Cultured meat: The term used to describe meat that has been lab grown from a cell culture rather than taken from a slaughtered animal.

Hughes figured GFI’s report projected unrealistic cost decreases, and left key aspects of the production process undefined, while significantly underestimating the expense and complexity of constructing a suitable facility.
“Clean meat version 1.0 involves recapitulating as quickly as possible the merchandise that consumers already know

the lab-grown cells grow onto and around in order to produce the “cuts” of meat with which we’re familiar.
Natural scaffolding includes cellulose, silk, gelatin, and alginate from algae.
However, should you be relatively new to it, it could be tricky to make sense of.
In this guide, we’ll explain just what it is, and define the most useful terms that will help you navigate this topic confidently.
If you’re writing, reading, or discussing cultured meat, you’ll have to know and understand the proper terms to use.
As global demand for meat goes up, more forested land is changed into ranches and crop fields.
Cultured meat requires significantly less land, uses less water, and produces less pollution.

Life science companies with high-throughput and microfluidic capabilities can also lend services for formulation discovery.
Some cultivated meat companies have already struck partnerships with animal feed manufacturers to obtain these components at feed-grade, allowing them to utilize mature supply chains.
The creation of new cell lines can be both time- and resource-intensive, often taking 6-18 months to derive and sufficiently characterize an individual line.
In medical research, the creation of large-scale cell line biorepositories is often nationally-sponsored, emphasizing their fundamental importance in advancing research.

• The ultimate goal of the cultivated meat industry would be to create a complex meat product such as a steak or chicken white meat in a pre-programmed way, every time.
• Cell-cultured products designed to mimic real meat must face exactly the same stringent regulatory requirements as livestock agriculture, including truthful labeling standards.
• Ultimately, the quality of taste will probably vary across companies and products, especially in early years of production.
• The business cultures bluefin tuna cells in what it calls a microbrewery-style production facility.

That is typically done via biopsy, an agonizing and uncomfortable procedure that uses large needles.
If a company could scale up with this method, it would require a consistent supply of animals from which to acquire cells and innumerable painful extractions.
To help make the cell-based product more consistent, the producer may biopsy the same animal often for the cells that growing “meat” requires.
In his report, Humbird highlights that if companies will get a method to derive a full amino acid profile from cheap commodity soy, it might reduce the cost of growth medium macronutrients dramatically.
It might take years of research and development to devise a method of processing soy into forms ideal for cell culture, on a scale large enough to provide the cultured meat industry.

Developing Marbled Cultivated Beef

For Memphis Meats, this process involves the use of a bioreactor and the creation ofimmortal cell lines.
Its proponents tout it as an environmentally responsible, cruelty-free, and antibiotic-free alternative to current meat production.

Cultured meat production allows the biological processes that normally occur within an animal to occur without the animal.
Since cultured meat is grown in a controlled, artificial environment, some have commented that cultured meat more closely resembles hydroponic vegetables, rather than genetically modified vegetables.
Since so many consumers would choose not to purchase a product produced using animal cell DNA, it is important that consumers be informed about the presence of cultured animal cells in products in clear, easily understood language.
This will be indicated in the product name and in the ingredient list on the product label so that consumers can be aware of the product’s composition.
…TCFA recommends USDA adopt “lab-grown” being an unambiguous description for the products.
Unlike the terms “cultured”, “clean” and “cultivated”, “lab-grown” offers a clear and unambiguous description that effectively distinguishes the merchandise from traditionally harvested meat.

Great Things About Cultured Meat

Research on optimized formulations, animal-free components, and recycling technologies are essential to make cell culture media a lot more affordable.
In the foreseeable future, researchers will have easy access to many well-characterized cell lines housed in multiple biorepositories spread around the world.
To obtain there, more public funding is required to attract experienced stem cell biologists who is able to apply their knowledge and tools to the cultivated meat field.

Transparently communicating the science is essential, but oversharing the wrong aspects of the product could draw unfavourable focus on safety concerns.
Thus one of the challenges in how cultivated meat is marketed is striking the balance between transparency of the science behind it, but communicating it in a manner that it generally does not evoke resistance.
One study suggested that describing cultured meat in a manner that emphasizes the ultimate product rather than the production method was a good way to boost acceptance.

The technology allows bold and creative entrepreneurs to build up animal-free versions of cheese, ice-cream, honey, meat, and other well-loved foods.
Scaffolds are solid materials offering a structure inside a bioreactor for the cells to cultivate into the desired meat product.
In addition, many members of the Hindu, Muslim, and Jewish religions aren’t sure whether cultured meat could adhere to the dietary laws of their faiths.
It appears unlikely a priori that our societies would face a shortage of animal manure unless you will find a drastic reduction in animal farming.

According to the Open Philanthropy report, an adult, scaled-up industry could eventually achieve a ratio of only three to four calories in for every calorie out, compared to the chicken’s 10 and the steer’s 25.
That would still make cultured meat a lot more inefficient in comparison to just eating plants themselves; we’d dump two plates of pasta for every one we eat.
And the cells themselves might still be fed on a diet of commodity grains, the cheapest and most environmentally destructive inputs available.