Eating Real Meat Without Harming The Animals
Human meat consumption has had devastating consequences on life on this planet. Yet, this is not an article that will try to convince you to eat less meat. Quite the opposite!
Anyone can (and should) do a quick Google search of what mass-production agriculture looks like, what implications it has on the planet and what we do to the animals to ‘optimise’ their production. I can’t imagine it leaving anyone indifferent. Without going into much detail let’s skim the surface.
Quick fact-bomb on meat production
Consider that 27% of our planet’s surface is dedicated to raising livestock. That chickens are five times the size of what they’ve been in the ’50s and have to be slaughtered at six to eight weeks otherwise their legs wouldn’t be able to hold their bodies. The animals are packed so tightly that 2018 was the beginning of the largest farmed animal pandemic ever due to antibiotic resistance. Because of the overuse of antibiotics, the bacteria turned into resistant superbugs and are affecting us directly, not just via meat consumption. Lastly, millions of pigs, cows and other animals are lost every year due to natural disasters that are a direct cause of climate change. And let’s not forget the carbon footprint of the industry.
It takes about nine calories fed to a chicken to get one calorie back out in a form of meat. And chicken is the most efficient animal in turning crops into meat. Most of our crops today are used to feed livestock while 800 million people are still malnourished. Consider that all those crops have to be shipped, processed and stored before being fed to the animals. The animals have to be raised, slaughtered, processed, shipped and stored. This creates multi-level labour and machine use intensive processes that are anything but environmentally friendly. About 70% of total antibiotic production is not used for sick people, but for well animals to make them grow bigger and faster and stay alive for long enough in the unbearable industrial farming conditions.
While going plant-based would definitely help in many ways, it is not the panacea for everything either. Monocrops, pesticides and unsustainable agriculture still have damaging effects on the planet and our health.
The solution?
For the last 50 years, all kinds of experts, activists and media have been begging the public to reduce meat consumption. It didn’t work. Per capita, meat consumption has been increasing this whole time. It is estimated that it will increase by another 70-100% by 2050! The vast majority of people are going to fight for the momentary ‘right’ to eat meat until their last breath regardless of the long-term consequences.
Admittedly there are many benefits to eating animal-based foods, but if we want to continue life on this planet we need a better solution. We need products that don’t require live animals, taste just as good or better and cost the same or less. Enter cell-meat.
If you think eating meat products without ever harming the animals is something out of a science fiction movie think again. This is possible because of the so-called cellular agriculture. This industry is still in its infancy and it needs all the support it can get from the public, private sector and governments. The first products already exist in a form of burgers, sausages and nuggets, but are not yet commercially available.
They aren’t just fast food products, they are a ticket to the new food system that might help fight world hunger and mitigate the damage we are doing to the environment by trying to feed 8 billion people.
Here’s how this works
Rather than raising whole chickens with beaks, feathers, sentients, the scientists grow the meat directly from muscle cells. By taking a small biopsy from a living animal they extract the cells of interest (muscle, fat or connective tissue).
Muscle cells love to attach to things so they can elongate into the long muscle fibres we are so familiar with, this is why scaffolding material is provided for the cells to adhere to. To feed them, they are put in a liquid substance filled with nutrients they need to grow and divide. All this is happening in a large bioreactor. It’s a stainless steel tank that looks like a piece of brewing equipment and provides a stable environment for the cells to flourish in.
Once the cells mature into muscle fibres, they are harvested and turned into chicken nuggets for example. A piece of boneless and skinless meat. This process is shown to require 99% less land, 96% less water, and produce 96% fewer greenhouse gas emissions than conventional agriculture.
Cell agriculture can, unlike classic agriculture, grow vertically. With all the saved space we can maybe finally try to save the Amazon rainforest which we continue to clear-cut for cattle. Or revive the ecosystems that have been colonised by cattle, corn and soy. Maybe we can return some of the lands to the indigenous people who can reclaim their ancestral foodways.
Think of the implications of this new technology. It might be an opportunity to get a second chance at agriculture and learn from our mistakes.
Endless options
You may already consume some cell grown products without even knowing. Many vitamins, flavours and enzymes are made with cell cultures. Rennet, which is used to turn milk into curds and whey for cheese-making used to come from a stomach lining of the fourth stomach of calves. In 1990 the cell-version hit the market and today 90% of rennet comes from a bioreactor instead of a calf.
We don’t have to grow only meat from cells. Anything can be grown to minimise the impact on nature. Vanilla for example doesn’t have to be rainforest farmed. Egg whites don’t have to come with the yolk. Leather and silk don’t have to come from the back of an animal or the home of a silkworm.
Today you can already buy real dairy ice cream that was produced by cellular agriculture. The milk didn’t come from the cow but the computer. The gene for whey protein was looked up in an open-source database, printed and inserted into an organism called Trichoderma. When fed sugars (just like in brewing when yeast is fed sugars) this turns it into whey protein that can be put into yoghurt, cream cheese and ice cream.
Tissue engineering is a special branch of this new science that is trying to achieve three-dimensionality with animal cells, and this is not an easy feat. Once this is achieved, instead of only having minced meat we could also have a full chicken breast of beef steak.
The progress of cell meat is quick. In 2013 it cost over $300,000 to produce one single hamburger and today the estimates are as low as $100 per kg. The only reasonable expectation is the price of cultured meat to come down further and the price of meat from animals to go up. The latter heavily relies on government subsidies, climate change and viral infections, while the other relies on the private sector and market forces to enable infrastructure, training support and further research. According to Isha Datar, the Executive Director of New Harvest, there is a real chance the cellular agriculture fails and it’s not going to be because the science doesn’t add up. It will be because of our purchase choices.
In conclusion
Many of us love the texture, flavour, nutritional content and bioavailability of animal products so much that we are willing to shut our eyes and pretend its mass production has no downsides. The good thing is these products don’t have to come from an animal anymore.
Although there is still a long way to go to realise the potential of this technology, this can mean as big a transformation for humanity as it did when transitioned from hunting to agriculture some 12,000 years ago. This can be a new era of abundance. Not only to produce the known foods but imagine the possibilities of culinary creativities! The foods we’ve never known before. The meat can be whatever shape or texture we’d want it to be. Maybe thin and translucent? Or crunchy or even liquid! Burgers and nuggets are just the starting point. We could specifically target the nutrient content for individual needs. We could enjoy big family dinners without a guilty conscience that someone else is paying the price.
Is this a utopian dream? What could be next? Sustainable life on a spaceship? There must be some downsides to this innovation, right? Give yourself a moment to objectively think about your thoughts on this amazing and revolutionary approach to food production.
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