UK - Cultured meat
Posted by Meat Trade News Daily
12 Jun 2010

What do see on your plate? A succulent steak, straight from the butcher? A hunk of meat, carved from a carcase much as you might cut wood from a tree? Part of a dead creature, slaughtered for the whims of human kind? I see something different.

To me, your steak is a complex culture of muscle cells, fibrocytes, nerve fibres and adipose tissue. It’s a community of cells that were all living their disparate lives: some busily carrying messages, others in a state of readiness to contract and create movement, many of them tough and stringy, holding the whole system together, with a great swathe of the cells storing fat as an energy reserve.

The important thing is that, from the cells’ point of view, it doesn’t really matter where they grew. They happened to be part of the hind end of a cow, sure; but they might just have well have grown in a glass flask or a factory. It would make no difference to them.

Within a decade we are set to see meat produced in factories. Meat from slaughtered animals is a time-honoured product, but it is one that is set for revolution. As the global population increases with alarming speed, it will not be possible to raise livestock sufficient to feed everyone who wants steak. It takes around a tonne of water to raise 1kg of beef. Newsweek once calculated that the amount of water to make an adult ox is enough to float a battleship.

More than a quarter of all the rain-forests in Central America have been converted to cattle rearing since 1960 and 70 per cent of former tropical rain-forest in Costa Rica and in Panama has been stripped and converted to cattle-raising pasture. Brazil calculates that almost 40 per cent of its land has been cleared for raising beef. Cattle rearing is said to have claimed the loss of more species than any other single human activity. Meanwhile, nations like Japan and Saudi Arabia are acquiring land in other countries, ready to fly the produce straight back home. There will be land wars if this goes on.

Cultured meat is starting to attract interest and research funds. The Netherlands authorities have reportedly ploughed €2m into research in Utrecht and Amsterdam. American policies have been far less forward-looking, though PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) have offered a $1m prize for the first firm to market cultured chicken meat in at least six of the United States by 2016.

Would people accept it? There was a time when I’d have felt the answer was ‘no’, but the success of Quorn shows that the public truly are ready to accept novel foods. Flavoured and texturised Quorn is popular among the health food enthusiasts, yet is completely science-based. It is made from a fungus originally found in a corn-field, Fusarium venenatum. These fungi normally grow like fluffy, cotton-wool growths of fine, silky filaments. Culture them in vats and texturise the growths, and you have something with a firm consistency that can be flavoured to provide a low-fat, high-protein food.

If something so unnatural can be a business success, then the prospects for commercially cultured meat must be good. The product will be of known composition and guaranteed quality. What’s more, it will avoid the need to slaughter livestock. It could prove to be the most nourishing, yet humane, meat we have ever seen.

Professor Brian Ford is a Fellow at Cardiff University and an Associate of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge University. His essay Culturing Meat for the Future appears in Death and Anti-Death, edited by Charles Tandy, Ria University Press.

timesonline.typepad.com

News Link: http://meattradenewsdaily.co.uk/news/100610/uk___cultured_meat_.aspx