Culture confusion:

Lab-grown home cooking?

Thanksgiving includes the star of the show: A turkey. But lately, their close cousin, the chicken, has taken to center stage of the news.

Chickens were unfortunately famous earlier this year because of the bird flu that swept through chicken barns, killing over 47 million birds either directly or through culling. Migratory birds brought the disease with them and as they came into contact with domestic chickens, passed it on.

That sounds horrible, right?

Let’s do a 180 and talk about the most sterile environment you can possibly imagine. Are you picturing a lab, with people in white coats holding petri dishes?

That’s where it starts to get confusing. Yes, labs have very good techniques to keep their work free of contaminants (called aseptic technique, or more intensively, sterile technique).

However, there are issues with growing cultures.

Cells and cultures grown in a petri dish are susceptible to invasions by fungi, bacteria, viruses, chemicals, and environmental changesfor instance, if the temperature fluctuates too much on the incubator they are placed in, the culture could weaken and die.

Now how about the last place you might think of as sterile: Namely, inside an ani

mal.

Meat or muscle in an animal is sterile. Yes, really!

Animals have immune systems that quickly immobilize and remove the threat of bacterial and viral invasions. In the case that the body is overrun by an invasion, the animal dies. But it takes a lot for that. In contrast, it doesn't take much of an invasion for a culture to die because it has no immune system: It’s just a bunch of cells that has no higher organization.

Like animals, cultures can be treated with antibiotics and fungicides in attempts to remove the problem- but cultured meats don’t have organ systems and their abilities to filter such treatments out.

This could be a major problem with cellcultured meat. The tight timeline Upside Foods put for themselves (a mere 3 weeks!) from initial culture to ‘meat’ ready for the table has no room for error, no withdrawal time possible.

Animals treated with antibiotics cannot be butchered and consumed until the withdrawal time is up, which depends on the product used. Draxxin, an antibiotic used in the beef industry, has a withdrawal time of 18 days. That’s over half a month- and nearly twice Upside Foods’ threeweek deadline from start to finish.

Upside Foods claims that their product is produced in a clean, contamination-free facility. But that’s just not possible. With so many steps and handling on the growth of a culture, including quality control checks, it is not possible to remain contamination-free, especially not in an entire facility. If a worker coughs, sneezes, or even breathes in the facility and near an open incubator… it’s no longer contamination-free. Lab devices like hoods and lab gear can only prevent so much in our decidely un-sterile environment. While a lab might look a lot more sterile than a barn, remember that animals are made to live on Earth, which is chock-full of bacteria, viruses, fungi, and parasites. And that’s healthy! Cultures do not have any of the advantages that a live animal does in fighting off diseases.

Upside’s claim of ‘no animal-borne diseases’ is correct- no disease that their cultures come down with will be animal-borne because there is no animal. The diseases they’re campaigning against are actually found in the processing and consuming steps: Processing the animal into meat introduces bacteria, storage of the meat can allow bacteria to grow, and defrosting meat unsafely or cooking it for too short a time can harbor bacteria. But their product also has all those steps- and all the possibilities for contamination.

The company newly rechristened ‘Upside Foods’ (formerly Memphis Meats) has gotten the go-ahead from the FDA in a ‘No Questions letter.' Pending approval from the USDA, Upside Foods can start selling their product to consumers.

But what is their product exactly?

Let’s dig in, in the name of full disclosure.

Upside Foods proclaims that they will be a ‘meatless meat,’ and that their product will be produced from a continuous cell line.

Their website states that cells are taken from a chicken and developed into a primary cell line. That means they are forcibly removed from an animal (and they also claim to be cruelty-free) and plopped into a petri dish. Then the harvested cells are fed a mixture of extremely processed ingredients and chemicals to allow them to continue growing.

Here’s where Upside begins to be even more glaringly wrong- they proclaim that their cultures are being fed exactly what they need rather than all the extra stuff that live chickens are fed. But where does their exact cell-nurturing food come from? If it’s produced in a different lab- and it has to be-, then their claim of 100% renewable energy is extremely false. To make such a concentrated product, it takes a lot of processing, which takes a LOT of energy in the form of fossil fuels.

Furthermore, industrial chicken barns have feeding down to a science. The animals are not over-fed, but fed a ration for optimal growth without waste. Extra feed means extra expense- and nobody in the agriculture sector has enough overhead room for extra expense.

Those primary cells taken from a chicken, Upside plans to develop into a secondary cell line, which means the cells’ genetic makeup is changed.

Cells grow, they get old, and they die- just like a live animal. However, secondary cell lines are genetically modified to keep growing, which is basically cancer in a dish. Actually, most secondary cell lines are developed from tumor cells, according to NewsMedical Life Sciences.

Let’s let that sink in for a few minutes. Commercial cell cultivation is the cultivation of cancer cells. Animals that have visible cancerous spots are not allowed to enter the food chain and instead are culled… but cell-cultured meat is made entirely from cancer-like, genetically modified cells.

Upside Foods has been issues a ‘no questions letter’ by the FDA, which means that Upside’s food product has been generally recognized as safe, also known by the acronym GRAS. Also GRAS are food additives like mycoprotein (affects 5% of known consumers with severe allergic reactions, worsening after multiple consumptions), partially hydrogenated oils (artificial trans fats, commonly known to contribute to heart disease, stroke, and type 2 diabetes), brominated vegetable oil (used as a flame retardant in plastics and also a citrus flavor enhancer in soft drinks- it leads to endocrine and reproductive issues), olean (used in fat-free packaged foods and it inhibits the body’s ability to absorb certain vitamins and minerals), and caramel coloring (which contains carcinogens). The mycoprotein statistics (1) come from a 2011 letter to the USDA, penned by the executive director at the

Center for Science in the Public Interest. The other information for food additives is widely available.

The problem with GRAS is that chemicals can be used in processing and packaging without any oversight, approval, or knowledgeand food companies are not vying to change that, since the approval process will take much more time than they wish, which will eat into their profit margins significantly.

Upside’s cell-cultured chicken is GRAS, but how will they process and then package it? Their website has no information on those processes, for good reason: Upside admits in a very tiny blurb that their ‘chicken’ is not colored the same as normal chicken. Perhaps in the processing and packaging step, they will add a colorant- which will join the ranks of either the 10,000 food additives that the FDA knows about or the unknown number that the FDA does not know about. Many of those food additives are GRAS-like mycoprotein- and they still have major negative impacts on consumer health.

Another part Upside doesn’t want you to know? Their cell line has to be replaced much more often than they claim, or the product they manufacture will deviate significantly from the original nutritional information of normal chicken. The reason for that is a genetic bottleneck.

If you’ve heard the fuss around heritage vegetables and fruits, or even animals, then you know that heritage varieties have much more flavor and higher nutritional status than commercially cultivated ones.

The reason? Also a genetic bottleneck. Commercial fruits and vegetables often are just a few very refined varieties, whereas heritage fruits and vegetables have huge lists full of the varieties for sale.

‘Generally Recognized as Safe’ does not mean ‘Full Steam Ahead, It’s the Same As Normal Chicken!’ It means that the FDA sees no glaringly obvious immediate toxicity in the product. But as fluid as that is, it also can change with timelook at nonstick coatings for the most recent news about a product that has been approved for many years and then was discovered to be unsafe.

Meat is a wonderful product to consume, to nurture our families, and to enjoy. However, not all meat is created the same. Traditional ‘on the hoof’ meat that has to be butchered is very different than the cell-cultured products created in big vats.

Watch for the labels on your food- additives have to be included on those. The longer the label, the more ingredients there are to trip us up, health-wise.

In his 2011 letter to the USDA about Quorn (a mycoprotein food additive that causes illness more often than any other common allergen), Michael Jacobson, PhD and executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest says it best:

“Consumers shouldn’t have to play Russian Roulette when they sit down to eat.”