The Future of Food: Will We Be Buying Meals Cultivated in Labs?

This past spring, the first international In Vitro Meat Symposium was held in Norway. The consensus among scientists seems to be that by the end of the decade we will be buying in vitro beef, pork and chicken that was artificially grown from stem cells in laboratories. They say it’s more humane to eat an animal that never had a head, sort of like eating a meaty vegetable.

How it works is you take some myoblasts (stem cells) that are pre-programmed to grow into muscle. Then you place them in a nutrient-rich fluid called the “growth medium”. Next they are poured on to a spongy scaffold where the cells can attach. They are then “shocked” into growing using electrical impulses. The resulting sheet of meat can then theoretically be ground up and consumed like any other piece of boneless, processed meat.

Now, just when the idea is starting to pick up steam, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) has jumped on board with its support. The organization, which has long advocated animal rights and vegetarianism, recently offered a $1 million prize to “the first person to come up with a method to produce commercially viable quantities of in vitro meat at competitive prices by 2012”.

The stipulation is that the meat must be chicken, with the same taste and texture as meat taken from a living bird. Why chicken? Because PETA says that the worldwide abuse of chickens is the most pressing issue that needs to be addressed. Commercially raised chickens often live out their shorts lives crammed with other birds into small cages. Billions of them are slaughtered each year, which is 100 times more than pigs and 200 times more than cattle.

But not everyone at PETA is on board with the “lab meat” agenda. Some members of the organization are angry that PETA would support eating meat—even brainless meat. Ingrid Newkirk, its co-founder and president, admits it has caused “near civil war” in the PETA offices. Some purist animal rights activists consider it a “moral” surrender.

On the other side of the debate are those who believe that humans as a whole are unlikely to kick the meat habit altogether, so they may as well come up with a more humane and healthy alternative. Artificially produced meat will be kinder to the animal kingdom, the environment, and the human body, they argue. The “petri dish” meat would not be pumped full of steroids and antibiotics and fed on questionable foodstuffs, they point out, so theoretically it should be healthier. The science of it would even allow for variations such as “saturated fat-free”, or replace “bad fats” with healthy fats such as omega-3, which could conceivably lead to fewer health problems and heart attacks.

If you think this kind of technology is far off, think again. Researchers have already started producing meat in laboratories. But there is a major roadblock from doing so commercially at this point: Cost. At the present moment it would cost nearly $1 million to purchase a 250g piece of beef. But many scientists are confident that with the proper research and funding there’s no reason why they can’t eventually find a way to produce meat relatively cheaply. The other major roadblock is the “ick” factor. Many people shudder at the idea of eating “headless” meat. However, not everyone feels that way. Vegetarian Carol Midgley, a writer for Times Online claims that the idea that petri dish meat is somehow any grosser than “real” meat is absurd.

“How can it possibly be more disgusting than, say, eating chickens that have ulcered backsides from sitting for weeks in their own excrement, bodies five times their natural size, with leg abscesses the size of 50p pieces, and end their lives strung upside down with their heads hacked off? Personally I would have nothing against eating in vitro meat in principle, because it was never a conscious animal,” Midgley writes. “If it supported an industry that would eradicate the need to keep animals in factory conditions, then I'd not only eat it, I'd buy shares in it.”

Not only that, but natural animal meat has its own increasing yuck factor in terms of spreading diseases. Food-borne diseases, which mostly come from meat, are responsible for more than 76 million episodes of illness, 325,000 admissions to hospital and 5,000 deaths each year in America alone.

While lab meat will likely be considered a “frankenfood”, espectially at first, it would potentially be much safer than traditional meat. But either way, some scientists argue that the world will have no choice but to eventually get used to the idea, because current meat production is simply not sustainable. Each year people around the world eat 240 billion kilos of meat. In the US, about one million chickens are eaten every single hour. Livestock production accounts for about 18 per cent of the global warming effect, which is more than the whole transport sector combined. Lab meat would be near zero-emission, and would not use up valuable land, water and grain resources to produce. The amount of grain used to feed farmed animals is a large contributing factor of the global food crisis. Apparently cutting back on traditional meat isn’t just humane to animals, it’s more humane to humans.

For example, there’s been a lot of complaining about biofuels contributing to world food shortages, but farmed animals are by far and away a bigger culprit to the problem. About 760 million tons of grain are used to feed farmed animals, which is over seven times the amount used to produce biofuels. In fact, it can easily take up to 16lb (7.3kg) of grain to produce just 1lb of meat. Earth's population is predicted to grow to nine billion people around 2050. PETA campaigner Bruce Friedrich puts it this way: “We will have to stop eating animals in the way that we do for simple self-preservation.”

Personally, I am not a vegetarian, and there are few things I love as much as bacon. However, if a scientist can at some point hand me a healthy, cruelty-free version of it, I’d like to think I’d be willing to try it for the sake of pigs, future kids and the environment. Who knows, maybe it will turn out like the popular Dr Seuss book Green Eggs and Ham—sounds gross, tastes fine. We’ll see.

Posted by Rebecca Sato

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2008/11/the-future-of-f.html#more