FUTURE PROOF

I can’t believe it’s not beef! It is, says Shannon Harley, just not as you know it.

WE FEED ANIMALS so they can feed us, but the cow (followed by the pig, then the chicken) is pretty inefficient when it comes to converting plants to protein. That’s due to the environmental toll of intensive farming – studies show 70 per cent of arable land is used to raise meat, requiring 15,000 litres of water for every 1kg of beef, and creating more greenhouse gasses than the entire transport industry.

The omnivore’s dilemma is figuring out sustainable production. You can put down your steak knives; this is not a call for mass vegetarianism. While there has been an explosion of plant-based ‘meat’ – from the Impossible Burger that has been taken up by US fast food chains to Beyond Meat’s ‘bleeding’ vegan burger – cultured or in vitro meat grown in petri dishes from real animal tissue may be the future.

The concept of cultured meat certainly challenges what we consider ‘natural’, but a burger grown in the lab from bovine stem cells has better provenance than a supermarket hotdog. A single muscle cell harvested from the cow can grow 10,000kg of beef, according to Dutch scientist Professor Mark Post, who leads global research. He says we can go one step further to boost nutrition in Big Macs by altering the fatty acid composition to increase beneficial omega-3 fats.

The UN reports world population will reach 9.8 billion by 2050, and with the story of human evolution tied to meat, demand will double. Richard Wrangham, author of Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, captures our predicament that puts cellular agriculture on the horizon: “We are a species designed to love meat, but by some horrendous irony, it has become part of a system that threatens our species.”