The rise of the lab butcher
For thousands of years, humans have had to kill animals to eat meat. This is no longer the case, at least not in Singapore.
Cultured meat is legal in the city state. Singapore’s Food Agency has approved chicken nuggets from a San Francisco company called Eat Just, known for its cultured meat. This is a world’s first, according to the agency.
Experts in food science, toxicology, nutrition, epidemiology and other fields have deemed the product safe for human consumption. After farms and factories, laboratories are making meat. Indeed, synthetic agriculture appears to be the new frontier in food.
The cell-cultured chicken will be licensed to a local manufacturer and sold under the GOOD Meat brand. Most products will be sold to restaurants.
No animals are killed to make the product. The process begins with cell isolation, where cells are sourced from a live animal. Cultured cells are then transferred into a bioreactor. Like in a mixer, a combination of proteins, amino acids, minerals, sugars, salts and other nutrients are added, then harvested after they achieve enough density.
The process can allow anyone to design the perfect meat product. Why not produce iron-rich chicken, or pork with all the vitamins you need? Anything is possible.
The timing is no coincidence, and the reasons driving this technology are numerous. Considering what has happened in abattoirs during the first wave of the pandemic, with plant closures, vulnerabilities and disruptions in the supply chain, it seems these problems can potentially be avoided with lab-produced meat alternatives.
This is particularly interesting for the cattle and hog sectors, which are still dealing with overwhelming backlogs caused by plant closures in the spring and summer. Quebec producers have had to sell over 95,000 hogs to the United States in recent weeks to ease some inventory pressures.
Food safety and the recalls in livestock could be prevented, as well. The largest recall in Canadian history was XL Foods in 2012, when millions of kilos of possibly contaminated meat were dumped. The Maple Leaf listeria outbreak killed 22 Canadians who had eaten cold cuts that had come from an ill-maintained slicing machine. From a food safety and supply chain perspective, meat processing presents several risks.
But cultured meat is still a relatively new concept. How to evaluate risks from a food product entirely manufactured in a synthetic environment can bring a significant number of regulatory obstacles. Whether these products need to be labelled is also up for debate.
Canada has yet to consider any of these products, but the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has. Support by powerful lobby groups could be overwhelming in the United States, making the likelihood of legalizing cultured meat high. Once approved there, it would be just a question of time for approval in Canada.
With the race for approval of COVID vaccines, cultured meat approval may be delayed, but it may still very well happen within the next two to three years.
Strangely enough, food these days appears to be going in two directions. On the one hand, the effort to promote local and natural foods is stronger than ever amid the pandemic. People want to eat local, and to celebrate and cook real food. But an influx of new investors with different ideas in the agrifood space has set the sector on a very different path, with different values.
In recent years, some are trying to reshape our food systems by addressing some of the inherent flaws. The meat industry has attracted criticism for its impact on climate change. Animal-rights activists are increasingly pointing to issues related to animal production and the ethical treatment of livestock. The bucolic and authentic yearnings of agriculture are also clashing with urban-centric views of how agriculture should be perfectly flawless.
In a recent survey, barely 22 per cent of Canadians would be willing to try cultured meat. In Canada, though, most of us were raised with the idea that supplies of meat were endless. In countries like Singapore, where food sovereignty is a work in progress, cultured meat is a serious issue.
It wants to produce 30 per cent of its consumed meat domestically, and labs will provide the farms it needs to do this.
With these technologies, we could perhaps dream of supplying developing countries with affordable sources of animal proteins. Similar promises were made with genetic engineering many years ago, yet we are still waiting for results.
Once all risks are fully assessed, the case for lab-grown meat is undeniably strong. So, if our livestock farmers were threatened by the plant-based revolution, they have not seen anything yet.