40 | New Scientist | 22 February 2020
The technology hasn’t stood still. Back in
2013, the standard culture medium was bovine
fetal serum extracted from unborn calves,
which was both expensive and ethically
troubling. The industry has now developed
animal-free alternatives using ingredients
grown in genetically modified bacteria.
There are still technical challenges to
overcome, principally scaling up production
and getting the taste and texture right. Yet
these are widely seen as solvable in the near
future. Nobody has yet achieved mass
production, but some companies can already
produce enough meat at an affordable-enough
price to launch a product in a restaurant, says
Elliot Swartz of the GFI. And while texture
matters a great deal if you want to grow a steak,
it isn’t so important for minced beef or shrimp.
This is one reason why Sriram is so confident
in Shiok. “Shrimp is only muscle and not any
other tissue,” she says. “We don’t have to worry
about fat or connective tissue. Definitely,
crustacean cells are easier than land-based
animals.” Shiok doesn’t even have to grow
whole shrimp, just recreate the minced
shrimp that is a staple in Asian cooking. Last
year, the firm demonstrated a prototype, and
is prepping for an invitation-only tasting event
at a meeting in Singapore in April.Beneficial
bugs
The cleanness of cultured meat
compared with farmed alternatives
might be problematic. Conventional
meat has a microbiome that,
assuming the bacteria are benign,
protects against food poisoning
because the resident bacteria
outcompete hostile interlopers.
But cultured meat comes out of
the bioreactor sterile and is a sitting
duck for bacteria. “Uncolonised meat
is dramatically attractive to bacteria
and they can grow very rapidly,” says
microbiologist Elizabeth Wellington
at the University of Warwick, UK.
“That’s how food poisoning happens.”
It may prove necessary to inoculate
cultured meat with benign bacteria
to eliminate this risk, she says.SHIOKMEATSHow to grow meat
Meat can be made in the lab from a few starter cellsBegin with a small
sample of cellsGrow the cells in a
bioreactor. To create
3D tissues, an edible
scaffold is needed for
the cells to grow onHarvest the beef muscle
fibres or shrimp proteins
and process them into
food productsBrunel University London, elevating it from
futuristic possibility to practical reality.
Companies quickly sprang up all over
the world, driven by a desire to right the
wrongs of livestock farming. Unlike the real
thing, cultured meat is almost cruelty-free:
aside from biopsies to obtain stem cells,
no animals are harmed. In theory, the
environmental footprint – all that land, water
and pollution – shrinks to almost nothing,
although this is the subject of much debate.
Perhaps best of all, antibiotics become
unnecessary. In return, we get sin-free real
meat, in as large a quantity as we can eat.Cellular agriculture
Back in 2013, the technology was nowhere near
ready for the market; the burger took three
months to grow at a cost of about €250,000.
Mark Post, at Maastricht University in the
Netherlands, the scientist behind the project,
said it would take 10 or 20 years to make it
commercially viable. But things have moved
faster than he anticipated. That doesn’t mean
cultured burgers, let alone steaks. Those are
still at least five years away, according to
Stephens. Seafood is a different story.
“We might see the first commercial sale
soon, maybe in the next year,” says Stephens.
Shrimp or other crustacean meat will be
followed by salmon, tuna and white fish
and then mammal and bird meats. Other
animal products such as milk, leather and
wool are also in development.
As this “cellular agriculture” industry
develops, new battle lines are being drawn.
Cultured meat will be the biggest disruptive
technology to hit the food industry since
genetic modification. How will the conventional
meat industry respond – embrace the new
technology or fight it tooth and nail? “It’s all
to play for in this space,” says Richard Parr at
the Good Food Institute (GFI), a US non-profit
organisation that promotes the development
of alternatives to animal products.
The cultured meat technology being refined
by Shiok and other companies – there are
about 30 firms doing this around the world –
is essentially the same as that used to grow
the €250,000 burger. The main ingredient is
a culture of muscle cells (often with fat cells
too) growing on a support structure called a
scaffold, bathed in a liquid medium containing
nutrients and growth factors (see “How to
grow meat”, top left). The medium stimulates
the cells to proliferate, whereupon they
spontaneously organise themselves into
muscle tissue, aka meat.