Burgers From A Lab: The World Of In Vitro Meat
"Can something be called chicken or pork if it was born in a flask and produced in a vat?" asks Michael Spector. "Questions like that have rarely been asked and have never been answered."
Imagine picking up a nice juicy burger and taking a bite, only to find out that the meaty burger you're biting into didn't come from an animal — it was grown in a lab.
Sound far-fetched? The reality of test-tube burgers in supermarkets may be close to becoming a reality. Scientists at laboratories around the world are currently working to make meat in labs that will eventually look and taste like the real thing, without any animal parts.
Science writer Michael Specter recently traveled to laboratories in the Netherlands and North Carolina to examine the progress scientists have made in developing in vitro meat. He writes about his trip, and the arguments in favor of lab-made steaks, in the May 23 issue of The New Yorker.
Motivation For Lab Meat
Specter explains that part of the motivation for growing meat in laboratories is animal welfare: billions of cows, chickens and pigs would no longer spend their lives force-fed grain and antibiotics or cooped up in factory farms.
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"There is something inherently creepy about [growing meat in labs]," Specter tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "But there is something more inherently creepy about the way we deal with the animals that we eat. ... They live a horrible life, and they often die quite cruelly. So the idea of being able to eliminate some of that is extremely exciting for a lot of people."
Another motivation, Specter says, is the positive environmental impact test-tube meat could have on the planet. According to the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations, global livestock is responsible for nearly 20 percent of all greenhouse-gas emissions. And as the population grows, he says, more resources will be needed to sustain the agricultural industry.
"We have 7 billion people on the planet, and there will be 9 billion [people] by 2050," he says. "Those people need food. They need protein — and they tend to eat better as they get wealthier. And better, unfortunately, means eating more like Americans — a lot of meat. And a lot of meat means a lot of water, a lot of grain, a lot of grass. And we don't have that much room for any of it."
How It Works
Currently tissue scientists are taking stem cells from pigs and putting them in nutrient broth-filled petri dishes, where they rapidly grow. The biggest slab of meat grown so far is about the size of a contact lens and contains millions of cells. The next step, Specter says, is trying to take these cells and turn them into muscle tissue, using biodegradable scaffolding platforms.
Michael Specter has been a staff writer at The New Yorkersince 1998. He is the author of Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives.
"The idea is you grow these cells into muscle tissue, and you eventually have the same sort of meat that you would take from the flesh of an animal," he says.
But muscle cells or tissue cannot just be placed on a platform and left alone. Muscles require stimulation and exercise or they will atrophy and die. Scientists currently use electrical impulses to stimulate the muscle cells grown in the laboratory, but haven't yet figured out how to do it on a mass-factory scale.
"If you're growing it in a factory, [there's a mass] quantity of meat," Specter says. "It's difficult to see our way to zapping tons of electricity into muscle cells, because it will just be, if nothing else, extremely costly. So while that works in a lab and it works well, they are looking at other ways of doing it."
In addition to the technical complexities of making test-tube meat, there's also the issue of taste. Specter says scientists assured him that there will be no taste differential between animal meat and test-tube meat.
"I talked to one scientist and I mentioned this as 'synthetic meat,' and she got annoyed," he says. "She said, 'This isn't synthetic. It's organic. It's meat. It's two meat cells growing to become more meat cells.' And depending on what your definition of any sort of life is, this is as fundamental as any animal is."
Discussion Questions:
1. What are the repercussions for farmers if this type of meat becomes readily available? What will it do do government subsidies for grain which are being fed to animals? Will this new kind of meat be a replacement for grain in US food aid policy?
2. What are the health ramifications for this kind of meat? If it is more readily available, will people consume more red meat? Will it stop people from eating as much additive-rich food? Will it benefit heath and economy?
Is it vegetarian?
1. I think if this meat becomes readily available, and the main choice of the consumers, it could completely change our food system. We would be forced to use that grazing land for growing land, which is a really positive idea if we use it to diversify our crop range. I think we will hold onto the grain we have as it will have a new level of value and ration it. Then when that is gone have the opportunity to decide how much of what will be grown. I think we would actually wait and see how the meat does before it became a large part of our food aid policy. As bad as it sounds, we are our governments most readily available lab rats.
ReplyDelete2.How easily does this meat spoil? What is put into it to ensure it has good levels of protein? For the American people to eat it readily... how cheap will it be to produce? If we can make this meat cheap AND healthy this could potentially be great for our society. Who knows?
1. Meat and dairy farmers, in anticipating that lab-grown meat may become readily available and consumer-preferred, have the ability to transition their farms to plant-based agriculture. Farmers have adapted to other market forces and regulations, so this would not be unprecedented. Having this meat become apart of US aid policy would occur only if the meat became as cheap to produce as grain is.
ReplyDelete2. The article says people in poorer countries, to be healthier, need to eat more like the US. That's an hysterical comment. The US has an obesity epidemic, a heart disease and diabetes epidemic, and is one of the unhealthiest "1st world" countries. Furthermore, meat is not required to be a healthy human being. A human being can be healthy- healthier, in fact- on a plant-based diet. People in poorer countries do need more protein, but this can be more readily and cheaply supplied by plant protein such that found in beans and soy.
Will the meat be healthy? If it is chemically exactly like meat from animals, it seems that it would be. But this seems to be a secondary concern since meat is not even something a human diet requires. Talking about the healthiness and safety of plant GMO's is a much more salient discussion.
3. Yes lab-meat is vegetarian, from an animal-cruelty perspective. From a diet perspective, probably not.
1. Lab-grown meat does have potential to impact the global food system in a significant way. As the rest of the world, specifically China, transitions to a Western diet, the demand for red meat will increase vastly. However, in America I don't see much changing. Meat is already so cheap and readily available that laboratory meat has a lot of catching up to do and government hurdles to jump through, not to mention the "traditional" Americans who like their meat from live animals and not a test tube. Our food system is set up in a way that favors large scale industrial animal production, and for this to change lab meat will have to be supported by a major agribusiness company.
ReplyDelete2. As far as health concerns, meat is meat, and it is by and large the most unhealthy aspect of American's diets. Red meat in particular is responsible for a multitude of health problems, the most prominent being heart disease, the number one killer in the United States. I could definitely see an increase in global meat consumption, but yet again I feel that America consumes so much of it already that I shudder at the thought of we actually eating more. The real ramifications and troubling aspects of this product is that it would encourage a Western diet to be embraced the world over, and while the environmental impacts could be significantly reduced from this new product, the negative health impact would largely overshadow this gain. Obesity is already a nation-wide epidemic, do we really want to spread it worldwide?
There has been a good deal of debate on vegan forums as to whether this meat could be considered cruelty-free, yet the fact that the cells originally came from a living being would rule out the fact of it being vegetarian.
1. If synthetic meat eventually becomes widespread, livestock farmers (at least in America) will likely not be affected to strongly for 2 reasons. First, synthetic meat will probably be the "cheap" meat sold at stores, but the market for "traditional" meat from animals will still be strong. Second, if demand for animal meat did indeed fall drastically, most farmers could simply supplement crops for cattle. Synthetic meat does have the potential to become a huge export, maybe even surpassing grain eventually.
ReplyDelete2. Assuming synthetic meat becomes widely available, it will be much cheaper than traditional animal meat and people will eat more red meat as a result, especially if the taste caters to them. The biggest question here, is: "Will the meat actually be healthy and additive free?" If yes, then this innovation will be nothing but positive for health and economy. If no, then synthetic meat will be a disaster, because other nations (those in the EU for example) will not buy it and our own citizens will become even unhealthier.
1. In vitro meat would make livestock farmers virtually obsolete. While initial apprehension will take place, I think that people will begin to purchase lab-made meats once they realize the vast difference in price. While the environmental impacts are greatly reduced, the consequences for society are endless regarding health and the economy.
ReplyDelete2. Unless the meat that they are creating has no saturated fats and is basically not at all meat, than it cannot be considered healthy, because meat is not healthy. Therefore, it is harmful to the entire world if meat becomes even more readily available, and if this occurs, even more places will adopt an American diet which is ridden with meat, causing further obesity epidemics and heart disease.
In vitro meat is definitely not vegetarian, and it concerns me that even PETA supports it. I realize that it is from an animal rights perspective, but it is imperative think of all of the negative impacts to our health and society as a whole.
I think there are some benefits to the idea of meat made in a laboratory. There would be no need for big meat factories or slaughter houses, but wouldn't more people eat meat? I think that meat has it's place in our diet's, but it's something that shouldn't be eaten in large quantities.
ReplyDelete