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In late March, the Australian company Vow, which specializes in creating meat from animal cells, presented a meatball with the DNA of a hairy mammoth that went extinct 4000 years ago. This unique product was even exhibited at the NEMO Science Museum in Amsterdam as a symbol of loss of biodiversity and climate crisis. The company itself stated that it wanted to use this unusual way to demonstrate the potential of artificial meat.
Similar experiments with cultured meat – literally grown in laboratories in specialized bioreactors – are not being conducted for the first time. Since scientists have studied the impact of traditional animal husbandry on global warming, the discussion about all of us eventually having to become vegetarians never stops. Or at least radically change the way meat is produced to stop global warming and survive.
In my previous text, I explained how livestock farming in Brazil became one of the main reasons for the destruction of the Amazon rainforest. And in this one, I will tell you what the future of meat could be in the rapidly changing climate conditions on Earth. Shall we start eating meat from the test tube?
NAVIGATION
In the letter, there are more than 24,000 characters, it will take approximately 15 minutes to read.
The text consists of an introduction and four chapters. The introduction discusses how much meat we eat. The first part explains the harm of animal husbandry. The second discusses plant-based alternatives to meat, such as bean patties and pea steaks. The third is dedicated to cultured meat – not only beef and chicken are grown, but also shrimp, lobster, and tuna. And in the fourth, we explore why we still eat traditional meat – and whether this will change in the near future.
Introduction. How much meat do we eat?
A lot.
In 1931, an essay titled “50 Years Hence” was published in the British literary journal Strand Magazine, written by Winston Churchill. During the period between the two World Wars, the future Prime Minister of Great Britain temporarily stepped away from state affairs and devoted himself to literary work. In this essay, he pondered the speed of human progress, the cost of progress, and the fate of civilizations, and also attempted to predict the future. Churchill believed that his readers were just a little time away from new powerful sources of energy and ultra-strong materials; that people were about to learn how to control the earth’s climate and even create new human races.
But Churchill’s essay is remembered not for that – it is believed that it was the first prediction of the invention of artificial meat. “We will be freed from the absurd need to grow a whole chicken to eat the breast or wing, and we will grow these parts separately in a suitable substrate,” he wrote.
Many years have passed since then, but current generations of people still fall short of Churchill’s fantasies. We not only continue to raise animals for food, but also do so more and more actively. Over the past 60 years, global meat production volumes have grown almost fivefold, specifically beef by two and a half times, pork by 4-5 times, and chicken by almost 15 times.
Naturally, consumption is also increasing. On average, a modern person consumes 34 kilograms of meat per year – 20 kilograms more than their ancestor in the 1960s. And in OECD countries, which include almost all of the European Union, as well as the United States, Australia, Turkey, Japan, and several Latin American states, the period from 2019-2021 saw the highest level of meat consumption in history – 69.5 kilograms per person per year. And current figures are not the limit. If projections are to be believed, by 2031, the average person on the planet will consume nearly 36 kilograms of meat per year, with OECD countries seeing their number rise to 72 kilograms.
The richer we become, the more meat we eat: the most significant growth in consumption is recorded in countries that have undergone a sharp economic upswing. For example, in China over the past sixty years, demand for meat has increased by 15 times, in Brazil – by 4 times. The exception was India, where the average meat consumption has remained almost at the same level for decades – less than four kilograms per person – which, of course, can be easily explained by the cultural and religious characteristics of this country.
In short, it doesn’t seem like humanity will be freed from the “need to raise a whole chicken to eat a breast or wing”. On the contrary, in the near future, we will need even more pastures, even more feed for livestock, even more resources for meat production. The problem is that animal husbandry already requires too much – and produces too many emissions.
Part One. What’s Wrong with Livestock Farming – if you put ethics aside
Many figures about the harm caused by the industry.
77% of the world’s agricultural land is allocated to animal husbandry. It is used not only for grazing livestock, but also for growing feed, with feed crops taking up a third of all arable land.
A huge amount of water is used in meat production. The highest water footprint among livestock products is beef; it takes 15,400 liters of water to produce one kilogram of ready-to-sell meat. Pork follows with 6,000 liters, and chicken with 4,300 liters. For comparison, growing one kilogram of tomatoes requires only 214 liters of water, while one kilogram of potatoes requires 287.
Livestock products are among the leaders of another ranking – in terms of greenhouse gas emissions. According to data from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, livestock is responsible for 14.5% of all global emissions. And a large part of the emissions (41%) come from cows bred for milk and meat production.
The most carbon dioxide is generated during the production of a kilogram of beef – 99.5 kilograms of CO₂, followed by lamb (39.7), pork (12.3), and chicken (9.9). To understand how much this is, it can be compared to the indicators of agricultural crops. Thus, the carbon footprint of wheat and rye is 1.57 kilograms of CO₂, peas – 0.98 kilograms, and potatoes – 0.46.
The main greenhouse gas in the livestock sector is methane, accounting for 44% of all emissions. The remaining volume is almost evenly distributed between nitrous oxide (29%) and carbon dioxide (27%). There are four sources of these greenhouse gases. Firstly, cows themselves produce methane during the process of intestinal fermentation – the animals literally burp it out. Secondly, methane and nitrous oxide are formed during the decomposition of manure. Thirdly, greenhouse gases are emitted during the production of feed: forests, which “absorb” carbon dioxide and act as natural reservoirs, are cut down to grow feed. Also, sources of greenhouse gases include fertilizers, field processing with manure and transportation of feed to animal housing facilities. Fourthly, there is also a carbon footprint associated with the energy used at every stage of livestock production.
In general, ruminant animals produce 30% of all anthropogenic emissions of methane, and this is a serious problem. Although there is not much methane in the atmosphere (its share is estimated at 20% of the total volume of emissions), its greenhouse effect is significantly stronger: 82 times higher than that of CO2 in the first 20 years after entering the atmosphere, and if counted for a hundred years, then 30 times higher.
Against this backdrop, a widespread rejection of meat or a significant reduction in its quantity in a person’s diet no longer seems like too radical a response to the climate crisis. Especially in a situation where there are already alternatives to meat.
Part two. How pea and soy patties tried conquere the world
They were not successful.
Arguably, the oldest meat substitutes are soy and tempeh, which began to be used as food in Asian countries thousands of years ago. The prototype of modern substitutes can be considered “Protose” – this product made from soy, peanuts and wheat gluten was promoted in the American market as early as the beginning of the 20th century. They say the taste of “Protose” was so-so, yet it still had its fans. By the early 2000s, the substitute had been discontinued, but you can still find recipes for making “Protose” at home on the internet.
The vegetable “meat” of the new generation has become products from Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods companies. The first was founded by Ethan Brown, a long-time vegan, in 2009. Before becoming a businessman, he worked in the renewable energy industry. He managed to attract investors such as actors Leonardo DiCaprio and Jessica Chastain, McDonald’s, and even the Tyson Foods corporation – the largest meat producer in the USA. And 10 years after its launch, the value of Beyond Meat was estimated at $1.3 billion. The second company – Impossible Foods – was launched by Pat Brown in 2011. No, he and Ethan are not related, just have the same surname. A biochemist from Stanford University and also a vegetarian, Pat Brown’s first goal was to replace beef on the market, and then eliminate pork and chicken.
Both companies wanted to create a product that looks like meat, smells like meat, cooks like meat, and tastes like meat, but is made entirely from plant-based ingredients – so that people who are not ready to give up meat products completely, and there are still many of them, have a worthy alternative. Impossible Foods even developed an ingredient called “heme” – a genetically modified additive that makes the plant-based imitation of meat “bleed” like the real thing.
Businessmen succeeded in the production of Beyond Meat (based on pea protein) and Impossible Foods (soy protein) that really resemble meat – thanks to their special texture and additives. There were also other companies experimenting with meat substitutes not only using peas and soy but also seaweed, mushrooms, rice, and oats. It seemed that against the background of growing concern about climate change in the world, the new generation of plant-based meat would soon dominate the global market.
At first, everything was heading that way. In 2019, Beyond Meat became a public company and had the most successful IPO (the first public offering of a company’s stock) not only that year but also of the decade since the 2008 financial crisis. As part of an experiment, fast food giants such as KFC, McDonald’s and Pizza Hut began collaborating with them and launched meals with Beyond Meat’s plant-based meat in the United States and other countries. Things were also going well for Impossible Foods, whose plant-based meatballs were promoted by famous chefs and sold by the Burger King chain. Giants like Tyson Foods (which invested in Beyond Meat) and Nestle began producing their own alternatives to meat. And in 2020, during the pandemic, sales of Impossible Foods, Beyond Meat, and Gardein, a Canadian plant-based meat producer, soared by 45%.
The triumph was short-lived, as early as 2021 a decline began – sales of both Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods began to decrease. Over the past year, the price of Beyond Meat shares has fallen by almost 80%, and the company has had to cut 20% of its staff. To top it all off, experiments in major restaurant chains ended, and none of them kept Beyond Meat products on the menu: plant-based meat didn’t sell very well. The situation is slightly better for Impossible Foods: the company is launching new products and claims that its business is growing. At the same time, it carried out two rounds of layoffs in 2022, dismissing 6% of its employees in October alone.
In short, while the plant-based meat industry is lagging behind in development, the field of artificial meat is developing well. It is also called “cultivated” because such meat is literally grown from animal cells.
Part three. How to grow beef in a laboratory
And also pork, chicken, tuna, lobster and shrimp.
The world saw its first burger with a patty made from lab-grown cow cells relatively recently, in 2013. Its creator, Dutch researcher Mark Post, called a press conference and invited scientists, representatives from the food industry, and gastronomic critics – chef Richard McGowan from a London restaurant prepared burgers with cultured patties for them. Mark Post spent several years and 250,000 euros on developing the product – the project was financed by Google co-founder Sergey Brin. Event participants noted that the meat resembled traditional meat, but lacked a little juiciness.
Growing lab-grown meat happens like this. First, a sample of stem cells is taken from a donor animal – this procedure, resembling a biopsy, is done under anesthesia, does not harm the animal and does not threaten its life. The obtained cells are multiplied in bioreactors – steel vessels filled with a nutrient medium for growth. This is a kind of broth made of sugars and proteins, the main ingredient of which is embryonic bovine serum from the blood of fetuses obtained from pregnant females (yes, you need to kill a pregnant cow, extract the fetus and extract the serum from it). In such a medium, the donor animal cells begin to multiply and gradually form tissue (see what it looks like), which is then extracted from the bioreactor and given a shape to resemble meat. The process takes several months, and meat from any animal can be grown. Australian company Vow, which created a meatball with mammoth DNA, collects cells from various animals, including zebras, yaks, and kangaroos, in their “library”.
Mark Post’s press conference was a sensation, and meat grown in a test tube was one of the hottest topics of the year. In the next ten years, dozens of startups appeared on the global market that were engaged in meat cultivation. In 2016, Post himself founded the company Mosa Meat to continue his research: optimize the process, reduce costs, and make the product competitive. Other entrepreneurs have taken on the same tasks.
So, the Israeli company Aleph Farms, launched in 2017, presented the world’s first cultivated ribeye steak created using 3D printing in February 2021. Leonardo DiCaprio invested in this company, just like in Beyond Meat (and he also gave money to Post for the development of Mosa Meat). Another company from Israel, MeaTech (later renamed Steakholder Foods), created in 2019, experimented with chicken cells and in 2021 prepared the “largest steak grown in a laboratory”, weighing 110 grams. Another Israeli company, SuperMeat, has already launched its own production of cultivated chicken in Tel Aviv. But for now, it’s mostly in a testing phase – their products are not yet available in supermarkets, but you can try them at tastings held at the restaurant on the premises.
One of the most successful companies became the American company Memphis Meats (now called UPSIDE Foods), founded a year before Mosa Meat. In 2016, they created the first meatball from cultivated beef, introduced the first chicken and duck “grown in a lab” the following year, and in 2021, they launched production of cultivated meat in the USA. It still cannot be purchased in stores, but in 2022, UPSIDE Foods became the first among companies of this kind to receive approval from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) – this means that the product is recognized as safe for consumption. In addition, they became a “unicorn” – valued at over a billion dollars. The company is funded by Tyson Foods.
In March 2023, another American company producing cultured meat, GOOD Meat, received FDA approval. In Singapore, this startup has been selling its products since 2020 with the permission of local regulatory authorities.
In labs, not only meat, but also seafood is grown. In 2018, Dr. Sandhya Sriram, who was studying stem cells and had been a vegetarian her whole life, founded the Shiok Meats startup in Singapore. Recently, the company introduced cultivated shrimp, lobsters, and crabs. Now, Shiok Meats needs to obtain regulatory approval, but by the end of 2023, the startup plans to increase production capacity and begin supplying products to restaurants by mid-2024. In turn, the American company Finless Foods is growing bluefin tuna in the laboratory, which is at risk of extinction due to excessive fishing.
Since the world saw the first burger with a test-tube patty, investors have poured more than seven billion dollars into alternative proteins, of which around 900 million has gone into cultured meat. Creators of plant-based “blood” burgers and lab-grown steaks had grand plans to capture the market within five to ten years. Yet, to this day, traditional meat still out-sells plant-based alternatives, and lab-grown steaks remain something out of science fiction for the average consumer. What’s wrong with the alternatives, then?
Part Four. Why do we still prefer conventional meat
Alternatives are not very tasty, expensive, and not entirely ethical.
The criticisms of both alternatives to traditional meat – plant-based and cultured – are very similar, and in some places they almost completely overlap.
Taste. No matter how hard the creators of plant-based meat try to recreate the taste and texture of a beef patty, the consumer still feels a difference. According to Steffen Jan, a marketing professor at Oregon University studying consumer food choices, any imitation makes us compare it to the original. And no matter how hard plant-based meat producers try to bring their product closer to traditional meat, they are still forced to emphasize that it is an imitation, which discourages many consumers.
With cultivated meat there is another problem. In laboratories, only muscle tissue is grown from stem cells, whereas regular meat contains connective and fatty tissue, which give it a familiar texture and make it juicy and aromatic. In this sense, the technology for producing cultivated meat still needs to be further developed – but producers are already working on it. For example, Mosa Meat has learned how to grow fat similar to regular animal fat.
Price. One of the main problems with cultivated meat is its cost. On average, it is twice as expensive as beef, four times as expensive as chicken, and three times as expensive as pork, making it inaccessible to a significant portion of buyers. This is despite the fact that the cost of cultivated meat has noticeably decreased since the first burger with a lab-grown patty was priced at a quarter of a million euros. By 2019, the cost of production had been reduced by thousands of times, but a hamburger with an artificial patty is still more expensive than its counterpart from the supermarket.
Cell-based meat production technologies are constantly improving, but it is difficult to say when they will be able to compete in terms of cost with traditional meat. The main costs are for bioreactors, nutrient medium, and employee wages – all of which make up more than 80% of the cost of cultivated meat. It will take years of research, investment, and innovation for cultured meat to become as affordable as regular meat – let alone replace it.
Impact on health. Plant-based meat producers insist that their product is beneficial to health. However, even vegetarian sausages and cutlets are heavily processed products that are considered more calorie-dense and can cause overeating and weight gain. Some researchers even associate excessive consumption of ultra-processed foods with the risk of dementia, diabetes, and premature death. Nevertheless, the statement that all processed products are harmful is too loud since there are many such products, they are all different, and a wide range of ingredients are used in them. Thus, it is difficult to make unambiguous conclusions based on studies on the benefits or dangers of plant-based meat products. Moreover, soy is one of the best plant-based proteins in terms of digestibility.
Consumers (as well as regulatory authorities) are also wary of meat grown in a test tube – seeing it as something artificial, and therefore suspicious. The fact is that growth hormones are used in its creation – as in order to obtain in a laboratory something that an animal produces in several years, cell growth must be actively stimulated. Hormonal drugs are also used in traditional animal husbandry – although not everywhere and with restrictions. In the United States, for example, they are prohibited (unlike Russia), and in EU countries, certain steroid hormones are outlawed.
However, studies do not confirm the hypothesis that meat from animals that received steroid hormones leads to earlier sexual maturity in humans and negatively affects health. However, it remains to be seen whether this applies to meat grown in a lab.
Impact on climate. Even the most strict climate activists are unlikely to oppose plant-based meat: greenhouse gas emissions during its production are up to 40-90% lower than traditional meat. Cultivated meat is more complex, but it also has many “climate” advantages. Its production requires 7-45% less energy, greenhouse gas emissions are reduced by 78-96%, land use is reduced by 99%, and water consumption is reduced by 82-96% (the large range in numbers for each indicator is due to the fact that there are different products and technologies).
However, even here everything is ambiguous. Researchers from the Martin School at the University of Oxford have come to the conclusion that in the long term, meat production may be even more harmful to the planet than traditional livestock farming. Scientists built a climate model taking into account the fact that three greenhouse gases – carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrogen oxides – behave differently. Animals produce a lot of methane, but it remains in the atmosphere for not as long as carbon dioxide. And laboratories that grow meat emit CO₂.
At the same time, the authors of the study emphasize that their work is based on a large assumption. They took a huge time frame of a thousand years and assumed that during this time meat would be grown in laboratories using fossil fuel energy. If we hope that in the future bioreactors will be connected to renewable sources – say, wind or solar – then the production of cultivated meat will immediately become much cleaner.
Ethics. Animal rights activists have no claims about the ethics of plant-based meat – as is clear from the name, it is made exclusively from ingredients of plant origin. However, there are nuances with “lab-grown” meat.
The point is that the nutrient medium for growing cells in bioreactors, as mentioned above, includes embryonic bovine serum – that is, supposedly ethical meat is grown from decidedly unethical raw materials. The good news is that there is an alternative: Mosa Meat itself is already creating its own animal-free nutrient media. It is likely that the future lies with such raw materials: according to a study from 2022, embryonic bovine serum is too expensive, so in the future, manufacturers will probably abandon it.
However, among opponents of meat, there are those who believe that any meat, even cultured from ethical raw materials, is unethical by definition. The essence of their arguments boils down to the fact that red meat is harmful in any case (and this is true – read about the rules of healthy eating here, here and here), and any meat substitutes only reinforce people’s belief that they cannot simply give up meat. Moreover, they remind us that even cultured meat grown in a plant-based nutrient medium is created from animal stem cells – and this is exploitation of a being, albeit in a “soft” form. In short, supporters of this idea believe that instead of spending so much effort and money trying to create ethical meat, we need to stop eating meat once and for all.
The meat industry clearly needs a revolution, and cultured meat appears to be the most promising revolutionary technology. There are many advantages to the technology: meat grown in a lab requires less land and water than traditional meat, and the freed-up resources can be directed to the production of plant-based food to feed humanity. This is very welcome, since according to forecasts, the world’s population will increase by two billion people to 10 billion by 2050. We will all need food, but the planet’s capabilities are limited – we cannot endlessly cut down forests to create pastures.
A person switched from vegetarianism to meat-eating approximately 2.3 million years ago. In his book “Close Encounters with Distant Ancestors: How Our Species Evolved,” American anthropologist Sang-Hee Lee suggests that the change in our ancestors’ diet may have been related to a radical change in living conditions. Africa became dry, forest areas shrank, and the spread of grasslands increased competition for plant-based food.
It seems that after millions of years, humans will have to rethink their diet again.
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