several potential safety issues, such as microbial contamination at various points in the process, biological by-products and scaffolding that some people might be allergic to. Experts acknowledged a lot more safety testing is needed but noted that conventional meat carries significant food-safety risks, such as potential bacterial contamination during slaughter.

With all of that pushing them forward, some cultivated meat companies are growing as fast as their cells. Good Meat has nearly completed a production facility in Singapore and plans a large-scale U.S. plant. Believer broke ground on its own large-scale plant last December in North Carolina.

Management consultant firm McKinsey & Company predicts cultivated meat could provide billions of pounds of the world’s meat supply by 2030. Still, that’s only around half a percent, and not nearly enough to offset rising consumption of meat from animals.

Though no one expects cultivated meat to transform human diets any time soon, some experts say population and climate pressures may make traditional meat production impossible in the long term — making cultivated meat a potential solution for a growing, fragile world