How 150 cows could feed the world
Around the world food laboratories are working hard to produce a protein that consumers are happy to use as a meat or fish replacement. The financial reward is huge with the theory being that just ‘one cell sample can create up to 10,000kg of cultured mea
Sage and Marjoram Sausages, the packaging proudly declared, beneath a picture of crispy-skinned bangers on a bed of sautéed onions.
My mouth started watering. Quarter of an hour later, an almost familiar aroma filling the kitchen, I pulled the baking tray from the oven. There they lay. True, they were not glistening with molten fat in that familiar, tempting way. They did not quite manage to be crispy on the outside, tender within. But when I popped that first slice into my mouth, I was surprised. These meat-free sausages were surprisingly meaty.
Yet no animal was harmed, as the old cinematic phrase goes, in the making of this sausage. The stunt doubles were wheat and soya protein, stepping in to save the pig’s bacon. It wasn’t bad. With a bit of ketchup, there were moments I forgot I wasn’t chewing the real thing. All apart from that skin, a somehow papery casing that never approximated the true experience.
As I cleared away, my little taste test had demonstrated both the improvement of plantbased meat — and how hard it is to fool the senses. Yet the latter is precisely what a breed of new producers are trying to do — make or emulate meat in a way that looks, smells, and tastes as good as the animal flesh we are used to.
If they succeed, the norms of global food supply, of raising billions of animals for slaughter, could become a thing of the past. Industrial abattoirs might disappear, and meat as we know it become a rare luxury, a treat to splash out on, like a great bottle of wine.
“A different type of product, a more expensive product and more high quality product,” as Prof Sir Charles Godfray, director of the future of food programme at Oxford University’s Martin School, puts it.
It’s a vastly complex business. We all know how texture alone (“mouth-feel” in the new-meat jargon) can arouse passions on the plate — just ask those who love, or hate, baked beans.
Some companies, like VBites, which turns out everything from meat-free nuggets to roasts (to my test sausages) from its factory in Corby, Northants in the UK, use plant-based substitutes.
Others want us to switch to insect protein. And then there is the “clean meat” brigade — the firms growing pork or beef or fish muscle cells in labs.
Each technique faces challenges in technology, taste and in overcoming scepticism from consumers who are rarely more demanding than about products they cook and put in their mouths.
The shadow of GM foods — many of which have been passed as safe, yet continue to be resisted by consumers — looms large. Even so, a vast global race is on to find a new way of satisfying our ever-growing appetite for meat.
It is a race that, analysts say, will not only create huge financial winners and losers (a new book on the subject is entitled Billion Dollar Burger).
It will also determine the fate of those animals we rear in industrial quantities to slaughter, and have a significant impact on our species too.
There are tentative signs that change is already under way. Witness the rise in “flexitarianism” among consumers aware that traditional meat not only has an ethical, animal welfare dimension, but a significant environmental impact, too.
Mintel research shows many consumers see reducing consumption of animal products as a way to lessen human impact on the environment. They are also turning away from meat to save money and because they think it’s healthier. The effects are palpable: almost a quarter of all UK food products launched in 2019 were labelled as vegan.
The number worldwide reducing their meat consumption, however, is dwarfed by the total increasing theirs. Today, around 320 million tons of meat is consumed, up from 268 million tons a decade ago. And the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations estimates that demand for meat will increase by 45 percent again by 2050, to 464 million tons.
Global per capita consumption has risen from 23kg in 1969 to 32kg in 2019. But it has above all been this year, 2020, that the price of our taste for flesh has been laid bare — by a global pandemic which, like the nearcatastrophes of Sars and Mers before it, seems to have crossed the species barrier at a food market where human and animal exist cheek-by-jowl.
That is not all. In the months since, efforts to corral Covid-19 have repeatedly been upset by outbreaks in meat processing plants. One of the biggest occurred in South Dakota in the US. On a normal day it is one of America’s biggest, slicing and dicing almost 20,000 pig carcasses.
But towards the end of March it became notorious instead as a fever factory, when hundreds of its 3,700 workers fell sick. More than 600 cases were eventually linked to the factory, an outbreak echoed again and again on crowded, noisy, physically demanding meat-packing lines around the world, including several in Britain.
Such has been the impact of Covid-19 that by the end of April, John Tyson, the chairman of Tyson Foods, the biggest US meat firm, remarked: “The food supply chain is breaking.”
Our passion for meat — the way we rear it, transport it, sell it, butcher it — has long been considered a vector for disease. As Valentina Rizzi, at the European Food Safety Authority, put it: “The majority of emerging new infections in humans in the last 10 years really come from animals or food of animal origin.”
No wonder there’s a growing band of entrepreneurs who argue that if we want to keep on eating meat, from fish to foie gras, we have to find another way of producing it.
Meat is not only delicious, it is an excellent source of protein and dietary essentials like zinc, iron and vitamin B12. Above all, it offers an abundance of energy
— energy to fuel our large, power-hungry brains. Our small-brained, nut, fruit and plant-eating ancestors devoted resources instead to a large gut and long digestion. Meat provided a shortcut to that lengthy process, allowing the gut to shrink and the brain to grow. Is it too much to say eating meat made mankind the uniquely capable species it is today?
Of course, meat has its downsides too. Consumption of processed meat has been linked to colorectal cancer, with the World Health Organisation estimating that 34,000 deaths per year worldwide are attributable to diets high in processed meat.
Calorie for calorie, meat production, the world’s most important source of methane, creates more emissions than plantbased foods. A third of all the freshwater we use for agriculture (itself the most thirsty business on the planet) is used for livestock; indeed 46 percent of the world’s harvest is used for livestock feed, more than the 37 percent we eat ourselves.
Meanwhile, the use of antibiotics as animal medicines and growth promoters helps bugs develop drug resistance. And who among us has not seen tear-jerking footage of rainforest ripped down to create grazing land, or converted to arable to produce grain or soy feed for livestock?
In the seas too, demand has risen, with production of fish and seafood almost quadrupling from 43 million tons to 154 million tons in the 50 years to 2013.
With that rising demand, the percentage of fish stocks that are overexploited has risen from 10 percent in 1974 to 33 percent in 2015.
The rise in global demand is driven, says Carrie Chan, the founder of Avant Meats, by Asian consumers. “China alone consumes more than 35 percent of global seafood and fish,” she says. “Asia accounts for about 66 percent.”
That demand is why Hong Kong’s Avant, among China’s first lab-grown meat firms, has chosen to focus on producing not pork or beef, but fish. The very phrase “lab-grown” has, inevitably, attracted the term “Frankenmeat”. But this is not about making the dead live. Rather it is about the altogether more prosaic process of multiplying tiny samples of meat cells until there are enough of them to eat. If anything it is antiseptic, not creepy.
At Avant, as at all cultured-meat companies, the basic concept is simple: a sample of cells is taken from a live animal (a process that doesn’t harm bigger animals but does kill fish). This sample is nurtured with growth serum until great quantities of meat cells are eventually produced in large drums called “bioreactors”.
In theory, says Becky Calder-Flynn, of Mosa Meat, which cultivates beef, “one cell sample can create up to 10,000kg of cultured meat”.
Mosa, whose founders Mark Post and Peter Verstrate famously unveiled the first cultured beef burger in 2013, estimates that such ratios mean “we would only need 150 cows to satisfy the world’s current meat demand”.
Back in Hong Kong, Avant has two pilot products. One is yellow croaker, a fish which, to the untutored eye, looks entirely unremarkable. To the aficionado, however, croaker is a delicacy, renowned for its swim bladder, or maw, which is turned into soup so prized that the maw can cost hundreds of dollars a kilo. That expense is an advantage for Avant, because its main problem, like that of all cultured-meat producers, is relative cost.
When Post and Verstrate unveiled their burger in 2013, it cost $325,000 (about R5m). Manufacturing improvements have driven such figures down, but still, not so far that cultured meat is anything like competitive on price.
“It can cost $2-3,000 (R33,000 to R50,0000 per kg,” says Chan. Just Inc’s cultured chicken nuggets cost 50 bucks (R833) a piece.
Avant’s second product is grouper, “which is very popular in this part of the world,” she says. “Very firm, textured white flesh.”
It is this that highlights the other significant difficulty for cultured meat — turning an amorphous mass of meat cells from the bioreactor into something that resembles a steak, or a fish fillet.
It is a fiddly process that usually requires a “scaffold” to shape the tissue cells. The problem is removing that scaffold without destroying the product. At the moment, Avant can produce homogeneous textured meat, a bit like calamari. Its first fillet prototype, says Chan, is coming at the end of this year. Price parity, she hopes, a year after that.
Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. This is a business, it can sometimes seem, where revolutionary product launches are forever just around the corner.
“I invested in Memphis Meats about six years ago and the plan was to launch in five years,” says Niccolo Manzoni, managing partner of Five Seasons Venture Capitalists.
“And of course they’re probably still five years away.”
But Manzoni is not worried. “It’s easy to get it wrong by a decade, this kind of technology, simply because it’s really game changing.”
It’s not just pioneering a manufacturing process at scale to bring down costs and get the right texture that needs to be mastered, he suggests; an entirely new regulatory system needs to be put in place. Then there’s the final, and most important hurdle: us.
“Most importantly you have to convince consumers that it is all right to buy and eat something that comes from a Petri dish as opposed to an animal.”
Yet there is no reason, its advocates say, why meat from cattle raised in intensive barns is seen as “natural” and labgrown meat “unnatural”.
It is all farming, says, Iñigo Charola, the CEO of Spain’s Biotech Foods, which produces cultured pork “Mankind has been doing agriculture for thousands of years, and this is what we are doing here. We are doing cellular agriculture, no more and no less. The process is as natural as any other we use nowadays.”
In the UK alone, more than 300,000 people work in the livestock industry. “Even in middleand high-income countries, a vast number of people do owe their livelihoods to rearing meat,” says Sir Charles.
“We need a narrative so that those people who would feel threatened by simplistic arguments about ‘we must eat less meat’, can maintain viable livelihoods. One could find different uses for that land, or think of meat as a more expensive, more high quality product.”
A report last year suggested the tipping point — when cultured and plant-based meats overtake conventional meat supply — will have arrived by 2040.
Already, the flourishing number of firms involved, and the sums invested in them, suggest such products are moving to the mainstream. Last year, US Burger Kings debuted the “Impossible” Whopper, which testified to the mainstream acceptance of plant-based products, as did plant burgers by JBS, the world’s largest meat producer, and Nestlé.
The industry has come a long way since the Eighties’ plantbased horrors. But of course, innumerable missteps — scandals, health hazards, or sheer technical difficulties — could intervene to interrupt the rise of new meats.
Among the many voices — in academia, analytics, investment or the industry itself — that I spoke to, opinion differed about when the breakthrough would come for cultured meat.
Most suggested a five- to 10year horizon for products appearing on the market and gaining acceptance. Most also cautioned against promises in the next couple of years. But all were confident that the displacement of traditional meat and its farming processes was a matter of when, not if.
I tended to conclude my interviews by asking if, as a 45 year-old, I should be lucky enough to live another 45 years, would abattoirs still be standard? All agreed they would have largely or completely disappeared.
If that comes to pass, 2020 may come to be seen as a tipping point all of its own — a point where the risk of transmission of deadly, novel diseases from animal to man became abundantly, tragically clear; and where the appeal of meats grown in sterile laboratories began to take off.
“Today, people understand animal-human contamination much better,” says Charola. “Before it was a horror movie, some kind of science fiction. Now it is real.”
The stunt doubles were wheat and soya, stepping in to save the pig’s bacon ... With a bit of ketchup, there were moments I forgot I wasn’t chewing the real thing
Mankind has been doing agriculture for thousands of years ... We are doing cellular agriculture, no more and no less. The process is as natural as any other