The race for a steak grown in the laboratory – Techno EA

Posted: January 12, 2020 at 8:55 am

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In 2013, the worlds first burger was cooked in butter from a laboratory and eaten at a brilliant press conference. The burger cost 215,000 (at the time $ 330,000) and despite all the media razzmatazz, the tasters were polite but not overly impressed. Close to meat, but not so juicy, said a food critic.

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Still, this one burger, which Google co-founder, Sergey Brin paid for, was the earliest use of a technique called cell culture to make edible meat products from scratch no dead animals are required. Cellular agriculture, the products of which are known as cultivated or laboratory-grown meat, builds muscle tissue from a handful of cells taken from an animal. These cells are then grown in a bioreactor on a scaffold and fed with a special nutrient solution.

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Just over five years later, startups around the world are trying to produce laboratory-grown meat that tastes as good as the traditional way and costs about as much.

You are already catching up: vegetable-based meat, which consists of a mixture of non-animal products that mimic the taste and consistency of real meat, is already on the market. The biggest name in this field: Impossible Foods, whose faux meat is sold in more than 5,000 restaurants and fast food chains in the USA and Asia and is expected to be available in supermarkets later this year. Impossibles team of over 100 researchers uses techniques such as gas chromatography and mass spectrometry to identify the volatile molecules released during the cooking of meat.

The key to their special formula is the oxygen-carrying molecule heme, which contains iron, which gives meat its color and metallic taste. Instead of using meat, Impossible uses genetically modified yeasts to make a version of heme that is found in the roots of certain plants.

Impossible has some competitors, especially Beyond Meat, that use pea protein (among other things) to replicate minced meat. The product is sold in supermarket chains such as Tesco in the UK and Whole Foods in the USA in addition to real meat and chicken. Both Impossible and Beyond released new, improved versions of their burgers in mid-January.

In contrast, none of the meat startups bred in the laboratory have yet announced a launch date for their first commercial product. But if that happens some claim it will be at the end of this year the laboratorys approach could turn the traditional meat industry upside down.

I suspect that cultured meat proteins can do things that vegetable proteins cannot in terms of taste, nutrition, and performance, says Isha Datar, director of New Harvest, an organization that funds research into cellular Agriculture helps. Datar, cell biologist and member of the MIT Media Lab, believes that meat cultures are more likely to be more nutritionally functional and functional than real meat. The idea is that a die-hard carnivore (like me) may not feel so upset about giving up the real thing.

Dingding Hu

You might ask, why would anyone want that? The answer is that our meat consumption habits are literally unsustainable.

Livestock breeding already contributes around 15% to global greenhouse gas emissions. (You may have heard that cows would be the third largest emitter in the world as a country.) A quarter of the worlds ice-free land is used for grazing cows and a third of the acreage is used for growing food. A growing population will make things worse. It is estimated that a population of 10 billion people is expected to eat 70% more meat by 2050. The greenhouse gases from food production will even increase by 92%.

In January, a commission of 37 scientists at The Lancet reported that the harmful effects of meat are not only a global risk to people and the planet, but also to our health. In October 2018, a study in Nature found that we would need to change our diet significantly in order not to irreparably destroy our planets natural resources.

Without changes towards a more plant-based diet, says Marco Springmann, a researcher for ecological sustainability at Oxford University and main author of the nature paper, there is little chance of avoiding dangerous climate changes.

The good news is that more and more people are rethinking what they eat. A recent Nielsen report found that sales of plant-based foods to replace animal products increased by 20% in 2018 compared to the previous year. Veganism, which not only avoids meat, but also products that come from greenhouse gas-emitting dairy cattle, is now considered to be relatively widespread.

That doesnt necessarily mean more vegans. A recent Gallup survey found that the number of people in the United States who claim to be vegan has changed little since 2012, at only about 3%. Regardless, the Americans eat less meat, even if they dont cut it out entirely.

Ulma Valeti (center), CEO of Memphis Meats, and Nicholas Genovese (right), chief science officer, watch a chef prepare one of their creations.

Memphis meat

Investors are betting large sums that this dynamic will continue. Startups like MosaMeat (co-founded by Mark Post, the scientist behind the 215,000 burger), Memphis Meats, Supermeat, Just and Finless Foods have all raised a lot of venture capital. The first step now is to bring a tasty product onto the market at an acceptable cost.

Eric Schulze, Vice President of Product and Regulation at Memphis Meats, sees his product as a complement to the meat industry. With our rich cultural background, we offer a new innovation that fits into our growing list of sustainable food traditions, he says. We see ourselves as a and not or solution to help feed a growing world.

The traditional meat industry does not see it that way. The National Cattlemens Beef Association in the United States calls these new approaches repellent as wrong meat. In August 2018, Missouri passed a law prohibiting the labeling of such alternative products as meat. Only food that comes from the harvest of cattle or poultry is allowed to have the word meat on the label in any form. Violation of this law can result in a fine or even a one-year prison sentence.

The alternative meat industry is fighting back. The Good Food Institute, which advocates regulations that favor plant-based and laboratory-grown meat, has partnered with Tofurky (manufacturer of a tofu-based meat substitute since the 1980s), the American Civil Liberties Union, and the Animal Legal Defense Fund repeal the law. Jessica Almy, the director of the institute, says that existing law is nonsensical and an insult to the principle of free speech. The idea behind the law is to make vegetable meat less attractive and to put farm meat at a disadvantage when it comes to the market, she says.

Almy is confident that her case will be successful and expects an injunction to come soon. But the Battle of Missouri is just the beginning of a battle that could take years. In February 2018, the U.S. Cattlemens Association issued a petition calling on the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to pass a similar federal law.

We have to change our diet so as not to destroy the planet.

Traditional meat industry groups have also been very vocal about how to regulate meat and meat on a plant basis. Last summer, a group of the largest agricultural organizations in the United States (nicknamed The Barnyard) wrote to President Trump asking for the certainty that the USDA will oversee farmed meat to ensure level playing field (the USDA needs tougher) and be more stringent) than the Food and Drug Administration.)

Finally, in November 2018, the USDA and FDA issued a joint statement announcing that the two regulators would share responsibility for monitoring laboratory-grown meat.

Some farmed startups claim that this regulatory confusion is the only thing holding them back. One company, Just, plans to launch a ground chicken this year and has partnered with a Japanese cattle breeding company to produce a Wagyu beef product from cells in the laboratory. Managing Director is Josh Tetrick, who previously founded the controversial startup Hampton Creek, Justs ancestor. (The FDA had previously banned the company from calling the product mayonnaise because it contained no eggs.) Talk to Tetrick, a bullish, confident young man, and youll get a feel for the drive and excitement behind the alternative meat market , The only (limit) for the start, he says, is regulatory.

Dingding Hu

That is optimistic to say the least. The laboratory meat movement is still facing major technical hurdles. One of them is that the so-called fetal bovine serum is required for the production of the product. FBS is harvested from fetuses taken from pregnant cows during slaughter. This is an obvious problem for an allegedly cruelty-free product. FBS is also very expensive. It is used in the biopharmaceutical industry and in basic cellular research, but only in small quantities. However, cultivated meat requires large amounts. All laboratory meat start-ups have to use less of it or eliminate it entirely to make their products cheap enough. Last year, Finless Foods (aiming to make a fish-free version of bluefin tuna) reported that the amount of FBS needed to grow its cells had halved. And Schulze says the Memphis Meats team is working on completely cutting it out.

However, according to Datar, there are other issues with New Harvest. She says we still dont understand the basic processes well enough. While we have a fairly deep understanding of animals used in medical research, such as laboratory mice, our knowledge of farm animals is rather poor at the cellular level. I see a lot of excitement and VCs invest, but not much in scientific, material advances, she says. It will be difficult to expand the technology if we learn how these complex biological systems react and grow.

Meat from laboratory cultivation has another more tangible problem. Growing muscle cells from the bottom up produce pure meat tissue, but the result lacks an essential part of every burger or steak: fat. Fat gives meat its taste and moisture, and its texture is difficult to reproduce. Vegetable meat already partially circumvents the problem by using the shear cell technology to pull the vegetable protein mixture together in layers to form a meat-like fiber texture. However, if you want to prepare a meat-free steak from scratch, you still need to do some work. Cultivated meat needs a way to grow fat cells and somehow mix them with the muscle cells to make the end result tasty. This has proven difficult so far, which is the main reason why the first burger was so dry.

The scientists at the Dutch meat startup Meatable may have found a way. The team has focused on medical stem cell research to find a way to isolate pluripotent stem cells in cows by removing them from the blood in umbilical cords of newborn calves. Pluripotent cells that form early in the development of an embryo can develop into any type of cell in the body. This means that they can also be made to produce fat, muscle, or even liver cells in meat from the laboratory.

I think there will be queues outside the store that are longer than the next iPhone.

Meatables work could mean that the cells can be processed into a steak-like product, the fat and muscle content of which depends on the customers wishes: for example, the characteristic marbling of a rib-eye steak. We can add more fat or make it slimmer we can do whatever we want. We have new control over how we feed the cells, said Meatables CTO, Daan Luining, who is also the research director of the nonprofit Cellular Agriculture Society. Pluripotent cells are like hardware. The software you run turns it into the desired cell. Its already in the cell you just have to trigger it.

The work of the researchers is also interesting because they have found a way to work around the FBS problem: the pluripotent cells do not need serum to grow. Luining is clearly proud of this. It was a very elegant solution to bypass this other cell type, he says.

He admits that Meatable is still years from the launch of a commercial product, but is confident that it will open up prospects. I think there will be queues outside the store that are longer than the next iPhone, he says.

It looks like laboratory meat isnt quite as virtuous as you think. While greenhouse gas emissions are lower than that of the greatest villain, beef, it is more environmentally harmful than chicken or vegetable alternatives due to the energy needs currently required for its production. A World Economic Forum white paper on the impact of alternative meat found that laboratory-grown meat as it is now produced only produces about 7% less greenhouse gas emissions than beef. Other substitutes such as tofu or plants led to a reduction of up to 25%. We will have to see whether companies can actually offer low-emission products at reasonable costs, said Marco Springmann, co-author of the newspaper in Oxford.

It is also unclear how much better laboratory meat would be for you than the original. One reason why meat has been linked to an increased risk of cancer is because it contains heme, which can also be present in cultivated meat.

And do people even want to eat it? Datar believes that. The little research on this topic supports this. A 2017 study published in PLoS One magazine found that most U.S. consumers were willing to try laboratory meat and that about a third were likely or definitely willing to eat it regularly.

It is unrealistic to expect the whole world to go vegan. However, a October 2018 report in Nature suggested that if everyone switched to the flexible lifestyle (mainly vegetarian food, but with a little poultry and fish and no more than one serving of red meat a week), we could halve greenhouse gas emissions from food production and also reduce other harmful effects of the meat industry, such as the excessive use of fertilizers and the waste of fresh water and land. (According to a study in The Lancet in October, premature mortality could be reduced by about 20% as fewer people die from diseases such as coronary artery disease, stroke, and cancer.)

impossible food

Some of the biggest players in the traditional meat industry recognize this and subtly call themselves protein producers rather than meat companies. Like big tobacco companies that buy vape startups, the meat giants are buying shares in this new industry. In 2016, Tyson Foods, the worlds second largest meat processor, launched a venture capital fund to support alternative meat producers. It is also an investor in Beyond Meat. The third largest company, Cargill, invested in meat culture startup Memphis Meats in 2017, and Tyson followed in 2018. Many other large food manufacturers do the same. For example, in December 2018, Unilever bought a Dutch company called Vegetarian Butcher, which produces a variety of non-meat products, including vegetable-based meat substitutes.

A meat company doesnt do what it does because it worsens the environment and doesnt like animals, says Tetrick, Justs general manager. You do it because you think its the most efficient way. But if you do give them another way to make the company more efficient, they will.

At least some in the meat industry agree. In a profile for Bloomberg last year, Tom Hayes, then CEO of Tyson, made it clear where he saw the possible future of the company. If we can grow the meat without the animal, why not?

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The race for a steak grown in the laboratory - Techno EA

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