Our eating habits won’t change so process must. Machines alone can’t save us but by growing meat in labs can shift the odds in our favour
Right now, growing cells as meat instead of animals is a very expensive process,” said Yaakov Nahmias, founder and chief scientist of Israel-based startup Future Meat Technologies. But it will get cheaper and it probably will be needed. Global population is heading for 10 billion by 2050 (the current world population is 7.7 billion). Average global incomes will triple in the same period, enabling more people to eat meat-rich diets.
“We need a significant overhaul, changing the global food system on a scale not seen before,” said Professor Tim Lang of the University of London, one of the 37 scientific co-authors from 16 different countries who wrote a report by the EAT-Lancet Commission on Food, Planet and Health that will soon be launched in Jakarta. But we’ve heard it all before. It takes seven kilos of grain to grow one kilo of beef. Seventy per cent of the world’s fresh water is used to irrigate crops. We have appropriated three-quarter of the world’s fertile land for food production and we’ll need the rest by 2050. The world’s stock of seafood will have collapsed by 2050. It’s all true but we’re sick of being nagged.
And still they are bang on. The EAT-Lancet Commission even has a diet that will save the planet. Cut your beef consumption by 90 per cent (ie one steak a month). Eat more beans and pulses (three times more) and more nuts and seeds (four times more). Going vegetarian or vegan will help even more. That’s all true, too, but I don’t think it’s going to happen. Or at least, it’s not going to happen by everybody turning vegan, vegetarian, or just ‘flexitarian.’ No doubt in due course there will be high taxes on meat and fish and official propaganda campaigns to persuade people to change their eating habits and some people will change. Some people already have: The Vegan Society in Britain claims that the number of vegans in the country has quadrupled in the last four years. But not enough people will switch to a plant-based diet soon enough, or maybe ever. We need to bring the rest of the population along and few things are more persistent than cultural dietary preferences like eating meat.
India is home to almost one-third for the world’s vegetarians but local variations are immense and deeply entrenched: Seventy five per cent of the people are vegetarians in the northwestern state of Rajasthan but fewer than two per cent are in the southern States of Andhra Pradesh and West Bengal. The most enthusiastic meat-eaters are in the richer countries. And as other countries join their club (like China), they start eating more meat too. So clearly, there would be a huge market for real meat that didn’t come from cattle, pigs, sheep and chickens but tastes right, feels right in the mouth and doesn’t trash the environment.
We’re not talking about the famous $325,000 hamburger patty made from beef cells immersed in a growth medium that was triumphantly cooked on television six years ago. We’re talking about a proper steak with muscle, fat cells and the right shape, taste and texture — but not one produced by the familiar process that uses huge amounts of fertile land, releases large amounts of greenhouse gases and involves slaughtering live animals. That is Yaakov Nahmias’ goal and he’s pretty close now. Future Meat Technologies produces its ‘cell-based meat’ in bioreactors, growing it on lattices that gives it shape and texture but we’re not talking about giant vats in a lab. He plans to give small units to existing farmers, who might still be rearing some beef cattle, too, for the luxury end of the market.
“With these two plays — a more efficient bioreactor and a distributed manufacturing model — we can essentially drop the cost down to about $5 a kilogram [$2.27 a pound],” said Nahmias. Meat giant Tyson Foods recently put $2.2 million of seed money into his company and a dozen other start-ups are chasing the same goal: Memphis Meat, JUST, Finless Foods, Meatable — a total of 30 labs around the world. How big a threat is this ‘cell-based meat’ to the traditional cattle industry? Big enough that the US Cattlemen’s Association has petitioned the government to restrict the words ‘meat’ and ‘beef’ to products “derived directly from animals raised and slaughtered.” A tricky definition, since it would mean that wild deer are not made of meat but the ranchers are clearly running scared.
Coming up behind cell-based meat there’s the even newer concept of ‘Solar Foods’. A Finnish company is using electricity from solar panels to electrolyse water and produce hydrogen. The hydrogen is fed to bacteria and the product is an edible food that is half carbohydrates, half fats and protein. It is just as good as soya as an animal food and it uses no land at all. No greenhouse gas emissions either and the first factory producing it opens in two years’ time. Technology alone can’t save us but it can certainly shift the odds in our favour.
(The writer is an independent journalist)
