Carbon: ‘Cultivated’ meat

Animal agriculture accounts for at least 14.5% of all anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. While there are many small tweaks that can be made to traditional agriculture to reduce these emissions, a step change in protein production is necessary to circumvent greater environmental damage on the planet.

Cultivated meat provides that required leap: this is meat that is grown directly from cells in bioreactors, without the slaughter of the animal, and not to be mistaken for the plant-based products that exist on the market today, such as those sold by Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods.

There is actually a Harvard study that cites 90 reasons why cultivated meat is advantageous, but we would say the main argument, or driver, is that our food production system cannot support the projected world population growth to 9.7 billion by 2050. This means the global food supply will need to increase by 70%.

Given that in the UK, the utilised agricultural area covers about 22 million acres, or 70% of the total land, the numbers don’t add up. It shows we need to adopt radical changes to how we provide our daily subsistence, using methods that have a minimal land, energy and environmental impact, as well as alleviating all animal welfare concerns, and the possibility of producing nutritionally superior meat, with no saturated fat or cholesterol. It would certainly help tackle obesity, a problem that affects a third of the UK’s population.

A steak is composed of many different cell types – long muscle fibres, fat cells to give it that juicy flavour and connective tissue providing the structure. Companies working on producing the cellgrown equivalents are looking to match the profile of conventional meat, and examine the nutritional content to ensure the organoleptic quality of eating meat is maintained.

A sirloin is probably further down the pipeline than an ‘unstructured’ cell-based hamburger; however, it is anticipated that the first cultivated meat products to be approved by US regulatory bodies, will be as early as 2021.

These initial products will be offered on a small scale launch, at a premium to the conventional meat products we consume today. But, by 2030, as economies of scale kick in, these products will eventually be at cost parity (or potentially cheaper) than conventional products and with that, will gain mass market traction.

However, before these products are approved, there are some key challenges that companies in the sector are looking to overcome. The first technical obstacle is to reduce the cost of the growth medium, the nutrient ‘soup’ that the cells are grown in, down to a price that substantially lowers the cost of production.

This is predominantly an issue because all inputs thus far have been used for pharma-grade purposes, and therefore need to be tailored to be cheap enough for food-grade use. Second, achieving scale means adapting the cell mass to operate in bioreactors that are thousands of litres in size, not millilitres. This requires tweaking conditions and cell adaptation.

The universe of cultivated meat remains small, with just over 30 companies globally, but the prize is enormous: these companies will be able to supply vast quantities of meat, millions of tonnes a year, in an efficient process that does not involve the slaughter of animals, the heavy use of antibiotics or vast pastures of land.

The meat and seafood market is predicted to hit US$ 7 trillion by 2025 – cultivated meat must be used to meet this demand.