VegNews (May/June 2006)

iMeat
How Lab-Grown Meat Could Revolutionize Vegetarianism and the World
 
by Mat Thomas

At a massive factory in a major American megalopolis, technicians encased in hermetically sealed biosuits peer through their glass facemasks at what looks like a gigantic inkjet printer, ten meters wide. They monitor the bioprinter's functions as the elongated rotating head moves back and forth with a staccato ring across a flat plastic sheet, evenly distributing muscle and fat cells through thousands of tiny nozzle openings.

After attaching the 200-square-foot sheet, slick with living cell nodes, to a tubular metal framework, workers load it onto the bed of a customized electric truck and transport it to an enormous humming bioreactor in another section of the factory. They glance at their reflections in the tank's stainless steel hull as the foreman enters the security code into an embedded keypad. A set of garage-sized hydraulic doors slides open at the top, exhaling pressurized air and the pungent fumes of fermented fungi. The cellular sheet is submersed into the bioreactor's vat of warm nutrient soup, where the cells germinate in vitro for several weeks and grow firmer as long-armed mechanical stretchers "exercise" them into muscle. Workers at nearby bioreactors remove meatsheets that have matured, stacking them one on top of another to construct a thick slab of flesh. Finally, the room-sized hunk of muscle is fed into a large processor that minces and reshapes it into nuggets, patties and sausage links, which are packaged and shipped out to supermarkets and restaurants throughout the region and the world.

Welcome to the not-too-distant future, where meat is "grown" without factory farms, slaughterhouses, or the killing of animals. Sound like science fiction? Maybe. But a group of determined scientists believes it could be possible to mass-produce meat using cloned animal cells well within the next decade. They claim this lab-grown "cultured meat" will be healthier and safer to eat than meat sliced from slaughtered animals, and will produce less pollution and require fewer resources than harvesting livestock for human consumption. The icing is that cultured meat could theoretically be produced without harming or killing a single sentient animal. The animal cells themselves would be utterly insensate – totally lacking a central nervous system, pain receptors or a brain, and therefore incapable of suffering like living creatures. If it turns out to be technologically feasible and commercially successful, mass-produced cultured meat could radically transform the animal agriculture industry and vegetarianism.

Making a Muscle

As a journalist writing in 1932, future British Prime Minister Winston Churchill predicted that, "Fifty years hence we will escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium." Churchill's inspiration was probably a decades-long experiment performed by French Nobel Prize-winning surgeon Alexis Carrel, who kept part of a chicken embryo's heart muscle growing in a bowl of nutrients from 1912 until his death 32 years later. Despite Carrel's experiment and Churchill's futuristic forecast, it wasn't until the dawn of the new millennium that scientists yielded promising results with viable commercial applications.

Australian laboratory SymbioticA was the first to grow muscle tissue in vitro, followed closely by a team of NASA scientists seeking to provide meat for astronauts on lengthy space missions. While their attempts tendered only minute quantities, a small group of researchers has built on these and other experimental results to recently propose two promising techniques for synthesizing large amounts of meat in the laboratory. Both methods involve growing (on either thin membranes or small three-dimensional beads) muscle and fat cells taken from animals in a nutrient-rich medium. To achieve a meaty texture, the growing cell culture would need mechanical workouts during development that replicate animals' physical movements (otherwise, the end product would be the consistency of a jellyfish). Once the cells have grown, the membranes used in the first technique would be stacked into thicker slabs, while the beads employed in the second method would be harvested. In either case, the meat would be processed for use in soups or sauces, or fashioned into nuggets or burgers.

Even though this technology is still in an embryonic stage, the researchers who published these theories last summer as part of a ground-breaking paper in the journal Tissue Engineering are hopeful that progress can be made relatively fast. The development of a highly nutritive growth medium and sophistocated bioreactors have been identified as crucial to moving forward, as is overcoming current fixed limits on the number of divisions that scientists have been able to coax from living cells. In addition, far more advanced biotechnology would be needed to produce "cuts" of meat like steak or turkey breast because these would require a complex circulatory system to deliver nutrients throughout the muscle during growth.

However, researchers believe that resolving the problems so far encountered in growing cultured meat should be relatively simple compared to scientific accomplishments in other fields, so progress mainly depends on how much money and effort is invested in advancing the technology. A research group in the Netherlands is leading the way toward developing meat substitutes using cell cultures with $5 million in public and private grants. In America, Washington D.C.-based nonprofit New Harvest is helping fund research and providing a forum for sharing scientific innovations. In addition, a U.S.-based start-up will be announced within the next few months to raise capital and begin collaborating with the Dutch researchers.

Only one meat company – sausage manufacturer Stegeman, owned by Sara Lee – currently funds cultured meat research, in partnership with the Dutch government. Tyson Foods, the world's largest producer of meat products, claims to have never heard of lab-grown meat. Perhaps the industry is either waiting until the technology is proven before investing or keeping their involvement under wraps to catch the competition off guard. Nonetheless, given current technological progress, key researcher Professor Henk Haagsman of Utrecht University in the Netherlands believes cultured meat could be on the shelves as soon as 2012.

Cultured vs. Conventional Meat

How will cultured meat stack up to the kind that is cut from slaughtered animals? No one is sure, as the technology is unproven. Yet proponents have high hopes based on available knowledge, and theorize that if it can be produced cheaply, cultured meat will reduce the harm done by the world's current meat-based diet to human health and safety, the environment, impoverished people and animals.

Health

Researchers claim cultured meat would be healthier because the nutritional content could be controlled and customized. "Meat weighs heavy with unhealthy baggage," argues Michael Greger, M.D., Director of Public Health and Animal Agriculture for The Humane Society of the United States' (HSUS') Farm Animal Welfare section. "Beef, for example, is an excellent source of protein, except that all the artery-clogging saturated fat makes it not a good source after all. But the prospect of lab-grown meat would enable us to stuff a burger full of omega-3 fatty acids now found predominantly only in foods like flax seeds and the contaminated flesh of animals like fish. Or you could produce in-vitro fish with heart-healthy fats, but without the heart-damaging mercury or cancer-causing PCBs." Theoretically, cultured meat would also be free of hormones, antibiotics, pesticides and other toxic by-products of factory farming.

Safety

Cultured meat could be grown in completely sterile surroundings, eliminating the kind of contamination (e.g., bacteria from fecal matter) that commonly occurs in factory farms, slaughterhouses and meatpacking plants and contributes to over 5,000 deaths in the U.S. every year. The chances of meat-borne pathogens (such as Salmonella, E. Coli, avian influenza and mad cow disease) infecting cultured meat could be reduced to nearly zero by thoroughly testing the source cells for disease before they are grown.

Food safety issues are becoming increasingly critical as viruses mutate on overcrowded factory farms into ever-deadlier forms that can be transmitted through a sneeze or a handshake. Dr. Michael Osterholm, director of the U.S. Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, recently wrote, "An influenza pandemic of even moderate impact will result in the biggest single human disaster ever – far greater than AIDS, 9/11, all wars in the 20th century and the recent tsunami combined. It has the potential to redirect world history as the Black Death redirected European history in the 14th century." Culturing meat would also significantly reduce the threat of bio-terrorism because it is far easier to ensure the security of enclosed labs or food production facilities than unwieldy feedlots and factory farms.

Environmental

Proponents claim that cultured meat production would require fewer resources (cropland, grazing land, water, pesticides and energy) than raising animals for their flesh. For one, growing meat without all the "extra" body parts that are considered unfit for human consumption (e.g., bones, organs, neurological tissue, fur) would lower the conversion ratio of resources to actual product. Jason Matheny, one of the authors of the pivotal Tissue Engineering article, concedes that "eating cultured meat probably won't be as efficient as eating plants directly." However, he asserts that it will be "several times more efficient than consuming traditional meat if a suitable growth medium can be made from plants that reproduces the functions of an animal's digestive system."

A lot of energy could be saved on transportation alone because lab-grown meat could be produced where it is consumed, making it unnecessary to truck animals sometimes hundreds of miles from farm to slaughterhouse before shipping their meat to market. Researchers also assert that cultured meat would generate less pollution compared to factory farming, significantly reducing groundwater and soil contamination from nitrogen, phosphorous and heavy metals while lowering emissions of methane, a major greenhouse gas.

World Hunger

"With a single cell you could theoretically produce the world's annual meat supply," claims researcher Matheny. He also makes the point that "Meat consumption in developing countries continues to increase, having doubled over the last 20 years. This puts pressure on grain production, which is needed to feed most farm animals, and raises grain prices so that some people can't afford to eat this staple food and fall deeper into malnutrition. If cultured meat is more efficient than traditional meat in its use of grains, or if it doesn't use any grains, then it should decrease malnutrition if only by lowering grain prices."

Animal Welfare

Cloning technology could create something never before seen in history: guilt-free meat that can be mass-produced without killing animals. Theoretically, not a single animal would have to suffer or die to produce cultured meat because cells could be obtained from host animals using a muscle biopsy, doing them no harm.

Though some say that taking cells from even one animal donor would make cultured meat unethical, it would certainly be an immense improvement over the current state of affairs. Obviously, raising a relatively small number of animals to become cell hosts would be more humane than killing tens of billions a year on factory farms. One can assume that if animals had the ability to choose between these two options, they would gladly donate cells to avoid a lifetime of pain, deprivation and terror. Plus, whereas most factory farmed animals are genetically predisposed to suffer from rapid growth syndromes and routinely fed antibiotics just to keep them alive, hosts would by necessity have to be maintained as healthy specimens so that their cells could be replicated for meat production. Even the liquid medium used to nourish and grow the cells would probably be made from plants or mushrooms.

The "Yuck Factor"

Aside from the practical benefits cultured meat could offer, some raise concerns about the ethics of cloning. "People do not, in general, approve of animal cloning because it violates fundamental beliefs about ethics, nature, or the will of God," notes Marion Nestle, Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health at New York University and author of Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health. She also believes that lab-grown meat "could be safe but still elicit strong negative reactions based on the yuck factor." However, as Dr. Michael Greger points out, "In vitro meat is a product of biotechnology, the same as bread, wine, cheese, yogurt, tempeh and tofu. These are all 'unnatural' products. The kind of 'cloning' taking place in cultured meat – the mitotic division of single cells – is biologically identical to that which occurs in animals that people already eat." Meat eaters already have to suppress their disgust in order to remain omnivorous, and it could be argued that devouring the diseased flesh of tortured animals from factory farms is far more revolting than eating a collection of cloned animal cells grown under controlled conditions.

Widespread consumer acceptance of cultured meat will depend on many factors – including taste, price, safety, and yes, overcoming the yuck factor. Global concerns about industrialized meat production eating up precious resources and devastating the environment will also play a major role. Matheny guesses that mass acceptance of cultured meat could happen first in small prosperous countries like the Netherlands where such impacts are already being felt, followed by developing regions like Asia, where population growth and the rising demand for meat have combined to create food and resource shortages. Wherever and whenever cultured meat does arrive, if it tastes like "real" meat and proves healthier, it may offer vegetarian advocates unprecedented opportunities for "selling" the product to meat eaters by urging them to compare the yuck factor of eating cloned animals to what – and who – they are already eating.

Diverging Perspectives

What would the advent of cultured meat mean for vegetarianism? No one can predict yet, with so many questions still unanswered. Much seems to depend on scientific, social and economic factors over which vegetarian advocates have virtually no control. Even though the concept of cultured meat has only just been introduced and still remains mostly outside of mainstream consciousness, it already draws strong viewpoints among animal rights campaigners.

"If advocates are serious about reducing institutionalized animal abuse and environmental devastation, they will throw their weight and resources behind lab-grown meat," declares Dr. Greger. "Given the inhumane treatment of animals raised and killed for meat within modern agribusiness, I can think of no faster way to dramatically stem the cruelty of such customary abuses as intensive confinement and unnaturally fast growth than to provide humane alternatives to factory farm products." Paul Shapiro, Manager of HSUS's Factory Farming Campaign, strongly concurs. "In vitro meat has the potential to reduce an enormous amount of animal suffering. It could provide consumers with food that's virtually identical to traditional meat without the animal cruelty."

While many vegetarian and animal rights leaders would like the movement to take full advantage of cultured meat's potential benefits, changing course strategically if necessary, Viva!USA Director lauren Ornelas says she'll stick to a more traditional message based on healthy plant-based eating that promotes respect for animals and environmental stewardship. "Let the scientists who create lab-grown meat and the corporations who realize they can make money from it promote it," she proposes. "They'll do a better job of marketing it than we could, anyway."

Ornelas also has doubts that consumers will ever take to cultured meat. "The real question is, will people eat it? If they do, I don't see too much cause for concern, ethically or in terms of advocacy. Some people are going to have a knee-jerk reaction against lab-grown meat, so until we convince the public to care about the suffering of animals, as well as the impact of the meat industry's wastefulness on impoverished people and our planet, we should continue to invest our funds and advocacy efforts in discouraging people from eating animals. Even so, each organization is different and will do what they feel is best. Having a combination of tactics and viewpoints generally strengthens our movement, and shows that we are not all the same."

Meating The Future

As a literary genre, science fiction often attempts to envision realities before (or as) they come into being. While most of these futuristic visions remain in the realm of pure fantasy, some prove eerily prescient. The protagonist of Frederick Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth's 1952 sci-fi novel The Space Merchants works in a factory that manufactures Chicken Little – a meat cell culture that feeds the world. Yet more than half a century later, people still have trouble comprehending lab-grown meat as an actual reality. Having traversed the shaky boundary between the 20th and 21st centuries, our own imaginations often cannot keep up with our rapidly evolving techno-environment. Strange as it is, we feel somehow behind the times even while living through them.

Right now, mass-produced cultured meat is literally a science fiction technology. It is based on theoretical speculation and doesn't yet exist – but it soon could. For now, vegetarians can attentively follow the technology's progress while moving toward a considered position on the issue. The unknown may reveal itself in time, but some questions remain unanswerable at present. For example:

• How will this product be tested for consumer safety, and will it be fed to animals before humans? The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) currently prohibits selling meat from animal clones (like Dolly the sheep) as food, but this would not apply to cultured meat. A spokesperson for the FDA Center for Veterinary Medicine suspects it would be tested like other single-celled proteins grown as cultures (Quorn, for example). However, the unique methods used to produce cultured meat may determine how it is tested.

• Will cultured meat really conserve resources and reduce pollution? It will take energy to run those Chicken Little factories. Would the bioreactors pollute the air and water, or would they be solar powered? If growing meat turns out to be resource-intensive, it may slow or halt scientific progress. Maybe cultured meat was a good idea for feeding a few cosmonauts in space but not billions of people here on earth. Unforeseen ecological or health risks could emerge as the technology unfolds.

• Vegetarians have long insisted that meat eating is unnatural for humans and causes disease. If it were healthier, would vegetarians endorse cultured over conventional meat? Cloning is weird science, like something out of Star Trek or Brave New World, and vegetarians as a group have historically opposed Frankenfoods. Some might therefore view advocating artificial meat as a step backward that could dilute vegetarianism's anti-meat message and unwittingly open a Pandora’s box of mutant creations. Cloning could someday unleash disturbing, even horrifying hybrids on the world. Applied to food, this new technology might allow humans to dine on all sorts of exotic animal flesh, such as mock "bushmeat" made from endangered species or even mythical creatures like mermaids (a "surf & turf " combo of fish meat spliced with human femi-flesh).

And that's just scratching the surface of this deeply layered issue. It's far too early to tell whether culturing meat for the masses will ever pan out, much less fulfill its promise to better the world. But what if it does? By reducing pollution and resource depletion, cultured meat could help rescue the planet (and the endangered human race) while saving billions of animals' lives. In the long run, cloning could even become the ultimate weapon in the war against factory farming. Whatever happens, rest assured that the story of cultured meat will make for some pretty interesting science fiction.


Listen to podcasts of Mat Thomas' radio interviews on lab-grown meat:

- Go Vegan Radio - July 2nd, 2006 (MT interview starts about 17 minutes into broadcast)
 
- Vegan Radio - June 21st, 2006 (show 18: MT interview starts about 1/2 hour into broadcast)