Will the Petri dish put Daisy out to grass?

Ben Macintyre

Growing meat in the lab seems the stuff of
science fiction, but reality is not far behind

The science of meat

Winston Churchill, a carnivore to the core, saw the future of meat back in 1936. “Fifty years hence,” he wrote, “we shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium.”

Churchill’s timing was out by at least three decades, but his prediction is steadily moving closer to reality. While governments chew over the science of meat production — from the US Food and Drug Administration’s recent backing for the consumption of meat and milk from cloned animals to this week’s revelation of a calf born to a cloned cow in Shropshire — scientists are now working feverishly on a third solution.

In different parts of the world, rival research teams are racing to produce meat using cell-culture technology. Several patents have been filed. Scientists at Nasa has been experimenting since 2001 and the Dutch Government is sponsoring a $4 million (£2 million) project to cultivate pork meat.

The idea may be stomach-turning, but the science for making pork in a Petri dish already exists.

Put simply, the process relies on a muscle precursor cell known as a myoblast, a sort of stem cell preprogrammed to grow into muscle. This cell is extracted from a living animal, and encouraged to multiply in a nutritional broth of glucose, amino acids, minerals and growth factors — Churchill’s “suitable medium”. The cells are poured on to a “scaffold” and placed in a bioreactor, where they are stretched, possibly using electrical impulses, until they form muscle fibres.

The resulting flesh is then peeled off in a “meat-sheet”and may be ground up for sausages, patties or nuggets.

Those readers now choking on their morning fry-ups will be relieved to learn that it is not quite that easy. For a start, the process is prohibitively costly. Growing one kilo of “meat” costs about $10,000, making this by far the most expensive fillet steak in the world. Merely creating a commercially viable growth medium for the cells is a monumental challenge.

Proponents of cultured meat argue that if the hurdles can be overcome then the implications for the human food chain are revolutionary – in terms of animal ethics, environmental protection, and human health. “The effect would be enormous, because there are so many problems associated with meat production,” says Jason Matheny, director of New Harvest, a non-profit group in the US promoting such research.

Meat that has never been part of an entire living animal is potentially far cleaner and healthier. Free from growth hormones and antibiotics, cultured meat could be made healthier by removing the harmful fats and introducing “good” fats such as omega-3.

The world consumes 240 billion kilos of meat each year. But more than 75 per cent of what is fed to an animal is lost through metabolism or inedible parts such as bones. In theory, with cultured meat, nothing is wasted, nothing suffers and nothing dies.

Many of the worst human diseases — BSE, TB, avian flu — are associated with animals, while livestock produce greenhouse gases, deforestation, nitrate contamination and pollution from fertiliser and pesticides. Every kilo of beef requires 16,000 litres of water to produce, according to the Institute for Water Education.

“Right now we raise about 40 billion animals for food,” says Mr Matheny. “It does seem that in vitro meat is a better solution for getting our protein. We can solve all of these problems at one stroke.”

Cleaner, healthier, cheaper and kinder. There is, however, one fundamental problem with lab-grown meat. Most people would refuse to eat it.

While we may be prepared to eat processed food, artificial confections such as Quorn and any number of burgers containing who knows what animal parts, the notion of man-made meat seems uniquely repellent.

That, says Mr Matheny, is simply a matter of educating consumer tastes. “There is also something counterintuitive about eating yoghurt — a cultured food containing live organisms — but we do it.”

There is nothing “natural”, he adds, about eating chicken that has been crammed into a shed with thousands of others, raised in its own waste, and fed growth-enhancing chemicals.

In April 2005, a state-funded research project into cultured meat was launched in the Netherlands under Henk Haagsman, Professor of Meat Sciences at the University of Utrecht, and backed by the sausage manufacturer Stegeman.

Three Dutch universities are working together: scientists in Amsterdam are studying the “broth” needed to grow cells; at Utrecht they are analysing the way muscle cells proliferate; and Eindhoven University is working on a bioreactor.

In 2002 scientists at Touro College in the US removed some muscle from the abdomen of an anaesthetised goldfish and placed it in a saline solution enriched with foetal calf serum. The muscle reportedly grew by 15 per cent in a few weeks. It was then coated in breadcrumbs and lightly sautéed in olive oil: scientists said that the resulting dish “smelled good”. However, they did not eat it.

Vladimir Mironov, a tissue engineer at the University of South Carolina, believes that mass production of cultured meat represents the next step in food production. “I believe it is inescapable,” he told The Los Angeles Times recently.

Others are sceptical. No one has yet worked out a system to bring artificial blood vessels into artificial tissue, so a juicy steak à la laboratoire is not yet on the menu. Then there is the issue of taste: does the unique flavour of fresh lamb come from the tissue itself or a combination of factors, including grazing, feeding and breeding? Supporters of cultured meat respond that roughly half the meat consumed in the West is ground meat, and that the taste and appearance of many meat products is introduced by artificial flavouring and colouring.

It has even been suggested that laboratory meat could expand the gastronomic possibilities for carnivores, since scientists could harvest myoblasts from rare animals without killing anything. Leopard sausages? Coelacanth kedgeree? The issue of cultured meat may, finally, be more philosophical than scientific (or culinary). Would lab-meat represent a step away from the cruelties of much animal production, or yet more disastrous tinkering with the food chain? Would humans be prepared to eat a meat that had never breathed?

Even though he had the idea, Winston Churchill would never have replaced old-fashioned meat with high-protein, health-giving, artificial substitute. When an adviser wanted to reduce the wartime meat ration, Churchill refused to countenance it, declaring: “Almost all food faddists I have ever known — nut-eaters and the like — have died young after a long period of senile decay.”

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Lab Meat
Animal Rights FAQ
The Future Of Food?
The End Of Suffering?
In Vitro Cultured Meat
When Meat isn't Murder
In vitro Meat (Wikipedia)
Video advocating cruelty-free diet
New Harvest: advancing meat substitutes

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