Communicating Chemistry 2018W110

If the 20 largest meat and dairy companies in the world were a single country, they would have overtaken Germany to become Europe’s largest polluter in 2016 (GRAIN & IATP, 2018).

This statement probably makes you sad. But you’ll also get over it in the next few minutes because meat is tasty, and nothing else can fill its void in your life. Despite the damaging impacts of industrial livestock farming on the environment, the demand for farmed meat is unlikely to change without any effective meat substitutes.

But this reality is being challenged by a San Francisco-based start-up, JUST For All, developing lab-grown meat products. The movement is inspired by solving two of the meat industry’s biggest problems: the unethical treatment of animals and the poor efficiency of meat production.

The world’s first lab-cultured hamburger unveiled in 2013. Image Source: World Economic Forum – The Meat Revolution by Mark Post

The idea involves harvesting muscle tissue from an animal, followed by isolating special satellite cells from the sample. These cells can become skeletal muscle cells and so are allowed to multiply under controlled lab conditions. The cells eventually clump up into muscle fibers which can be processed into meat:

An overview of the process of producing meat in the lab – Figure by Brad Wierbowski (Image Source) (accessed 22nd October, 2018)

Raising animals for food requires many resources such as water, feed, and energy for animal upkeep. But you might think the same is true for many other industries in today’s age. The claim is justified, but the main problem concerns the resource efficiency of meat production i.e., how much meat we produce relative to the number of resources we invest.

The graph below is an example of the resource efficiency of animal feed in producing meat and dairy products. The efficiency is expressed as the percentage of energy in animal feed actually incorporated into an animal product. The energy conversion efficiency of most meat products is below 15%, with beef ranking last at 1.9%. This means that about 98% of the energy in the feed a cow eats is wasted. 

Graph illustrating percentage of energy in animal feed incorporated into final animal product. Figure by Sahil Kanani. Data Source: (Alexander et al., 2016)

I was personally skeptical about the notion of growing meat in a petri dish, but the benefits are significant. Most of the energy consumed by an animal is either wasted as heat or used in other metabolic processes asides from muscle production. Cell cultures eliminate most of these side processes, making more energy available for muscle fiber growth.

Furthermore, only a single sample of tissue needs to be harvested to make a large amount of meat: about 80,000 quarter-pounders according to start-up company Mosa Meat. Lab-grown meat effectively removes the need to raise animals from birth to harvest, reducing how much water and energy we use for meat production. 

But the road to cleaner meat is also not so straightforward. The lab-grown meat industry still needs to convince people that their products are safe to consume. Several start-ups have recently faced resistance from the US Cattlemen’s Association (USCA) who filed a petition on how lab-grown meat should be marketed. The lobby group has demanded that the term ‘meat’ only include products derived from raising or slaughtering animals. From my analysis, the petition aims to deter consumers from purchasing lab-grown meat due to the negative preconceptions associated with ‘artificially’ produced foods.

Overall, for clean meat to be well-assimilated, the industry must do a good job of educating the public about the safety of their products and highlighting the need for a more environmental-friendly meat substitute.

Is it also far too late in this blog to declare i’m vegetarian?