
In 2013, the worldâs first lab-grown burger was unveiled to the world. It carried a $330,000 price tag, and apparently, it wasnât all that tasty. But the scientists behind the idea have been hard at work, and artificial meat thatâs both cost-effective and palatable may arrive sooner than we think.
Itâs not just cow-free beef burgers on the future menu â several groups around the world are attempting to clone chicken breasts and fish fillets, as well. Why do scientists want to grow meat in vats instead of on animals, and how close are we to actually accomplishing it?
The Big Resource Hog
The arguments for growing so-called âculturedâ meat are as wide-ranging as the reasons people decide to become vegetarian or vegan. If youâre not vegetarian or vegan, youâve probably received a mouthful on this subject from a friend or family member before, so Iâm going to keep it brief and focus on the argument cultured meat proponents seem to embrace the most: Sustainability.

Advertisement
Literally hogging our resources. Image via Wikimedia
The meat industry is a huge contributor to humanityâs environmental footprint, accounting for some 18% of our total greenhouse gas emissions. And that numberâs deceptively low, because it includes roughly 40% of methane and 65% of nitrous oxide emissions, which are respectively 23 and nearly 300 times more potent climate warming agents than carbon dioxide. Whatâs more, the environmental footprint of livestock production is growing fast. By 2050, global meat production is projected to double from its 1999 levels, according to the FAO. At that time, the FAO writes, âThe environmental impact per unit livestock must be cut by half, just to avoid increasing the level of damage beyond its present level.â
If climate arguments arenât your MO, try this one on for size: Animal agriculture is soaking up an enormous portion of our arable land, drinkable water, edible food and combustible fossil fuel resources. According to a study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, livestock in the US consume more than 7 times as much grain as the American populationâenough grain to feed about 840 million people. The same study finds that roughly 25 kilocalories of fossil fuel energy are consumed for every 1 kilocalorie of meat protein produced, compared with a 2.2:1 ratio for corn. And producing 1 kg of animal protein requires 100 times more water than 1 kg of grain protein, in part because we have to take the water used to grow the animalsâ food into account. You can read the full report for additional statistics, but youâll find that on nearly every measure, raising livestock takes a lot more resources per calorie out than growing edible plants does.
Advertisement
Since we donât have industrial, meat-producing labs yet, itâs hard to say how the environmental impact and resource cost of cultured meat will measure up. But thereâs reason to be optimistic. Hereâs what a life-cycle assessment study, published in Environmental Science and Technology in 2011 found:
The results showed that production of 1000 kg cultured meat requires 26â33 GJ energy, 367â521 m3 water, 190â230 m2 land, and emits 1900â2240 kg CO2-eq GHG emissions. In comparison to conventionally produced European meat, cultured meat involves approximately 7â45% lower energy use (only poultry has lower energy use), 78â96% lower GHG emissions, 99% lower land use, and 82â96% lower water use depending on the product compared. Despite high uncertainty, it is concluded that the overall environmental impacts of cultured meat production are substantially lower than those of conventionally produced meat.
âThis actually makes a lot of sense,â Shier Friedman, co-founder of the pro-cultured meat Modern Agriculture Foundation told me over the phone. âWhen weâre raising animals, a very large amount is being discarded: The bones, fur, eyeballs, organs. What weâre doing is wasting resources to produce stuff that we donât get back. With cultured meat, you grow exactly what you want, and you barely throw anything away.â
Advertisement
That all sounds promising, but in reality, cultured meat will only save us resources and reduce the meat industryâs environmental footprint if we can produce the stuff at economies of scale. The meat growers of the future are dreaming big, but the scientific and engineering challenges ahead are also enormous.
The Quarter Pounder with Stem Cells

Advertisement
The most expensive burger ever grown. Image via David Parry / PA Wire
Two years ago, physiologist Mark Post of the University of Maastricht unveiled the worldâs first cultured beef burger, assembled in his lab from thousands of individual strands of muscle tissue. It precipitated an international media blitz: Hundreds of news articles, radio podcasts, and prime-time TV minutes were devoted to Unveiling of The Burger. But as for the flavor? A bit lackluster, according to food scientist Hanni RĂźtzler and journalist Josh Schonwald, the two chosen tasters. As NPR reported at the time:
âThe texture, the mouthfeel has a feel like meat,â Schonwald put it. âThe absence is ... fat. Itâs a leanness. But the bite feels like a conventional hamburger. Itâs kind of an unnatural experience [without condiments].â
RĂźtzler agreed the burger was edible, but not delectable. âIt has quite some intense taste, itâs close to meat,â she said. âI thought it would be softer.â
Advertisement
Still, one can argue the demonstration was less about the meatâs flavor and more about what scientists had managed to accomplish. Over the course of three months, Postâs lab turned a handful of stem cells extracted from a cowâs shoulder into a patty consisting of 20,000 individual muscle fibers. Keeping those cells healthy, well-fed and contamination-free during their growth was no small feat â in fact, itâs something biomedical engineers in the artificial tissue business have been struggling to do for over a decade.
But with a $300k price tag and a mediocre review, Post knew he had to do better. Heâs spent the last two years refining the process, and I caught up with him over the phone to hear how itâs been going.
One of the big takeaways from the 2013 cultured burger demo was that meat just ainât right without fat. So, Postâs lab is now culturing fatty tissue in addition to muscle fibers. Working out that process has taken some time. Until now, there hasnât been a whole lot of scientific interest in culturing fat cells, and methods that did exist used chemicals we donât really want to be eating.
Advertisement
âThe original methodology to make fat cells from stem cells requires steroids, which are not wanted in food applications,â Post told me. âWe had to redesign that and work with the biochemistry of the cell to figure out which stimuli we should use. We now have a bunch of natural components of fat that actually stimulate fat production.â
Right now, Postâs lab is culturing beef fat and muscle tissue separately, and mixing the two after the fact. In the future, Post imagines combining the two cell types in a co-culture. But first, there are a couple other burger basics the team is trying to improve on.
For one, Post would like to eliminate the use of animal products (stem cells aside, obviously) from the culturing process. In laboratories, cells are often grown using a fetal bovine serum extracted from unborn calves. But from a sustainability point of view, juicing a baby cow to grow a burger is less than ideal. It also doesnât do much for cultured beefâs image as a cruelty-free product. And, while it may be an unlikely scenario, a disease-contaminated batch of fetal bovine serum could spell disaster. Better off, Post says, if we could work out an animal-free culture serum â one based on photosynthetic algae or cyanobacteria, perhaps.
Advertisement

Mark Post and The Burger. Image via David Parry / PA Wire
Another technical issue Postâs team is trying to sort out how to boost cultured beefâs iron content. In muscle tissue, iron is found primarily inside an iron and oxygen-binding protein known as myoglobin. But because lab-grown meat lacks a circulatory system, itâs kept in a very high-oxygen environment, which has the unintended consequence of reducing cellular myoglobin expression. Less myoglobin means less iron, poorer nutritional content and a weaker flavor.
Advertisement
Once Post is satisfied with cultured beef version 2.0 â a fattier, more iron-rich and animal-free substance than its predecessor â heâll start thinking about scaling up. Going from petri dishes to factories raises a host of new issues. For one, thereâs that oxygen problem again: Without a circulatory system and blood vessels to shuttle O2 around, we can really only ever hope to grow thin sheets of meat. Post wouldnât get into specifics about the technologies involved in scaling this process up, other than hinting that 3D printers and new types of scaffolding materials might be involved.
In the cultured meat facilities of the future, impeccable cleanliness will be another top priority. Keeping everything sterile will no doubt up the maintenance costs, but Post sees it as a worthy challenge. Thatâs because, if we can ensure truly sterile production conditions, we might be able remove antibiotics from the equation.
âCurrently, we only use antibiotics in the first stage of the process where we harvest cells from the animals,â Post said. âThatâs not 100% sterile. But if you get rid of the serum, itâs much easier to get rid of the antibiotics. Weâre using very stringent doses now, but I think in the future antibiotics can be eliminated entirely.â
Advertisement
Today, most of the antibiotics produced in America are guzzled down by livestock living in filthy, overcrowded conditions. Reducing our dependency on antibiotics in animal agriculture will slow the spread of antibiotic resistant bacteria and ensure that our medicines last for future generations of humans. (We really do not want to live in a post-antibiotic future.)
As for the publicâs reaction to encountering lab-grown beef in the grocery stores? Thatâs something Post spends a lot of time thinking about.
âYou do hear people making references to GMOs, playing God, and âfrankenfoodsââthat sort of thing,â Post told me. (Despite public perception, cultured beef is not a genetically modified food, nor are genetically modified foods evil.) âItâs hard because these are emotional reactions â thereâs usually no rationale behind them.â
Advertisement
âBut,â he continued, âWe find that when we do surveys and explain what it is that weâre doing, the reactions tend to be more positive.â
In Postâs mind, a more legitimate concern than âfrankenfoodâ is the possibility of small farmers losing control of the meat production system entirely (to be fair, theyâve already been largely hedged out in the United States.)
âThatâs something we have to address,â Post said. âCan you design ways of implement culturing beef on a small scale so that it becomes a community thing? Can you design a home meat maker?â
Advertisement
But Post reckons weâre still ten or twenty years away from producing cultured beef en masse. Right now, growing a burger thatâs just as mouth-wateringly juicy and flavorful as a natural beef pattyâand figuring out how to scale upâis keeping the our cultured beef-makers plenty busy.
Fish and Chicken

Advertisement
Image via New Harvest. org
An affordable, scaleable cultured beef industry would go a long way toward reducing humanityâs environmental footprint. But Post isnât the only scientist trying to cook up meat in the lab. In fact, way back in 2002, a NASA-funded team demonstrated it was possible to grow fish filets outside of a fish. Admittedly, this early effort was a bit grisly: The team cut chunks of muscle tissue from freshly slaughtered goldfish and dunked them in a culture fluid for a week. The tissue chunks grew by over 14 percent, which lead scientist Morris Benjaminson attributed to partially differentiated myoblast cells dividing to make more of themselves.
Goldfish filets never caught on, but Post tells me that a few other research teams have recently begun investigating cultured seafood again, presumably using more modern techniques. Meanwhile, the Modern Agriculture Foundation has taken up the lab-grown chicken challenge. In some ways, that effort is even more ambitious than Postâs stem cell burger. Rather than growing a handful of individual cell types, Friedmanâs foundation is hoping to clone entire chicken breastsâcomplex, 3-dimensional organs.
Advertisement
âWe wanted to do something big, something that is needed, something that is important and could literally change the food culture in the world,â Frieman told me. âWe knew a group was already doing beef, so we decided to go with another of the most popular food animals in the world.â
So far, Future Meatâthe MAFâs cultured chicken research programâhas only conducted feasibility studies, looking at the costs, time and ingredients associated with growing whole chicken breasts in vats. There are some parallels to the burger meat effort: For instance, Future Meatâs lead researcher Amit Gefen told in an email that his team is very interested in coming up with a veggie-based culture medium that would eliminate animal serum from the production process.
But in many ways, Future Meatâs goal is very different from that of the Post lab. Engineering 3D-organs means thinking about how different cell types will interact, and how to coax tissues into taking on a certain size and shape. It also means worrying a lot about oxygen and nutrient availability. While some tissue engineers are trying to develop synthetic capillary networks for artificial organs, Gefen is hoping Future Meat can avoid that additional complexity with a cleverly designed bioreactor.
Advertisement
âI expect that developing a capillary network to feed the construct would be too complicated and expensive for the purpose of creating a food product, and so other approaches should be adopted,â Gefen told me. âThe most feasible one appears to be developing a special bioreactor that will circulate nutrients in the scaffolds (with seeded cells) efficiently so that cells will be able to proliferate and grow on the scaffolds.â
Gefen envisions his bioreactors will have the ability to stimulate growing muscle tissue, either mechanically or electrically, to facilitate proper development. Again, this is all very conceptual right now, but with more PhD student labor and grant funding, Future Meat is hoping to make headway on bioreactor prototypes within the next several years.
The Road Ahead
Cultured meat still has a long way to go, but itâs exciting to see groups of scientists around the world taking up the challenge. And in a very short amount of time, weâve seen major progress. This past April, Post announced that his team has managed to cut the cost of cultured beef to just $80 per kilogram, or roughly $11 per burger. Thatâs a pretty stunning price drop, considering two years ago one of his burgers couldâve financed a med studentâs education.
Advertisement

Hey, one can dream. Image via Harald Groven / Flickr
As public awareness of cultured meat grows, proponents like Friedman and Post seem hopeful that their products will, one day, become just as acceptable as meat grown on animals â perhaps even more so.
Advertisement
âWeâre trying to find a realistic way to produce the same type of food we love to eat,â Friedman said. âEventually cultured meat will be cheaper and more sustainable. And weâll have so many people on the planet that there just wonât be another option. The human race is progressing, technology is progressing, and eventually, people are going to get used to this idea.â
Personally, Iâm looking forward to the day when I can order a cultured salmon roll without wondering if my fish was sustainably harvested, or a McDonaldâs quarter pounder without imagining the sorry life of the animal it came from. Bring it on, science.
Contact the author at maddie.stone@gizmodo.com or follow her on Twitter.
Top image via David Parry / PA Wire
This was originally posted in August 2015.
Advertisement