The consumption of meat in food is unethical towards animals and leads to a significant increase in harmful emissions into the atmosphere, which affect global climate change. Can this situation be changed? It is unlikely that all people on earth will become vegans, but meat can be grown artificially from animal stem cells. So the way out has been found? Yes, scientists say. Not really, ecologists and technologists argue. The production of artificial meat is still too expensive economically - and, oddly enough, leaves a more abundant carbon footprint than growing conventional meat. Nevertheless, supporters of the new product do not lose hope of bringing it to the market on an industrial scale.
In September, Russian producers announced that they were joining the global trend of “cultivated meat”. According to the ideologists of this business, instead of killing animals for meat, muscle fibers can be grown in a bioreactor from stem cells in a special nutrient medium.
This product is also known as "test tube meat" and "clean meat". The latter term implies that your patties will be ethically and environmentally friendly.
Fasting and its meat
The idea of producing meat in a test tube (or rather, in a Petri dish) came from biomedicine: advances in stem cell cultivation and 3D printing of organs inspired food technologists as well. Indeed, if tissue can be grown in the laboratory for transplant, why not grow it for food?
The principle of growing meat in a simplified form repeats the principle of growing any tissue: stem cells are isolated from a sample of animal muscle, which are then multiplied in a special nutrient medium containing hormones and growth factors, and forced to differentiate into muscle fibers.
The process of cooking artificial meat in the laboratory of the Ochakovo food ingredients plant.
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Samples of artificial meat cells in the laboratory of the Ochakovo Food Ingredients Plant.
Similar experiments with the aim of obtaining an edible product have been carried out in laboratories since the 1990s, but the popularization of the idea is largely due to the merit of the scientist Mark Post from the University of Maastricht (Netherlands). In 2013, he presented to reporters the first burger with a cutlet made from cow muscle cells grown in his laboratory.
At the presentation, the cutlet was prepared by the chef and ceremonially eaten by culinary critics. Judging by the reviews, the product in all respects resembled “traditional” meat, except that it was not so juicy. In 2015, Post founded Mosa Meat, a company that optimizes meat production in the laboratory, with a view to bringing the product to market by 2021.
The first cutlet was grown within three months and cost the creators three hundred thousand dollars. However, the presentation spurred business and investor interest in "clean meat", which led to the emergence of many startups aimed at streamlining the process. Already in 2017, the cost of muscle fibers from the laboratory was 5 thousand dollars per kilogram, and by today it has dropped several times more.
According to Forbes, at least 26 companies are currently developing "clean meat" in the world, whose goal is to make a product available to the mass consumer.
How much does it cost to cultivate
Let's imagine that we want to grow a piece of such meat from scratch. First, we need to equip the laboratory: purchase centrifuges, a microscope, a laminar flow box for sterile work, an autoclave, a CO2 incubator to maintain the required concentration of carbon dioxide in the starting culture and several bioreactors of different volumes in order to grow biomass at different stages of “ripeness”.
Then you need to get stem cells from which the culture will be grown. They are best isolated from a muscle sample of a young animal (for example, a newborn calf) using a special technology that includes tissue lysis and cell selection.
Scientists working in the optimization of the technology are discussing the creation of a biobank of stem cells from which it will be possible to take the sample needed for production - this should slightly reduce the cost of the process.
Further, the cell culture must be grown in a culture flask, and then sequentially grown in several bioreactors with stirring and aeration in a nutrient medium (if we really want to grow a lot of cells). After that, the cells will need to be removed from the bioreactor and seeded on an edible scaffold (for example, from collagen), which will give the product the appearance of a piece of meat.
The whole process will take about 40 days, during which it will be necessary to monitor the sterility of the process.
Scheme of the proposed technological process of growing meat in the laboratory.
The cost of the nutrient medium will make up the lion's share of the final cost of the final product; in production, it will be consumed in hundreds of liters. Analysts estimate that the cost of "clean meat" will be comparable to the cost of traditional meat, when the price of one liter of medium will not be much higher than one dollar.
In the meantime, it costs more than three hundred dollars per liter in the cheapest version.
How to optimize your environment
The medium has a complex composition and must contain the required proteins, lipids, salts, amino acids, vitamins and hormones. The developers set themselves the task, firstly, to get rid of sources of animal origin (for example, fetal calf serum, which is often added to the medium to provide the desired composition), and secondly, to make the medium as cheap as possible.
To do this, scientists try to minimize the number of components, collect media from recombinant proteins (that is, those produced in microorganisms such as E. coli and yeast) and look for suitable plant components.
According to the calculations of experts from The Good Food Institute, the culture medium can be reduced in price by another 10-1000 times if we optimize the production of recombinant growth factors - the most expensive components of the medium, without which stem cells simply will not grow and differentiate.
The list of components of the medium with the indicated cost for 20 thousand liters.
The Ochakiv Food Ingredients Plant, which was discussed at the beginning of the article, reported that the first 40-gram piece of "meat" cost them 900 thousand rubles. This amount did not include laboratory equipment, for which another 9 million rubles were spent.
The director of the enterprise, Alexander Savkov, confirmed that the main costs associated with growing the cells fell on the growth medium. True, in his laboratory they used an imported Swiss-made environment used in biomedicine. The main efforts of the technologists of the enterprise, like their foreign colleagues, will be directed to the creation of a cheap analogue.
Technologists are faced with really difficult tasks, because "clean meat" will have to be grown on a huge scale - much larger than the industry is now growing mammalian cells, which, for example, are used to produce antibodies.
What's wrong with cows
In addition to the obvious ethical aspect (killing of animals), forcing many people to become vegetarians, animal husbandry causes significant environmental damage. Livestock raising contributes 14.5 percent of the total greenhouse gas emissions to the atmosphere, and pastures and forage crops account for 80 percent of agricultural land.
At the same time, animal husbandry supplies only 37 percent of dietary protein. The dominant greenhouse gases from livestock are methane from cattle. In terms of accelerating global warming, it is 28 times more dangerous than carbon dioxide.
However, the greatest contribution to emissions is made not by the livestock itself, but by operations for its maintenance - the disposal of manure, the production of fertilizers, the plowing of land, the production of feed. According to the forecasts of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, by 2050 the demand for livestock products will increase by 70 percent. It looks like this industry really needs optimization.
These facts are used by the developers of "clean meat" when they turn to investors for funding. They promise that if successful, the share of "traditional" meat on the market in the next 20 years will fall to 40 percent, and the number of cattle will be reduced from one and a half billion to several tens of thousands.
Mosa Meat, in particular, claims that production of its product will require 99 percent less land and 96 percent less water than conventional livestock conditions, and greenhouse gas emissions will be reduced by 96 percent.
Whose trail is worse
However, scientists are already questioning the unconditional environmental friendliness of meat from a test tube. Researchers from Oxford have calculated what carbon footprint will leave the production of "clean meat" in a bioreactor on a nutrient medium containing cyanobacterial extract and growth factors produced in E. coli cells.
The calculations included not only factors such as the production of fertilizers for growing cyanobacteria, but even the electricity spent on sterilizing the components of the medium. The model was compiled for three locations with different "carbon cost" of electricity generation - Thailand, Spain and California.
Depending on the production technology, the results varied from 1.7 to 25 kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalents per kilogram of product. At the same time, scientists have estimated the spread of carbon footprint values for the production of a kilogram of beef at 28-43 kilograms of CO2 equivalents.
Comparison of the impact on global warming of traditional beef production (Sweden, Brazil, USA) and cultivated meat according to different scenarios (cultured) in the long term. The diagram assumes that cultured meat will replace beef.
Although at first glance, cultivated meat does indeed have an ecological advantage over beef, the authors of the work recall that the main contribution to the carbon value of beef comes from methane. Its lifetime in the atmosphere is 12 years, while carbon dioxide does not go anywhere from there. Thus, in the long term, cultivated meat may be even more dangerous for global warming due to its “pure” carbon contribution.
However, Alexei Kokorin, director of the Climate and Energy Program of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), believes that in the short term, methane, produced mainly by dairy cows, should not be discounted. “The energy from the decomposition of methane ultimately accumulates in the upper layers of the ocean. The result of this, among other things, is an increase in the frequency of extreme natural phenomena, for example, hurricane winds - what we see right now,”the climatologist comments.
It is also worth considering that the production of beef is the most expensive in comparison with other types of meat. To produce a kilogram of chicken costs us about five kilograms of CO2 equivalents, which is already quite comparable to the production of "clean meat", the carbon footprint of which does not depend on whose meat is grown in the bioreactor.
The cost of a kilogram of agricultural products in carbon equivalent. The minimum values are for root crops, and the maximum values for beef and lamb.
What is meat
Clean meat has yet to hit the market, but traditional meat producers are already taking steps to protect their products from competitors. Last year, the US Cattleman's Association petitioned the State Agricultural Inspectorate (FSIS) to ban all foods other than those derived directly from animals from being named meat.
Livestock breeders are concerned not only with muscle grown in the laboratory, but also with a variety of vegan plant protein products that are marketed as meat substitutes. Unlike cultivated meat, their products are already available in stores and restaurants.
Founded by Stanford biochemistry professor Patrick Brown, Impossible Foods has done a lot of research to make a product that looks like meat in every way. The researchers realized that hemoglobin (a heme-containing protein in the blood) gives many properties to meat, and replaced it with leg hemoglobin, isolated from the nodules on the roots of soybeans.
For the mass production of "vegetable meat", the company established the production of recombinant leghemoglobin in yeast cells. The US Food and Drug Administration has already recognized cooked leg hemoglobin as a safe food, and the Impossible Burger, which is supposedly indistinguishable from beef, is now available at several restaurant chains in the US, including the popular Burger King chain.
Founded in 2009, Beyond Meat sells plant-based imitations of chicken nuggets, beef burgers and pork sausages worldwide. Their product development was also sponsored by Bill Gates and Tyson Foods Corporation. The burger patty is based on pea protein extract, as well as rice protein, coconut oil, starch, lecithin and other non-animal components.
While such products are still focused on vegans, "clean meat" is positioned as a complete replacement for regular meat. Nevertheless, judging by the surveys, potential consumers are roughly equally divided into two camps: some are enthusiastic about the idea and even ready to overpay, while others declare that they will not eat anything that is grown in the laboratory.
Technologists, of course, are a little cunning: unlike a traditional piece of meat, which contains fat and other components, for which many love the taste of barbecue, cultivated meat is a "dry" muscle.
Regulatory authorities are also still suspicious of the new product: according to experts, "clean meat" due to production technology may contain excessive amounts of hormones or growth factors, and a plant-based nutrient medium may cause allergies in consumers.
Need to eat less
Considering the technological difficulties described above and the need to go through the certification procedures for the product, we are unlikely to try "clean meat" in the near future. While plant-based meat simulators enter the burgeoning Asian market, scientists are confirming that plant-based diets are indeed the most sustainable.
“The latest IPCC report estimates that greenhouse gas emissions from all food on the planet account for about 30 percent of total emissions. At the same time, if humanity completely switches to a vegan diet, the share of food emissions can be reduced by 15-20 percent. Even if you switch to a Mediterranean diet that contains enough meat and fish, emissions will be noticeably reduced,”says Aleksey Kokorin.
The process of cooking artificial meat in the laboratory of the Ochakovo food ingredients plant.
Moving away from traditional meat and dairy products will cut agricultural land by 75 percent, while keeping everyone on board, according to a recent study published in Science.
For those who are not ready to ditch animal products altogether and switch to soy protein, Nature recommends a still very sustainable flexitarian diet that contains some chicken, fish and eggs.
However, statistics show that in developed countries at least a third of food is thrown away, and the population is rapidly gaining weight, so the first step in the fight against climate change can be a simple rule “eat less” - no matter what.
Daria Spasskaya
