80 Time November 8/November 15, 2021
[a] pariah. It could go the same way with cultured meat.
If they get it wrong now, in 20 years, people will still be
saying, ‘Cultured meats, uh-uh, freak meats, we aren’t
touching it.’ ”
For the moment, Mosa is focused on re- creating
ground beef instead of whole cuts. A ground product
is easier, and cheaper, to make—the fat and muscle come
out of the bioreactor as an unstructured mass, already
fit for blending. Other companies, like Israel’s Aleph
Farms, have opted to go straight for the holy grail of the
cellular- agriculture world—a well- marbled steak—by
3-D printing the stem cells onto a collagen scaffold, the
same process medical scientists are now using to grow
artificial organs. So far, Aleph has only managed to pro-
duce thin strips of lean meat, and while the technology
is promising, a market-ready rib eye is still years away.
Small thin slabs are exactly what Michael Selden, co-
founder and CEO of the Berkeley-based startup Finless
Foods, which is producing cell- cultivated tuna, wants.
Few people would pay $50 for a pound of cul-
tivated beef—15 times the cost of the conven-
tional version—but consumers are already
paying more for high-grade sushi. “Bluefin
tuna sells in restaurants for $10 to $20 for
two pieces of sashimi. That’s $200 a pound,”
he says. Sashimi, with its thin, repeatable
strips and regular fat striations, is much eas-
ier to create than a thick marbled steak, and
Selden says Finless Foods has already pro-
duced something “close to perfect.” His cell-
cultivated bluefin tuna is nearly identical to
the original in terms of nutrition and taste
profile, he says, but the texture still needs
work. “It’s just a little bit crunchier than we
want it to be.” But he’s confident that by the
time the product makes it through the regu-
latory process—he’s hoping by the end of the year or
early 2022—his team will have perfected the texture.
If they do, it could be the first cultivated meat product
on the U.S. market.
Cell-cultivated luxury products could be the ideal
thin end of the wedge for the market, attracting
conscientious—and well-heeled—consumers who want
an environmentally friendly product, and thus creat-
ing space for the technological advances that will bring
down the cost of commodity meat alternatives like cul-
tivated beef and chicken. “People who are buying ethi-
cal food right now are doing the right thing, but the vast
majority of people are never going to convert” when
it’s only about doing the right thing, says Selden. “So
we want to make stuff that competes not on morals or
ethics—although it holds those values—but competes
on taste, price, nutrition and availability.” Assuming
they can, it will revolutionize the meat business.
“If I was in the beef industry, I would be shaking in
my boots, because there’s no way that conventionally
grown beef is going to be able to compete with what’s
coming,” says Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale
Program on Climate Change Communication. There
are many reasons people eat meat, ranging from the
taste to religious and cultural traditions. But the bulk
of meat consumption is not cultural, says Verstrate of
Mosa Meat. “It’s just your average McDonald’s every
day. And if for that type of consumption, if you can pres-
ent an alternative that is not just similar but the same,
without all those downsides that traditional meat has,
then it simply makes no sense to kill animals anymore.”
Four of the world’s five largest meat companies (JBS,
Cargill, Tyson and BRF) are already embracing the tech-
nology. From a market point of view, it makes sense, says
Friedrich of the Good Food Institute. “These companies
want to feed high- quality protein to as many people
as possible, as profitably as possible. That is their en-
tire business model. If they can make meat from plants
that satisfies consumers, if they can cultivate meat from
cells that tastes the same and costs less, they will shift.”
A transition to a lab-grown meat source doesn’t nec-
essarily mean the end of all cows, just the
end of factory farming. Ground beef makes
up half the retail beef market in the U.S., and
most of it comes from the industrial feedlots
that pose the greatest environmental threats.
Eliminating commodity meat, along with its
ugly labor issues, elevated risks of zoonotic
disease spread and animal- welfare concerns,
would go a long way toward reining in the out-
size impact of animal- meat production on the
planet, says Friedrich. “The meat that people
eat because it is cheap and convenient is what
needs to be replaced. But there will always be
the Alice Waterses of the world—and there
are lots of them—who will happily pay more
for ethically ranched meat from live animals.”
Small herds like Farmer John’s could pro-
vide both. John feeds his cows on pasture for most of the
year—rather than on cattle feed, which is typically more
environmentally intensive—and rotates them through
his orchards in order to supplement the soil with their
manure, a natural fertilizer. When he needs to feed them
in the winter, he uses leftover hay from his wheat and
barley crops. It’s a form of regenerative agriculture that
is impossible to replicate on the large scale that indus-
trial meat production requires to overcome its smaller
margins. “We want good food for everybody. But if we
do this [the old] way, we only have good food for some
people,” John says. That’s why he’s willing to embrace
the new technology, even if it is a threat to his way of
life. “This is the future, and I’m proud that my cows
are part of it.”
It’s likely to be more than a year before John can
finally taste the lab-grown version of meat from his
cows. Mosa is in the process of applying for regulatory
approval from the E.U. In the meantime, the company
is already expanding into a new space with roughly
100,000 liters of bioreactor capacity, enough to produceC S G
A transitionto lab-grownmeat doesn’tmean the end ofall cows, just theend of factoryfarming