The Future of… Meat?
Okay, after you read the title, I’m sure you are wondering ‘Wait, meat? What is so interesting about that?’ I am no psychic; I know this because I too was in your shoes when I first heard of that until I realized what was so wrong about our current food system which relies heavily on meat. So hold your perplexity, we are about to dive into the present and future of food! 🍔
But… What is so wrong with our food system?
Our current food system is flawed in many aspects. Be it for the environment or for the animals, it isn’t one that is going to sustain for a long time, especially considering how our population is increasing at such alarming rates. Here are just few of the problems that disables it from staying too long:
- Unsustainablity: Our current food system is driving climate change.🌍 In fact, a lot of the global greenhouse gas emissions are due to our current food system, not only from pesticides, weedicides and other unsustainable components of farming, but also from the meat and dairy industry which are also responsible for deforestation and overuse of water.
- Animal welfare: Meat and dairy factories never pay attention to the welfare of the animals they breed; all that matters in their point of view is profit💰 Hence, hormone-injected animals to maximise meat production and crammed, unhygienic conditions are a common sight in factory farms.
- Insufficent for growing population: Our population is rising in high rates and this increasing number of people will obviously need food! Our current food system will not be likely to support such large numbers of people and hence arises the need of change.
As you can see, the need for change in our present food system is clear just from three of the many flaws of our food system. Knowing the need for change simply isn’t enough, we need change and HOW we are going to bring this about is what we are going to be discussing in the next section!
The ‘How’
To understand how this change is going to brought about, we need to know a bit about cellular agriculture (specifically the part about cellular products, the others are not as important!). Here is a little summary I wrote👇
Cellular Agriculture:
As the name suggests, cellular agriculture is producing agricultural products (cellular- containing cells like meat and acellular- without cells like casein, gelatin etc…) from cell cultures. The only difference between products made via cell cultures is how they are made, which varies depending on the type of product. For example, we can make acellular products via cellular agriculture (sounds crazy, I know) by inserting a gene containing the blueprints of the product into the microbe — this will be your starter culture! An example of this seen in insulin production. To make cellular products via cellular agriculture involves tissue engineering as most cellular products are found in tissues. In this, cells from a specific tissue are assembled on a scaffold (materials which contribute to formation of tissues.) to grow on with serum (cell-food) in a environment which promotes growth. Examples include growing meat! 🐔 (Sounds awesome, right?)
Now that you are equipped with all the knowledge you need to understand the rest of the article, let us actually get to the topic: The future of meat!
The future of meat (Spoiler: No more FARMS!)
Theories seem to be revolving around this topic for so long! High protein insects, new personalized nutrition and much more are what people expect to be eating in the future, but what about the silent driver of climate change? Animal agriculture, that is!
You probably won’t be a fan of this idea once I tell you, but imagine your hamburger 🍔— same taste, mouth-feel, look — but the meat is not from a once-living animal like it is today, rather straight from the laboratory!
Crazy, right? You might be doubtful of its occurence, but believe me when I say this, it has already happened once — in 2013! Of course, it was a relatively new idea then and obviously we couldn’t expect much from it (in terms of sustainablity), but in my opinion, this occurence opened a new peephole; a peephole of the future of food, where in-vitro meat (lab-grown meat) will be the norm. The sooner we start to look through this peephole, the easier it will be for us to make the switch as new ideas like such pop in our dynamic world!
In the previous section, we looked at cellular agriculture and that is exactly what is put into action here! Currently, the best method involves these steps:
- Harvesting adult muscle stem cells (also known as myosatellite cells) from an animal (say, cow 🐄) in a painless procedure.
- These cells are grown in a medium that recreates the environment of the animal’s body.
- Stem cells are replicated (to increase their number) and then these cells are directed to develop into muscle cells 💪 (as that is one of the main components of meat)
- All other neccessary procedures like adding other cells to match nutritional content to create our desireable (tasty) product.
This process that we are trying to replicate is actually known as myogenesis which is the process involved in formation of muscle tissues.
…and voila! Your cruelty-free, sustainable hamburgers are ready to serve!
Hold up! You aren’t having lab-burgers for dinner yet!
Sadly, those steps aren’t as simple as they seem. In between them, a lot of important drawbacks make lab-grown meat a distant dream for now.
Remember, we need lab-grown meat not just for a wacky science experiment but for a better future and so, it needs to be cheap, widely available and should match all the other considerations. With my deepest regrets, here are some reasons why lab-grown meat isn’t here yet:
- We can’t recreate blood vessels which ferry oxygen to the cells.
- Public perception — It does seem weird eating something from the labs, right?
- Taste, isn’t it obvious?
- Slow rate of growth medium development 😟
- Serum derived from animals; won’t really help much to cut down greenhouse gas emissions.
- Recreating the texture of meat proves to be a challenge — Meat isn’t just muscle, the juiciness and flavor also comes from fat cells. Growing fat cells in a lab and later attempting to connect them to the muscle cells is NOT an easy task.
Because of these hurdles, lab grown meat is long ways away.
Let’s Conclude!
To conclude, we can say that the idea of lab grown meat though new is a great one. If we are able to manufacture and use it in the intended way (to help our planet and animals, feed growing population etc…), it will be a boon to all, otherwise, it might just end up worsening the already-undesireable situation we’ve got ourselves in and trust me, we DON’T want that happening.
I guess you have reached the end. Your curiosity did get the best of you. Here is a quote to ponder upon:
“We shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat a breast or a wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium” -Winston Churchill
Oh wait, don’t leave!
Here are some Action Items ✨
- Follow me on Medium! (I am going to be releasing a more in-depth article for lab-grown meat so stay tuned!)
- Comment down your key takeaways from this article.
- If you enjoyed this article, please give me some claps! I’d love to know it helped.
Also, here is a bit about me :)
Hey, I am Sayyida, a 13 y/o who is trying to make an impact. I am an Innovator at The Knowledge Society (TKS) where I am learning about exponential tech (one of which is cellular agriculture!). My interests are all over the place and are constantly changing but for now it is cellular agriculture (yup, you guessed it) and neuroscience!
Thank you for reading!
