You must have heard of "artificial meat". If someone had mentioned this concept more than a decade ago, we might have not hesitated to joke, "Who hasn't eaten artificial meat?" 'Tang Monk Meat' from the commissary! ”
Now, it's a physical object.
Not long ago, the Dutch Science Museum exhibited a meatball made by an Australian company - "artificial meat" grown from the DNA of an extinct mammoth. Recently, in China, some companies have been interviewed by the media and said that they have "developed China's first piece of 100% cellular meat". In the United States, catering companies including KFC and McDonald's have introduced "artificial meat" into restaurants to varying degrees.
One visible trend is that "artificial meat" is becoming the biggest investment hotspot in the food industry (Bill Gates has also joined venture capital in this space with high profile). However, some countries have negative opinions on this, such as the Italian agricultural department, which said that it intends to ban "artificial meat" from entering the market.
At present, there are two types of "artificial meat" such as plant meat and cellular meat, of which cell meat has attracted the most attention, because it is meat in a sense, and it is also the closest to real feeding meat in taste. The difference is that when we pick up a piece of meat on a plate and chew it slowly, the animal that contributed the cells to the meat may still be alive somewhere, eating grass. Perhaps in the future, it will not be farmers, breeders, or agricultural trading companies that will affect what kind of meat we can eat and what quality of meat we eat, but scientists in laboratories and investors in enterprises.
In fact, lab-grown animal tissues have been growing for decades, but switched to food for only a decade. In 2013, Mark Post's Mosa produced the world's first cell-cultured meat burger. The burger cost $330,000 at the time.
An important ethical basis for the acceptance of "artificial meat" by many consumers is the resistance of animal rights to anthropocentrism. "Artificial meat" promises to save animals from the painful fate of being slaughtered. And this is also a moral torture entrenched in our hearts, in the long history of the formation and development of "human society", based on taming and raising animals, using them to replenish energy, and with the progress of civilization, a sense of guilt also looms. The relationship between humans and animals is being reconstructed. This guilt can even penetrate into everyone's daily life, imagine how parents watching their children play happily with the fish and shrimp they bought home, and even buy chickens from the school gate to feed, how can they explain to them that these cute and loving lives end up in the kitchen and dinner table? How cruel. Even people who know the food chain and have accepted it must be unbearable to hear the cries of cows, sheep, pigs, chickens, ducks and geese before they are slaughtered one day. These trivial thoughts have the power to trigger a reflection on the right to animal life at the conceptual level.
A still from The Farm (2018), which swaps human and animal roles.
In the process of introducing products to the outside world, the "artificial meat" production company cannot be separated from showing ethical significance at the beginning and end. Larissa Zimberoff, a longtime writer who investigates and reports on food, "was invited by companies to visit labs and factories," and "I cut the chicken and they stared at me," seeing the hopes and promises that the fate of animals could be changed, while thinking about the uncertain consequences.
What is "artificial meat"? Is it greener and more ethical? This is a reflection that is possible only if we return to the production line.
"Food for Showmanship", by Larisa Zinbelov, translated by Senning, Kyushu Publishing House, Golang, February 2023.
Chicken served,
The chickens may still be alive on the farm
The box in my hand looks like something I pick in the supermarket. A close-up of a stone dish covered with kale and some purple onion rings topped with a roasted chicken breast. There was a small piece of clear cellophane on the box, allowing me to peek inside a piece of skinless chicken breast covered by plastic film. The box reads "The Crystallization of California Love." Below the nutrition facts list on the back of the box is the ingredient list, so ordinary that you might overlook sea salt, jalapeños, sugar, and garlic. Everything is ordinary, except for the ingredients for the starter: chicken (cell culture).
It was indeed a chicken breast, but it was not cut from a dead animal. It is cell-grown in the lab from Memphis Meat in Berkeley, California. The chicken that contributed the cells may still be alive on some farm.
A still from the fifth season of "Friends" (1998).
The second floor of the Memphis Meat Building leads to a giant kitchen large enough to host a culinary competition. Behind the stove stands Morgan Rease, a food scientist with a sleek long beard and an apron. The aroma of fried mushrooms fills the air. My nose twitched and saliva flowed out unconsciously, even though I had only finished lunch shortly after. "Do you have anything not to eat?" Reese asked. The list of foods I don't like to eat isn't long, but when writing on this topic, my motto becomes: "I can eat anything." ”
As I toured the room's renovation and design, Reese and I waited with Uma Valeti, the CEO of Memphis Meat. Before joining this food technology revolution, Valetti was a cardiologist and a life-saving profession, but he felt strongly about saving more lives with his new career and stopping animal cruelty due to what happened in India as a child. After graduating from medical school in the United States, Valetti stayed. In addition to his clinical work, he has a research lab at the University of Minnesota, where patients have serious heart conditions. Stem cells are one of the treatments, but the founder began to envision whether he could make humans healthier starting with food. The idea was put on his back for a while until he was introduced to today's co-founder, Nicholas Genovese, a doctor of oncology. At that time, the pair also needed a catalyst to grow meat cells so that they could abandon a career in medicine and pursue a high-risk and highly uncertain future.
It has been 5 years since he left the medical profession, but Valetti still retains the temperament of a doctor, cautious and restrained, elegant and confident, which makes him a good choice to raise huge investments. Every cell-grown meat company was embarrassed by the fact that their work was "fake," but in the early days, cell-cultured meat was so bizarre that Valetti was turned away by most investors. Still, in the earliest seed round, Valetti raised more than $3 million. "This industry has never been funded." Until he showed investors the possibilities of cell-cultured meat, he said. Today, the vision has taken root as a company with more than 60 employees, including animal rights activists, environmental activists, and even meat eaters, who are eager to become the first company to commercially produce cell-cultured meat.
They, ambitious
Most of the founders are confident in the future of cell-cultured meat. Mark Post, founder of Mosa Meat in the Netherlands, is recognized as the initiator of the cell-cultured meat movement. Post's 15 years of studying cell-cultured meat in the lab made him far less conservative about this seemingly uncertain path, whether it's Dutch savviness or repeated attempts during a long career. In a feature in Food Phreaking, "What's in In Vitro Meat," Post writes that producing meat in the lab offers the possibility of saving resources, although that needs to be confirmed. Instead, Valetti spoke only of the need to "prove to the world that this worked," and that he was able to do so because he already had "real products" and "evidence that people liked the idea."
On our way to the conference room, Valetti stopped in front of the company chronology on the wall next to the bathroom. Memphis Meat has many milestones, such as the founding of the company (Valetti considers his company the first cell-cultured meat company, founded in 2015), the first meatball (produced in 2016, costing $1,000), and the 2017 Series A funding round that raised $17 million, the largest investment in cell farming at the time.
While most cell culture meat startups are still focusing on a single species, Memphis Meat is casting a full net, claiming that its platform is capable of growing all kinds of cells and tissues. In its 17,000-square-foot headquarters, scientists have grown beef, chicken (the most consumed meat in the United States), duck (the most consumed in China), and more than 1,000 people have tasted it.
Chicken Run (2000).
Valetti took me back to the kitchen where Reese was pulling a small slice of chicken out of the frying pan. He places the chicken on a cutting board and gently cuts it against the texture. Valetti urged me to step forward and watch, "When Morgan cuts chicken, you have to pay attention to the cutting method and texture. It really cuts like a piece of chicken".
On the plate beside Reese, two large golden spoons contained samples soaked in sauce. "No one eats plain chicken." Valetti said. I think it's time to tell fitness enthusiasts that Valetti wants them to enjoy his products. One of the spoons has the sauce of a lemon-scented grilled chicken steak, while the other is chicken satay with peanut butter and homemade ginger kimchi. Next to the two spoons, there is also a small serving of plain chicken without seasoning. I glanced down at the plate, then at the chef, and finally at Valetti. David Kay, Memphis Meat One employee and communications supervisor, stood on the sidelines to take pictures. Tasting samples in front of these people who have worked tirelessly to reshape our food supply has been one of my most uncomfortable professional experiences.
I cut the chicken. They stared at me.
Valetti is right, it cuts a lot like chicken. I put a half-inch piece in my mouth. Just like traditional chicken, it's tough, but it's also chewy, a feeling that requires my teeth to bite it. I could feel the muscles in my mouth. But it's also shriveled and doesn't have the juicy and moist chicken I had hoped for. Valetti assured me that there were fat cells in addition to muscle cells, but I couldn't taste them. The meat itself has a flavor, but the oil used to fry it has a greater impact on my sense of taste. Then I was told that the meat I was eating was cultured from the cells of an egg. This goes back to the old origin story, but I can't help but guess, how many people are willing to switch like this?
Next, I put the spoonful of lemon-scented grilled chicken steak into my mouth. For those who like meat, it is very delicious, much better than the original flavor. The texture of the chicken goes beautifully with butter, lemon and caper buds.
Top Chef Season 19 (2022) poster.
At the moment, the people around me were watching my reaction closely, as if I was participating in the reality show "Top Chef." I avoided their gaze, silently wishing I could make some record. I said "wow" many times, which bought me time to think. "It tastes healthy." It may not be what they want to hear, but it's from the bottom of my heart. Most importantly, they capture the necessary conditions for all imitation meat textures. "The texture is fantastic and impressive." I repeat it over and over again.
There were only a few samples on the plate, so it was hard for me to imagine a whole chicken breast coming out. According to Valetti, they have made "full-shaped chicken."
Ethics or profit? Source of motivation
When I talk to these Silicon Valley founders, believe it or not, money is often the last thing they want to talk about.
Meat Planet book cover, University of California, October 2020.
Ben Wurgaft, author of Meat Planet, feels the same way. "I've always been eager to [interview] people who are willing to admit that they want to make money. The founders wanted to combine their moral mission with market demand, and the main motivation for their accelerated careers could be the inability to bear to let animals suffer, or it could be money. ”
Like me, Urgaft believes that many founders are sincere. They point to ethical dilemmas in animal welfare. Meat consumption in developed countries is still steadily increasing, and we need to kill more animals to cater to the habit of eating meat. From a moral point of view, numbers don't matter. Whether you eat 1 animal or 1 million is the same meaning. In fact, in 2020, a total of 36 billion animals were killed for food worldwide.
Next, the founders need to figure out how unsustainable traditional animal husbandry is, how damaging it is to the environment, and how low the conversion rate of feeding animals to humans is. In terms of return on investment, feeding animals with crops and then producing protein to feed humans is an "extremely inefficient technology". Finally, they pull out that recurring statistic and phrase it with the question: "What will we feed the world's population of 9 billion by 2050?" With the limited amount of arable land, the younger generation not interested in agriculture, and the growing demand for protein, the founders turned to cell-cultured meat as the best option to save the planet and humanity."
Shifting to a healthier diet takes effort. In a report by the EAT-Lancet committee, a group of scientists from around the globe suggested that we should double our intake of fruits, vegetables, nuts and legumes. Perhaps even more challenging, they think we need to reduce our red meat and sugar intake by more than 50. Doing so "will improve health and the environment at the same time." Brent Loken, a scientist on the committee, said that without these changes, food-related carbon emissions are expected to double by 2050. "Food-related carbon emissions will most likely cause global temperatures to rise above the upper limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius in 30 to 40 years and close to the upper limit of 2 degrees Celsius by 2100." This view is widely accepted.
A still from Super Size Me (2004).
"Ignoring the health of the planet for the sake of a healthy diet is an exhaustive fishery." David Katz, founder of the Yale Griffin Center for Prevention Studies at Yale University, is also a nutrition writer.
In 2019, when my Instagram feed was flooded with images of the Amazon fire, I understood that this was the argument of all the founders I spoke to. The New York Times called the fire "ecological arson." Beef cattle ranchers are burning the world's largest and most biodiverse rainforest. At that time, the global protests were overwhelming. If cell-cultured meat had been on sale by then, its ad would have been pushed to me on Instagram along with images of the disaster.
Cell culture meat is still in its infancy, but plant meat has already entered the classroom. When plant-based burgers, bacon, and pork are soaring, are these relatively trickier cell-cultured meats still necessary?
Is cellular meat more environmentally friendly?
Large-scale production of cell-cultured meat will rely heavily on water, energy and food. Without the exact data of the company, it's impossible to imagine how much investment would really be.
Does producing a pound of cell-cultured beef consume fewer natural resources than a pound of regular ground beef? In 2020, UCLA researchers Tomiyama and Lovat published an article "Bridging the gap between the science of cultured meat and public perceptions". It is pointed out that in theory, one living tissue of a cow can meet the needs of 1 billion beef burgers in a month and a half. If you switch to traditional animal husbandry, it would take 500,000 head of cattle to produce the same number of hamburgers, which would take 18 months. More than 90 percent of the world's population eats meat. So can these 30-plus cell-cultured meat companies please everyone?
Footage from the documentary Earthlings (2005).
Going back to my question, should we focus more on plant-based meat than cell-cultured meat?
Whereas conventional agriculture produces three greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide, cell-cultured meat production emits almost all carbon dioxide, which comes from the energy required by the plant. On the surface, this difference would make us think that cell-cultured meat is much better. John Lynch and Raymond Pierrehumbert, researchers at the University of Oxford, in a comparative study of the climate impact of cultured meat and beef cattle, found that "greenhouse gas emissions per unit of cultured meat were generally better than farmed beef". But that's not the whole conclusion.
Initially, "cultured meat produces fewer greenhouse gases than beef cattle", but "in the long term, the gap between the two will narrow, and in some cases, farmed beef cattle will produce much less greenhouse gases because methane emissions do not accumulate and carbon dioxide does", the main gas emitted by cell-cultured meat production. The best way to make cell-cultured meat more environmentally friendly than conventional meat is to ensure that the cell-cultured meat industry relies primarily on renewable energy.
The end of the world in the movie I Am Legend (2007).
The cell-cultured meat industry's marketing narrative to venture capitalists, angel investors, and consumers has long been that it will save the world. Christy Spackman, an assistant professor in the School of Future Social Innovation at Arizona State University, points out the fallacy of this thinking. "I would say this is not a lesson that history has taught us. Industrialization has made our situation even more difficult. "The industrialization we used to celebrate has eventually led to the current dilemmas, such as large-scale livestock farms producing toxic wastewater that cannot be re-entered into the land. Sparkman felt that before the industrial production of new foods, we urgently needed to consider the supporting systems needed for the production of cell-cultured meat. Remember, large-scale industrialization is what every cell cultured meat startup wants to achieve together.
According to Ulgarft, author of Meat Planet, the diminishing desire for industrial meat is a good thing, but he wants it to be a free choice made by the public in a fully informed manner, rather than forced by government intervention or market pressure: "It is important that we do not give up on the hope that people actually have the ability to take responsibility for their choices." "We met at the New Harvest Conference at MIT in 2017, where he was a visiting scholar. What I like most about this unkempt-haired, glass-and-glass writer is that he's not a glutton, doesn't work for any startup, and isn't an investor. He eats meat. He has no interest in this game. He has the temperament of a historian and a philosopher, and when it comes to cell-cultured meat, Urgaft does not arbitrarily believe that eating animals is bad, or that vegetarianism is the only way forward.
The questions are endless
Regulation is often cited as one of the main barriers to market for these products (along with consumer acceptance and culture media).
Some people familiar with the matter said that once the United States approves cell-cultured meat, other countries will follow suit. Others believe that in less regulated countries such as Singapore and Japan, cell-cultured meat may be able to reach the market sooner. It is especially important for the FDA (US Food and Drug Administration) to check for possible contamination caused by bacteria, viruses and other biological agents. As a government agency on a tight budget, does the FDA have enough resources to visit these plants in the field and thoroughly understand their technology to evaluate them? "Unless you have a completely sterile plant with clean rooms and bioreactors operated by robots, the risk of food contamination remains." Ulgarft said. On the bright side, highly controlled bioreactors can be screened in real time and even evaluated remotely using cloud-based data. In contrast, the passageways on industrial farms are heavily guarded and the workers in meat packing plants are not safe, as evidenced by the many scandals during the pandemic. We think there are both regulatory and legal protections, but where are the protections?
Technically Food, Abrams Press, June 2021.
Even the FDA's experts who regulate tissue culture of medical animals say growing food-grade meat is a tricky problem. At a public hearing on the use of animal cell culture techniques to produce food, Jeremiah Fasano, the FDA's consumer safety official, said that even if conventional meat and laboratory meat are identical, safety concerns remain, such as growth-aiding substances and chemicals unique to different secondary component organisms, as well as unexpected metabolites that are intermediates, by-products and end products of cellular respiration. Growing living cells produce large amounts of metabolites. "Appropriately speaking, biological production systems are quite complex." Fasano said.
Another expert at the hearing was Paul Mozdziak, a professor of poultry at North Carolina State University. He spoke about the challenge of scaling up production, echoing Urgaft's concern that "every transfer [in the lab] has the potential for contamination to enter, including bacteria, microbes, viruses." The temptation here will be the use of antibiotics, which are not only unpopular with animal husbandry, but many experts also consider them a more serious threat to public health than climate change. In a high-tech production environment, safety rules must be meticulously adhered to, and much depends on the care of the employees – "In cell culture, most contamination is actually a personnel problem." If someone makes a mistake in a certain link, it will be difficult to trace. ”
Beyond pollution, there are other aspects worth thinking about. These cells are clones, and trillions of clones will produce genetic variations. Mutations don't happen all the time, but the bomb is there. In Billion Dollar Burger, Mark Post tells author Chase Purdy that this is a possible "disaster." In every copy, DNA "may undergo genetic mutations." This will generate unstable cells, which is a challenge for startups planning to make cell-cultured meat in large quantities. We are told that eating these genetically modified cells poses no health threat. But we better not take this lightly.
Billion Dollar Burger book cover, Portfolio Publishing, June 2020.
The associated questions are endless.
Unbearable consequences
Cell-cultured meat is a far cry from private dishes or small batches sold at farmers' markets. It doesn't enjoy that luxury. Can you imagine a piece of chicken with a $1,000 sticker price tag on a folding table at the Farmer's Market? Instead, these companies are moving directly from the lab to mass production, trying to lower prices to appeal to mass consumers. Not enough to sell to the rich, it will stay in the high-priced market for a while until the cost is "low enough," meaning it's not just affordable for the average person, it's cheaper than cheap beef. To achieve this, these companies need to develop scaling processes for production systems, an unprecedented attempt and a significant reduction in the cost of a nutrient that has never been created before.
Food eaten by the lower classes in the movie Snowpiercer (2013).
In the future, will competing ideas create a further tiered food system? Is the system based on differences in purchasing power between different demographic groups, as is the current structure of inequality in which we live? Targeted marketing to vulnerable people who crave convenience, coupled with the low price of junk food, continues to deteriorate the health of these groups. Then we were caught up in an outbreak where our most vulnerable were traumatized.
In an article in Slate, future innovator Sparkman writes that cell-cultured meat "continually disrupts metabolic intimacy rooted in the body's direct experience of food sources." How will we teach ecological awareness to the next generation in the future? It is important for a child to know how important it is that apples grow on trees and that cattle are worth more than their cells. Sparkman "has a deep love for food chemistry" and the endless possibilities for "taking food apart and assembling it back." But this comes at the cost of no longer understanding the food making process. Cell culture meat cannot simply exclude animals. "That's where rational thinking lets us down. Cattle do exist and participate in a cycle, they have their own immune systems and are part of a chain that renews the planet rather than feeds humans. She said.
Footage from the documentary Food, Inc. (2008).
While we wait for cell-cultured meat to hit the market, there are many measures that can be taken first. Be kind to the land already cultivated, improve the soil, support regenerative agriculture, and pay attention to biodiversity and crop resilience. If you eat meat, buy grass-fed, free-range animals to support local or regional regenerative farm families. Buying from a farm that has implemented carbon sequestration is a better option. Brainstorm on more efficient use of resources. Reduce food waste and give food to those in need instead of throwing it away. Finally, shift the diet from meat-centric to plant-centric.
Valetti has publicly stated that he is willing to invite everyone to visit the Memphis meat production facility when it comes online. As a food lover, as long as I can go to the back kitchen and understand the food making process, I will actively participate in these kinds of activities. I love visiting factories and remember visiting the Blue Diamond Almond Factory with my dad as a child. Machines and assembly lines create miracles of efficiency. But now the situation is different. Imagine you standing there with curious kids trying to explain to them these large stainless steel jars and what's inside. That's going to be an exciting conversation, and scientists have figured out a way to raise meat in jars!
Or it could serve as a cautionary tale that we ate animals many years ago. Perhaps, next door to the factory, Memphis Meat will be able to carve out a small farm for children to visit. There, they can imitate the moo of a cow, the cluck of a chicken, the rattle of a duck. Of course, perhaps one day we will have to explain to our descendants what a farm is, and long ago, we were still growing food on the land outdoors.
The content of this article has been excerpted with permission from the book "Food of Showmanship".
Original author/[US] Larisa Zimbelov
Editor/Luo Dong
Proofreading of the introduction/Liu Jun