Pass the Ketchup, Test-Tube Burger On the Menu Soon?
Source: The Guardian
By Ian Sample, The Guardian
Lurking in a petri dish in a laboratory in the Netherlands is an unlikely contender for the future of food. The yellow-pink sliver the size of a corn plaster is the state-of-the-art in lab-grown meat, and a milestone on the path to the world's first burger made from stem cells.
Dutch scientist Mark Post holds samples of in-vitro meat grown in a laboratory. Credit: Francois Lenoir/Reuters.
Dr Mark Post, head of physiology at Maastricht University, plans to unveil a complete burger — produced at a cost of more than $316,000 — this October.
He hopes Heston Blumenthal, the chef and owner of the three Michelin-starred Fat Duck restaurant in Berkshire, will cook the offering for a celebrity taster as yet unnamed.
The project, funded by a wealthy, anonymous, individual aims to slash the number of cattle farmed for food, and in doing so reduce one of the major contributors to greenhouse gas emissions.
"Meat demand is going to double in the next 40 years and right now we are using 70% of all our agricultural capacity to grow meat through livestock," Post said.
"You can easily calculate that we need alternatives. If you don't do anything meat will become a luxury food and be very, very expensive."
The recipe for meat grown in the lab. Credit: The Guardian.
Livestock contribute to global warming through unchecked releases of methane, a gas 20 times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.
At the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Vancouver, Post said the burger would be a "proof of concept" to demonstrate that "with in-vitro methods, out of stem cells we can make a product that looks like and feels and hopefully tastes like meat".
Post is focusing on making beef burgers from stem cells because cows are among the least efficient animals at converting the food they eat into food for humans.
"Cows and pigs have an efficiency rate of about 15%, which is pretty inefficient. Chickens are more efficient and fish even more," Post said. "If we can raise the efficiency from 15% to 50% it would be a tremendous leap forward."
Post and his team of six have so far grown thin sheets of cow muscle measuring 1.2in long, .6in wide, and half a millimeter thick. To make a burger will take 3,000 pieces of muscle and a few hundred pieces of fatty tissue, that will be minced together and pressed into a patty.
Each piece of muscle is made by extracting stem cells from cow muscle tissue and growing them in containers in the laboratory. The cells are grown in a culture medium containing foetal calf serum, which contains scores of nutrients the cells need to grow.
The slivers of muscle grow between pieces of Velcro and flex and contract as they develop. To make more protein in the cells — and so improve the texture of the tissue — the scientists shock them with an electric current.
Post said he could theoretically increase the number of burgers made from a single cow from 100 to 100 million. "That means we could reduce the number of livestock we use by 1 million," he said.
If lab-grown meat mimics farmed meat perfectly — and Post admits it may not — the meat could become a premium product just as free range and organic items have.
He said that in conversations with the Dutch Society of Vegetarians, the chairman estimated half its members would start to eat meat if he could guarantee that it cost fewer animal lives.
Meat grown in the laboratory could have several advantages, because its manufacture is controlled at each step. The tissue could be grown to produce high levels of healthy polyunsaturated fatty acids, or to have a particular texture.
Because the burgers are made from animal stem cells, researchers could make products from more exotic animals. "We could make panda meat, I'm sure we could," Post said.
He believes it will be a relatively simple matter to scale up the operation, since most of the technical obstacles have already been overcome. "I'd estimate that we could see mass production in another 10 to 20 years," he said.
Reprinted with permission.
Comments
By Robert
on February 21st, 2012
Scary. Mass production of cloned meats could spell extinction for actual animal.
By tony lovell (Australia)
on February 26th, 2012
I believe it is critically important that we firstly distinguish clearly between those impacts that are due to livestock themselves, and those that are in fact due to how we human beings decide to manage those livestock. As a simple example, the FAO report, Livestock’s Long Shadow, notes (page 97) that manure deposited on fields and pastures by livestock, or otherwise handled in a dry form, does not produce significant amounts of methane. However, if those same animals are placed into a CAFO by human beings, the manure is then managed in liquid form, normally in lagoons or holding tanks, and the methane then produced becomes an issue, but it is now a 100% human caused issue.
Livestock like cows and sheep know everything they need to know to be cows and sheep, but they know very little about managing land. This means that whether the impact these animals have on a landscape is negative or positive depends 100% on the decisions made by the humans who are in charge of them. This leads to my second important point ”“ there is a huge difference between livestock, and properly managed livestock.
Too often people mistakenly use very simplistic linear thinking when dealing with what is actually a complex and cyclical issue.
And a classic case with this is methane and ruminant animals - this simplistic thinking is that GHG’s are bad > methane is a GHG > cows emit methane > so cows are bad.
However what this completely misses is that in Nature’s grand scheme, ruminants are merely part of a cycle, and absolutely essential in seasonally dry grassland regions to allow the carbon trapped in otherwise lignifying grasses to be released back into the system.
In their absence, this dry and senescent grass will be cycled the only other way Nature can, which is by fire. Data from Australia’s CSIRO reveals that a grass fire is up to 3.6 times as GHG intensive as a ruminant for the same amount of plant material.
Nature is showing us that the preferred way to cycle carbon stocks is through ruminant animals - and it is up to we humans to ensure that the livestock we raise are properly managed livestock, on grass pastures using good grazing practices.
