First Lab Grown, ahem,..Cultivated Meat Served in America

Look forward to trying this, hope it works.
Futurist Tony Seba has called this a Disruption in the making (below). He’s been right before.

MIT Technology Review:

Soon, the menu in your favorite burger joint could include not only options made with meat, mushrooms, and black beans but also patties packed with lab-grown animal cells.

Not only did the US just approve the sale of cultivated meat for the first time, but the industry, made up of over 150 companies, is raising billions of dollarsto bring products to restaurants and grocery stores. 

In theory, that should be a big win for the climate. 

One of the major drivers for businesses focusing on cultivated (or lab-grown, or cultured) meat is its potential for cleaning up the climate impact of our current food system. Greenhouse-gas emissions from the animals we eat (mostly cows) account for nearly 15% of the global total, a fraction that’s expected to increase in the coming decades.

But whether cultivated meat is better for the environment is still not entirely clear.

That’s because there are still many unknowns around how production will work at commercial scales. Many of the startups are just now planning the move from research labs to bigger facilities to start producing food that real, paying customers will finally get to eat.

Exactly how this shift happens will not only determine whether these new food options will be cheap enough to make it into people’s carts. It may also decide whether cultivated meat can ever deliver on its big climate promises.

Raising livestock, especially beef, is infamously emissions intensive. Feeding animals on farms requires a lot of land and energy, both of which can produce carbon dioxide emissions. In addition, cows (along with some other livestock, like sheep) produce large amounts of methane during digestion. If you add it all up and take a global average, one kilogram of beef can account for emissions roughly equivalent to 100 kilograms of carbon dioxide. (Exact estimates can vary depending on where cows are raised, what they’re fed, and how farms are run.)  

At a cellular level, cultivated meat is made from basically the same ingredients as the meat we eat today. By taking a sample of tissue from a young animal or fertilized egg, isolating the cells, and growing them in a reactor, scientists can make animal-derived meat without the constraints of feeding and raising animals for slaughter.

The USDA just gave two California-based companies, Eat Just and Upside Foods, the green light to produce and sell their cultivated chicken products. This makes the US the second country to allow sales of meat grown in labs, after Singapore.

Cultivated meat will still produce emissions, since energy is required to run the reactors that house the cells as they grow. In the US and most places around the world today, that will likely involve fossil fuels. Renewables could eventually be available widely and consistently enough to power facilities producing cultivated meat. However, even in this case, the reactors, pipes, and all other necessary equipment for production facilities often have associated emissions that are tough to eliminate entirely. In addition, animal cells need to be fed and cared for, and the supply chain involved in that also comes with emissions attached. 

And the emissions from cultivated meat might be significant. Some of the early work in the field has relied on materials and techniques borrowed from the biopharmaceutical industry, where companies sometimes grow cells in order to produce drugs. It’s a painstaking and tightly regulated process involving high-purity ingredients, expensive reactors, and a whole lot of energy, says Edward Spang, an associate professor of food science and technology at the University of California, Davis.

Spang and his team set out to estimate the climate impacts of cultivated meat assuming current production techniques. To quantify the potential climate benefits, the researchers examined the total environmental impacts of both animal agriculture and cultivated meat in an analysis known as a life-cycle assessment. This type of analysis adds up all the energy, water, and materials needed to make a product, putting everything in terms of equivalent carbon dioxide emissions.

In a recent preprint study that hasn’t yet been peer-reviewed, Spang estimated the total global-warming potential of cultivated meat in several scenarios based on assumptions about the current state of the industry.

The scenarios were divided into two categories. The first set assumed that cultivated meat would be produced with processes and materials similar to those used in the biopharmaceutical industry—specifically including an energy-intensive purification step to remove contaminants. The other scenarios assumed that cultivated meat production wouldn’t require ultra-high-purity ingredients and would instead rely on inputs like those used in the food industry today, meaning lower energy requirements and emissions.

The two sets of results have very different climate outcomes. A food-grade process results in the equivalent of 10 to 75 kilograms of carbon dioxide emissions—lower than the global average  emissions from beef and in line with production in some countries today. But in the biopharmaceutical-like process, cultivated meat leads to significantly more emissions than beef production today: between 250 and 1,000 kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalent for every kilogram of beef, depending on the specific scenario. 

Where’s the beef?

Spang’s preprint, which appeared in April, sparked splashy news headlinesabout the potential for sky-high emissions. The study also drew quick criticism from some in the industry, including a widely circulated open letterquestioning its assumptions. 

Experts particularly took issue with the assumption that materials used in producing cultivated meat would need to use pharmaceutical-grade ingredients and go through intense purification steps to remove contaminants called endotoxins. Endotoxins are pieces of the outer membranes of some bacteria, and they’re shed as the microbes grow and when they die. Removing them is often necessary in biopharmaceutical processes, since even very small quantities can harm the growth of some cell types and provoke immune responses.  

The process that removes those contaminants is the major contributor to the high emissions seen in one group of the preprint’s scenarios. However, that purification step won’t be necessary in commercial production of cultivated meat, says Elliot Swartz, a principal scientist at the industry group Good Food Institute and one of the authors of the open letter. Different cell types are affected by endotoxins differently, and the ones that will be used for cultivated meat should be able to tolerate higher levels, meaning less purification is needed, Swartz says.