Your dinner’s in the lab – how we’ll eat in future

‘Right now, growing cells as meat instead of animals is a very expensive process,’’ says Yaakov Nahmias, founder and chief scientist of Israel-based startup Future Meat Technologies. But it will get cheaper, and it probably will be needed.

The global population is heading for 10 billion by 2050, from the current 7.7b. Average global incomes will triple in the same period, enabling more people to eat meat-rich diets.

‘‘We need a significant overhaul, changing the global food system on a scale not seen before,’’ says Professor Tim Lang of the University of London, one of the 37 scientific co-authors from 16 countries who wrote a report by the EAT-Lancet Commission on Food, Planet and Health that launched in Jakarta last Friday. But we’ve heard it all before.

It takes seven kilograms of grain to grow 1kg of beef. Seventy per cent 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’ll need the rest by 2050. The world’s stocks of seafood will have collapsed by 2050. It’s all true, but we’re sick of being nagged.

And still they bang on. The EAT-Lancet Commission even has a diet that will save the planet. Cut your beef consumption by 90 per cent (ie 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’s all true too – but I don’t think it’s going to happen.

Or at least, it’s not going to happen by everybody turning vegan, vegetarian, or just ‘‘flexitarian’’. No doubt there will, in due course, be high taxes on meat and fish, and propaganda campaigns to persuade people to change their eating habits, and some people will change.

Some people already have: the Vegan Society in Britain claims that the number of vegans there has quadrupled in the past four years. But not enough people will switch to a plant-based diet soon enough, or maybe ever. 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 meat-eaters 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 didn’t come from cattle, pigs, sheep and chickens, but tastes right, feels right in the mouth, and doesn’t trash the environment.

We’re not talking about the famous $325,000 hamburger patty made from beef cells immersed in a growth medium, which was triumphantly cooked on television six years ago. We’re 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 live animals. That is Yaakov Nahmias’ goal, and he’s pretty close now.

Future Meat Technologies produces its ‘‘cellbased meat’’ in bioreactors, growing it on lattices that give it shape and texture, but we’re not talking about giant vats in a lab. He plans to give small units to existing 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 $5 a kilogram [$2.27 a pound],’’ Nahmias says. Meat giant Tyson Foods recently put $2.2 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.

Technology alone can’t save us, but it can certainly shift the odds in our favour.

How big a threat is this ‘‘cell-based meat’’ to the traditional cattle industry? Big enough that the US Cattlemen’s Association has petitioned the government to restrict the words ‘‘meat’’ and ‘‘beef’’ to products ‘‘derived directly from animals raised and slaughtered’’. A tricky definition, since it would mean that wild deer are not made of meat, but the ranchers are clearly running scared.

Coming up behind cell-based meat, there’s the even newer concept from Solar Foods, a Finnish company using electricity from solar panels to electrolyse water and produce hydrogen. The hydrogen is fed to bacteria, producing 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 at all. No greenhouse gas emissions either, and the first factory producing it opens in two years’ time. Technology alone can’t save us, but it can certainly shift the odds in our favour.