Stakes high in future of food
‘‘RIGHT now, growing cells as meat instead of animals is a very expensive process,’’ Yaakov Nahmias, founder and chief scientist of Israelbased startup Future Meat Technologies, said. But it will get cheaper, and it probably will be needed.
Global population is heading for 10 billion by 2050. (It is now 7.7 billion.) Average global incomes will triple in the same period, enabling more people to eat meatrich diets.
‘‘We need a significant overhaul, changing the global food system on a scale not seen before,’’ says Prof Tim Lang, of the University of London.
He is one of the 37 scientific coauthors from 16 countries who wrote the report by the EATLancet Commission on Food, Planet and Health that launched in Jakarta last Friday. But we’ve heard it all before.
It takes 7kg of grain to grow 1kg of beef. Seventy percent of the world’s fresh water is used to irrigate crops. We have appropriated threequarters of the world’s fertile land for food production, and we will need the rest by 2050. The world’s stocks of seafood will have collapsed by 2050. It is all true, but we are sick of being nagged.
And still they bang on. The EATLancet Commission even has a diet that will save the planet. Cut your beef consumption by 90% (i.e. one steak a month). Eat more beans and pulses (three times more) and more nuts and seeds (four times more). Going vegetarian or vegan will help even more. That is all true, too – but I do not think it is going to happen.
No doubt there will in due course be high taxes on meat and fish, and official propaganda campaigns to persuade people to change their eating habits, and some will change.
Some people already have: the Vegan Society in Britain claims that the number of vegans in the country has quadrupled in the last four years. But not enough people will switch to a plantbased diet. We need to bring the rest of the population along, and few things are more persistent than cultural dietary preferences. Like eating meat.
The most enthusiastic meateaters are in the richer countries, and as other countries join their club (like China), they start eating more meat, too. So clearly there would be a huge market for real meat that did not come from cattle, pigs, sheep and chickens, but tastes right, feels right in the mouth, and does not trash the environment.
We are not talking about the famous $US325,000 [$NZ480,000] hamburger patty made from beef cells immersed in a growth medium that was triumphantly cooked on television six years ago.
We are talking about a proper steak with muscle and fat cells and the right shape, taste and texture – but not one produced by the familiar process that uses huge amounts of fertile land, releases large amounts of greenhouse gases, and involves slaughtering animals. That is Yaakov Nahmias’s goal, and he is pretty close now.
Future Meat Technologies produces its ‘‘cellbased meat’’ in bioreactors, growing it on lattices that give it shape and texture. He plans to give small units to farmers, who might still be rearing some beef cattle, too, for the luxury end of the market.
‘‘With these two plays — a more efficient bioreactor and a distributed manufacturing model — we can essentially drop the cost down to about $US5 a kilogram,’’ Nahmias said.
Meat giant Tyson Foods recently put $US2.2 million of seed money into his company, and a dozen other startups are chasing the same goal: Memphis Meat, JUST, Finless Foods, Meatable — a total of 30 labs around the world.
Coming up behind cellbased meat there is the even newer concept of ‘‘solar foods’’: a Finnish company called just that is using electricity from solar panels to electrolyse water and produce hydrogen. The hydrogen is fed to bacteria, and the product is an edible food that is half carbohydrates, half fats and protein.
It is just as good as soya as an animal food, and it uses no land. No greenhouse gas emissions either, and the first factory producing it opens in two years’ time. Technology alone cannot save us, but it can certainly shift the odds in our favour.