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The cows in Farmer John’s pasTure
lead an idyllic life. They roam through tree-
shaded meadows, tearing up mouthfuls of
clover while nursing their calves in tranquil-
ity. Tawny brown, compact and muscular,
they are Limousins, a breed known for the
quality of its meat and much sought- after
by the high-end restaurants and butchers in
the nearby food mecca of Maastricht, in the
southernmost province of the Netherlands.
In a year or two, meat from these dozen cows
could end up on the plates of Maastricht’s
better-known restaurants, but the cows
themselves are not headed for the slaugh-
terhouse. Instead, every few months, a vet-
erinarian equipped with little more than a
topical anesthetic and a scalpel will remove a
peppercorn- size sample of muscle from their
flanks, stitch up the tiny incision and send
the cows back to their pasture.
The biopsies, meanwhile, will be dropped
off at a lab in a nondescript warehouse in
Maastricht’s industrial quarter, five miles
away, where, when I visit in July, cellular
biologist Johanna Melke is already work-
ing on samples sent in a few days prior. She
swirls a flask full of a clear liquid flecked
with white filaments—stem cells isolated
from the biopsy and fed on a nutrient- dense
growth medium. In a few days, the filaments
will thicken into tubes that look something
like short strands of spaghetti. “This is fat,”
says Melke proudly. “Fat is really important.
Without fat, meat doesn’t taste as good.”
On the opposite side of the building,
other scientists are replicating the process
with muscle cells. Like the fat filaments, the
lean muscle cells will be transferred to large
bioreactors—temperature- and pressure- controlled steel
vessels—where, bathed in a nutrient broth optimized
for cell multiplication, they will continue to grow. Once
they finish the proliferation stage, the fat and the mus-
cle tissue will be sieved out of their separate vats and
reunited into a product resembling ground hamburger
meat, with the exact same genetic code as the cows in
Farmer John’s pasture. (The farmer has asked to go by
his first name only, in order to protect his cows, and his
farm, from too much media attention.)
That final product, identical to the ground beef you
are used to buying in the grocery store in every way
but for the fact that it was grown in a reactor instead
of coming from a butchered cow, is the result of years
of research, and could help solve one of the biggest co-
nundrums of our era: how to feed a growing global popu-
lation without increasing the greenhouse- gas emissions
that are heating our planet past the point of sustainabil-
ity. “What we do to cows, it’s terrible,” says Melke, shak-
ing her head. “What cows do to the planet when we farm
them for meat? It’s even worse. But people want to eat
meat. This is how we solve the problem.”
When it comes to the importance of fat in the final
product, Melke admits to a slight bias. She is a senior
scientist on the Fat Team, a small group of specialists
within the larger scientific ecosystem of Mosa Meat, the
Maastricht- based startup whose founders introduced
the first hamburger grown from stem cells to the world
eight years ago. That burger cost $330,000 to produce,
and now Melke’s Fat Team is working with the Muscle
Team, the (stem cell) Isolation Team and the Scale Team,
among others, to bring what they call cell- cultivated
meat to market at an affordable price.
They are not the only ones. More than 70 other start-
ups around the world are courting investors in a race to
deliver lab-grown versions of beef, chicken, pork, duck,
tuna, foie gras, shrimp, kangaroo and even mouse (for
cat treats) to market. Competition is fierce, and fewTHE COW THAT MIGHT
FEED THE PLANET
By Aryn Baker/Maastricht, Netherlands
Limousin cows
in Farmer John’s
pasture. Mosa Meat
will cultivate their
cells in a lab to grow
into hamburger
that is genetically
identical, no
slaughter required