Cellular agriculture grows protein

The concept of cultured meat — sometimes called “in vitro meat” or “clean meat” by its proponents — still has the capacity to shock: slabs of meat manufactured by culturing animal cells in a factory setting, a process sometimes referred to as “cellular agriculture.”

Its proponents love to point out how inefficient it is to raise animals for meat. “There are so many things that animals do that we don’t need them to do in order for them to be food for us,” says Michael Selden of Finless Foods, a new company trying to replicate fish filets. Eyeballs: What are they good for? Fish guts: potentially toxic. The energy required to grow feed for cattle and raise them until slaughter has been estimated at 25 calories expended per 1 calorie of energy contained in beef.

For years, scientists in medical circles have been working on generating human organs from stem cells. Using the same principles to create meat belonged to the realms of disquieting science fiction and academic journals — until August 2013, when scientists from the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands, led by Mark Post and funded by Google co-founder Sergey Brin, conducted a public tasting of a hamburger cultured out of muscle stem cells. “Close to meat, but not that juicy” was one taster’s judgment. No story was complete without reporting the experiment’s price tag: $325,000.

Four years later, the field is no longer improbable, merely nascent. Mark Post’s lab continues to refine its processes, and claims to have brought the price down to $11 a burger. In Israel, Super Meat recently raised $230,000 through Indie Gogo to culture chicken. Michael Selden’s team just began work on bluefin tuna at a biotech accelerator in San Francisco.

The best-known and most technically advanced player in the field of cultured meat is Memphis Meats, a 2-year-old company working out of San Leandro.

In January 2016, it debuted its beef meatball, produced without killing a cow; in March 2017, Memphis Meats held a tasting of cultured duck (à l’orange) and cultured chicken (fried).

Culturing animal flesh isn’t as simple as extracting a few muscle cells from a mooing cow and then sticking them in a petri dish. You have to find muscle, fat and connective tissue cells that grow ad infinitum. “The challenges are finding the cells that are the highest quality in terms of nutrition, protein content, fat content, taste and texture,” says Memphis Meats co-founder Uma Valeti.

The reason it took Memphis Meats a year to graduate from beef to poultry was twofold: “The way the cells grow and the way we cultivate and harvest them is different for each species,” Valeti says. “"A major breakthrough in texture for us was developing a cultivation process that allows us to harvest bulkier strips of chicken and duck. This opens up opportunities to develop thicker cuts of meat like steaks."

Another recent development: finding a nutrient solution to “feed” the cells in vitro. To date, scientists have relied on fetal bovine serum, extracted from slaughtered animals, which is both expensive and paradoxical. Valeti says that Memphis Meats has developed a kill-free feed, and must now identify the cell lines that will thrive on it and taste good when harvested.

The goal for all these companies is finding processes that can scale up, and affordably. “Take the human genome,” says Paul Shapiro, author of the forthcoming book “Clean Meat.” “First mapping it cost billions of dollars. Now we can send a vial to 23 and Me for a couple hundred bucks. These types of biotechnologies have a way of becoming rapidly more affordable.”

Memphis Meats’ goal is to be on the market in five years, although in that short time frame the meat will probably cost the same as premium steaks. That’s as modest as his projections get. “In the next 10 to 20 years we want to have Memphis Meats be accessible to 7 billion people across the world,” he says, “so they can still have the delicious meat that their cultures support but eat meat with their eyes wide open, not worrying about where it came from.”

“The challenges are finding the cells that are the highest quality in terms of nutrition, protein content, fat content, taste and texture.” Uma Valeti, Memphis Meats co-founder