Cultured Meat News Roundup (November 11, 2021)
Is cultured meat an impossible promise?
Where does the time go! It’s already been a month since my last post, and the world seems to be moving faster than ever. A bit of news first: Ella Hubber (aka big_science_energy on TikTok) has started her own podcast! You might remember our conversation from July where Ella discussed her experience livestreaming her research over TikTok. The Podcast is called “Let’s Learn Everything,” and it brings the curiosity of three fantastic scientists/TikTokers together to examine (quite literally) anything and everything. In their first three episodes they discuss how our brain processes sound, the evolution of behavior-controlling parasites, and more. This podcast is made by nerds for those with unbound curiosity, and I can’t recommend it enough. Go check it out for yourself!
Plenty of people have covered the growing narrative surrounding alternative protein and cell-cultured meat over the last year (Heck, a tsunami of news and coverage has come out over the last few weeks alone). The race to bring cultured meat from the lab to your table is on. Start-ups like Upside Foods, Eat Just, and Perfect Day have received astronomical investments both from high-profile celebrities like Robert Downey Jr. and mega-corporations like Tyson.
Billions of dollars toward the promising vision of a cleaner, healthier, more sustainable planet built with biology. They’ve used much of that money to expand their facilities and begin the first steps of rolling products out to market, but how much more work needs to be done before cultured meat makes a real impact?
Here’s some of the latest news (curated by yours truly):
1. Two insightful articles from the last two months temper the tremendous promises offered by cellular agriculture startups with the overwhelming challenges still ahead.
Tom Philpott outlines how difficult it truly is getting cells to grow into real-life meat. It turns out cells are pretty temperamental when they don’t have a body to live in. Philpott cuts through the hype and urges readers to dig into the details next time they read a claim about cultured meat hitting their supermarket shelves.
Joe Fassler asks: “Is lab-grown meat truly inevitable?” in his long (but totally worth it) investigation of cellular agriculture’s feasibility. Fassler outlines just how costly it is to produce meat from cells and all the barriers that remain to bringing that cost down (Surprise, it’s a laundry list that includes the expense of custom bioreactors, the challenging procurement of ingredients en masse for cultured media, and the enormous cost of sterilely outfitting production facilities to reach the potentially strict standards yet to be set by the FDA)
2. Over a decade into her work championing the development of cultured meat, Isha Datar gives an inspiring TED Talk chock full of great statistics and vision.
In her talk Datar tells us “early estimates of cell-cultured meat’s potential show that cultured meat would require 99% less land, 96% less water, and produce 96% fewer greenhouse gas emissions. Now those are still speculative early estimates, but think about the incredible potential this technology holds.”
3. Scaling cultured meat:
Both Naima Brown and Damian Carrington cover the excitement surrounding Eat Just’s “lab-grown” chicken nuggets that Singapore approved for sale at the end of 2020--the first cultured meat product approved for sale ever, and a critical milestone worth celebrating.
New Age Meats raises $25 million in series A funding to “double the size of its workforce, build a 20,000-square-foot pilot manufacturing facility in Alameda, Calif., and perfect the taste of its first product offering.” The company is using a hybrid approach, combining cultured meat with plant-based protein with the goal of releasing its first sausage products in 2022.
Perfect Day raises $750 million in series D funding to further scale their platform and expand their partner services. Currently Perfect Day is most successfully known for their brand of completely plant-based ice creams, Brave Robot, now “available in over 5,000 grocery stores.” Although not a “cultured-meat company,” Perfect Day is scaling many of the same technologies.
Upside Foods opens North America’s largest cultured meat facility, a brand new 53,000 square foot building capable of producing up to 400,000 pounds of meat a year. They’ve designed it to be perhaps one of the most transparent meat production facilities ever built—one with bioreactors behind glass walls that showcase the production process rather than hide it.
The USDA awards $10 million, its first grant for cultured meat, to David Kaplan’s lab at Tufts University. Kaplan, an established expert in the field of cultured meat and world-renowned for his lab’s work in tissue engineering, “received a five-year, $10 million grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to develop an alternative food source.”
It’s encouraging to see the USDA directly funding research efforts for the benefit of the American public. Allegedly, the grant is not only focused on the technology behind cultured meat but also on its environmental impact and consumer acceptance. Hopefully the cultured meat industry will avoid the mistakes made by big GMO corporations (you know the ones). Mainly, the manipulative practices that created new socio-agricultural problems and underestimated consumer intelligence.
Even today (more than two decades since the creation of genetically modified crops) many consumers have a tremendous misunderstanding of what genetically modified foods/organisms really are, let alone the benefits and risks they pose to their health and the environment.
Luckily, it seems cultured meat creators are eager to have open and honest conversations about their technologies and their impacts. Let's hope it stays that way, and let’s work to ensure that the dialogue doesn’t break down before cultured meat really sees the light of day.
4. Deep dives into the meat industry:
The LA Times has been publishing a “Guide to the future of cultured and plant-based meats” in the form of well written and nuanced articles. My biggest complaint is their misuse of the words “fake meat” to attract readership. We shouldn’t be misleading readers that alternative protein options are fake!
Journalists Liz Specht and Jan Dutkiewicz write for Wired in detail about the potential both plant-based and cell-based meats have for making our food supply chain more resilient by highlighting the issues the meat industry faced during the global pandemic.
Jan Dutkiewicz (again!) and Gabriel N. Rosenberg outline just how cellular agriculture could change the traditional chicken industry in Man v food: is lab-grown meat really going to solve our nasty agriculture problem? Their article has some of the most comprehensive reporting I’ve seen regarding how our factory farm system developed and the incredible change that cultured meat could bring. Some excerpts:
Americans spend just under 10% of their disposable income on food, among the lowest rates in the world, and eat a whopping 122kg of meat each a year, including 55kg of chicken. (For comparison, in the UK the numbers are lower but still unsustainable, at about 80kg of meat per person, including 32kg of chicken.) But there’s a high price to pay for low costs. Today, billions of genetically indistinguishable chickens live and die in squalid misery in supersized facilities designed around high efficiency and low margins. Three major processing companies – Tyson, Perdue and Koch – control the majority of the US market for chicken meat. The industry either functions as a quasi-monopsony, with a small number of buyers imposing prices and conditions on producers, or in some cases is vertically integrated so that Big Chicken directly controls most of the value chain.
Cellular agriculture, at a big enough scale, could help restructure agricultural land use by reducing demand for animal feed, thereby opening up space for more progressive food politics. If a government-financed land bank bought even a small fraction of the 320m hectares currently dedicated to feeding animals in the US, it could resell millions of acres at favourable terms for bold new uses: establishing agro-ecological and regenerative farms that are a foundation for healthier rural communities and landscapes; supporting community and worker-owned farms; providing land to people from communities that have been historically dispossessed and excluded from owning land; returning lands to tribal nations; rewilding and conservation initiatives. Many of these ideas are championed by critics of cultured meat, who often suggest it is incompatible with the holistic, ecological sensibilities of slow, small and local. But all of these ideas become more feasible in a world with commercially viable “labriculture”.
Dutkiewicz and Rosenberg’s article sheds light on the highly political space cultured meat occupies. With careful thought and communication, it could be an issue both sides of the table embrace, and incorporating cultured meat into the market could make the field richer for all parties. It won’t unless we help build a path to prosperity.
By alleviating pressure to feed the world’s growing demand for meat, cultured protein could allow producers of traditional meat products to focus on animal well-being and quality while also creating highly skilled jobs. This is both good for disease control and for consumers. One thing’s for sure, if cultured meat does come to market successfully, it will redistribute the market landscape, carving out and reshaping protein niches. It’s important we’re involved in that process together so that farmers, workers, consumers, and environment all benefit.
5. Fetal Bovine Serum:
I could write a handful of posts just on the discourse surrounding fetal bovine serum (and I probably should), but for now here’s what you need to know about cultured meat’s most controversial ingredient:
Kat McGowan addresses cell-based meat’s “dirty little secret:” Fetal Bovine Serum in a recent Neo.Life article. Fetal bovine serum, harvested from the blood of fetal calves, is a by-product of the traditional meat industry. When a cow is slaughtered, sometimes an unborn calf is discovered. Following this discovery, slaughterhouses collect its serum and ship it out for use in mammalian cell culture media (aka the food that cells eat).
Unfortunately, the use of fetal bovine serum is an integral part of culturing mammalian cells in the lab. Its use in culture media is almost unavoidable, and even in a medical research lab we use it (or other animal-derived products like bovine serum albumin) to grow cells. That bothers me.
Alternatives do currently exist, but they are either not great replacements or aren’t cheap enough for the industry. We just don’t know enough about why mammalian cells love fetal bovine serum so much to effectively replace it. The unfortunate news: more research is needed to create viable alternatives.
Although cell-based meat company Eat Just claims to have created a plant-based alternative to fetal bovine serum, protection of their intellectual property prevents others in the field from adopting the formula.
But all hope is not lost! Cameron Semper, postdoctoral fellow at the University of Calgary, sits down with the Cultured Meat and Future Food Podcast to discuss his work growing cultured seafood. His research focuses on creating fish growth factors as an alternative to fetal bovine serum.
There are other alternatives in development, but your author will have to do some digging in the weeks to come.
So, is cultured meat an impossible promise?
The latest news showcases the disagreements people have on whether cell-based meat will ever be scalable or affordable (and I’m not 100% convinced its the climate solution we need either).
Many want to create a future where human beings live in ways that are more aligned with our natural ecosystems. One that is also resilient and affordable. One that creates high-value jobs without eliminating jobs for those who need them most.
Cellular agriculture may or may not be that solution. However, Isha Datar, executive director of the Canadian nonprofit New Harvest that funds, shapes, and communicates cellular agriculture research, poignantly tweeted this last month:
“Every speculation I see about [cellular agriculture] assumes the world is static. We are in transition, with the powers of climate change, pandemics (humans AND animals) and justice movements frankly challenging economics as we know it….what’s the VALUE of a livable future?”
As the world changes, markets will grow, shift, and change values, and the scalable production of cultured meat may become more or less attainable. Datar points out that we won’t know exactly what those values may be, so it’s important we diversify our overall portfolio of food options.
But is cultured meat really both good for us and good for the planet? More on that next time.
As always, check out more at my website, feel free to reach out with any comments or suggestions, and please share this with anyone who might enjoy it!