The Future of Cultured Meat: A Pivotal Moment for the Industry
The concept of cultured meat has been gaining significant attention in recent years, with many companies vying to become leaders in the industry. However, the type of cells used for cultured meat production is crucial in determining its success. Different types of farming have different requirements, and not all types of cells are suitable for every method.
The use of a completely different type of farming approach would make it challenging to find the best type of cells for that specific process. As a result, researchers may need to explore alternative options. On the other hand, if we're talking about growing meat in a bioreactor, then cells that can grow really quickly and reach high densities are essential. They should also be able to grow in dirt-cheap media, last forever, and be really tasty, safe, and resistant to shear.
The odds of beef, chicken, or pork being anywhere near the front of the best possible things that we can produce on a large scale using cultured meat technology are nearly zero. This is because these types of animals have been consumed for thousands of years, and their genetic makeup has adapted over time to be well-suited for this purpose.
A company called Vow, an Australian cultured meat startup, has made headlines recently by creating a giant woolly mammoth meatball using genetic information from an extinct animal. They took the DNA sequence from a mammoth muscle protein and filled in the gaps with cells from an elephant, the mammoth's closest living relative. The company is currently conducting studies with muscle cells from various types of animals to see what actually grows best in a bioreactor.
The question remains, which animal would you like to taste if you knew that the animal itself was going to be unharmed? Are there things that you would like to try that you currently can't? Or is there anything that you wouldn't want to eat? This will depend on cultural influences and personal preferences. Let us know in the comments what you would or wouldn't try.
If no single animal solves all of the problems, then researchers may need to take little bits of DNA from different animals to create a new, entirely artificial product. Some companies are using this technology to engineer entirely new types of food from scratch. The goal is to have consumers purchasing meat based on brands and familiarity with the experience, rather than the animal it comes from.
According to an interview with the CEO of one company, it's more likely than not that a cell line will ultimately be needed to make cultured meat work. They've been exploring this option for three plus years now and would need FDA approval to sell such a line if they switch. The nutritional composition of the food produced is also unknown at this point, as red meat from cows has hemoglobin from blood in it, making it a good source of iron.
The industry is at a pivotal moment, with many companies facing funding issues. If some companies don't work together and share their research, it's uncertain whether many will survive. Let us know your thoughts on this in the comments.
"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enThis is real meat! This is a plant-based alternative and this is meat muscle cells growing in a Petri dish. Well actually it's just pink food coloring and water because I didn't want to spend thousands of dollars on something that looks just like that on camera but I want to know whether muscle cells grown in a lab can replace the meat that we buy at the shops like it's been predicted to do or is the idea of lab growing meat dead? Lab grown meat first hit the news over a decade ago now when Maastricht University unveiled their$330,000 lab grown hamburger patty. We use cells from a cow we harvest them through a harmless procedure uh take them out of the cow expand them in the lab until we have 40 billion cells um and we do that in a particular way so that they form real muscle fibers and that's the basis for our meat. Close to meat it's not that juicy. It was only muscle cells and no fat so it was understandably dry but it was proof of concept it was possible to grow meat in a lab instead of in the paddock. Now at the time they said they doubted that this could ever be scaled because it's so expensive but since then hundreds of cultured meat companies have popped up all over the world and more than $3 billion has been invested into researching the idea so why were investors so Keen to throw their money at this idea well in the us alone the meat industry is worth $900 billion a year and they wanted just a little piece of that pie or preferably a big piece of that pie and as well as that the cultured meat companies have been promoting themselves as a Slaughter free cruelty free alternative to factory farming they've also said that they are going to solve all future food shortage issues and of course that they are so much better for the environment than the old way of farming it's better for the environment it's better on your wallet and it's cruelty-free beef unfortunately is one of the biggest contributors to climate change each step of the supply chain is doing damage the only thing we need really is kind of electricity and energy input and obviously we can power that renewably cultivated beef when grown at scale using renewable energy has a 90% lower greenhouse gas emissions 90% lower land use and lower pollution as you know when calculating the environmental impact of making a product it is a huge sum you have to go right to the beginning and go okay for every ingredient you need how is that growing how is that produced and transporting that to where you are at the lab and then the electricity and then making the equ equipment that you need to run all of this stuff and every little piece of the puzzle has to be accounted for to get to that end number and if you listened carefully there you may have heard the words when grown at scale using renewable energy when grown at scale using renewable energy they just roll off the tongue but it's not actually being made at the moment using 100% renewable energy and it's not been made at scale it's only been done on a small scale and when the University of California looked into the current way it's being done using pharmaceutical grade equipment and ingredients it came out at between 4 and 25 times worse for the environment per kilo than traditional meat farming the argument to that from the cultivated meat companies is when we scale we will plan to use 100% renewable energy and we won't use pharmaceutical grade ingredients anymore we'll use food grade ingredients so it won't be quite so heavy on the environmental outputs but that's all just in theory nobody's actually scouted it so nobody actually knows some researchers say the environmental impacts of cultivating meat will need to be closely monitored as the industry grows just by the virtue of creating this meat in a lab doesn't necessarily mean it's better for the environment but even if we ignore the theoretical yet completely unproven environmental claims about cultivated meat it still had $3 billion in invested into it and surely the investors want a return on their money so why is it not been sold in stores well part of that reason is waiting for government approvals Singapore was the first country to approve cultivated meat being able to be sold for human consumption and that was followed by the US and Israel this morning the USDA has approved sell cultivated meat to be sold to the public for the first time an Israeli company has been approved to sell the world's first States made from cultivated beef cells announcing the news Israeli Prime Minister Benin nanyu called it a global breakthrough and here in Australia one local company has just passed the safety tests with the Australian New Zealand food standards Authority and if all goes to plan they'll be able to sell their product which is a qua paa here to customers in Australia fairly soon the application process is quite slow and each company has to apply on their own and they have to apply for each product that they want to sell it's not just a blanket all cultivated meat is fine it doesn't work that way even so not everybody is happy about the idea would you believe that this is actually artificial lab grown meat it was no I'm kidding this is Australian wagu ribe eyes these are orange fed they are amazing please stay away from that fake stuff Italy and some states in the US are moving to ban cultured mate altogether apparently in response to political pressure from the meat industry the Alabama Senate recently passed the bill that would ban lab grown meat take your fake lab grown meat elsewhere we're not doing that in the State ofFlorida is designed to represent a threat to agriculture as we know it but legally they can still sell it elsewhere in the US and in Singapore so is it at restaurants and shops there no it's really really hard to find it even if you wanted to taste cultivated meat you'd be hard pressed to find it any where it keeps popping up in different restaurants and then disappearing again cultivated chicken has been served at one restaurant in Washington and at Barren in California cultured Quail pafait was sold at a few high-end restaurants in Singapore and lab grown chicken was in Singapore for a short time too and customers seem to like it it looks it looks exactly the same it's really good that is oh wow now granted those videos were put out by the companies themselves so they're very unlikely to choose people who said they didn't like it to show on camera sorry I don't like it well she clearly didn't like it but lots of people did so why is it not available for them to choose if they want it well part of the problem is every company has said we just need to scale up and then we'll be able to make it cheaper but nobody has figured out how to scale up these operations in a way that is going to be economical so nobody has scaled up because grow growing living cells that need to multiply is quite a tricky thing you need to provide it with everything that the animal's body was providing but do all of that in a big steel tank called a bioreactor it keeps them at a steady body temperature supplies them with oxygen keeps the pH stable provides all the nutrients they need and the growth hormones they need to grow and of course you need to keep the whole thing 100% sterile because those big metal tanks don't have an immune system so they can't fight off viruses bacteria or diseases and the liquid that's normally in those tanks in the pharmaceutical industry they just use a liquid that they buy from a company that has nearly everything in it that the cells need and then they add to it fetal bovine serum and that provides all of the growth factors that are needed to make the cells multiply now most of the cultivated meat companies have moved away from using fetal Bon serum or FBS for short because you can't really promote yourself as being a Slaughter free alternative when you require the blood taken from the heart of an unborn baby cow when its mother was slaughtered some companies are still using FBS not in their big bioreactors but in the early stages when they're developing the different cell lines now obviously the public is not very happy about that so they are working towards finding a way to not use that as well as that they're trying to find find cheaper alternatives to that nutrient liquid that the pharmaceutical industry just Buys in because it's really expensive but cells need lots of things they need sugars and amino acids and vitamins and minerals and all sorts of things the thought Emporium has a really interesting video you can watch if you're more interested in that line of things where he experiments using different drinks and FBS or FBS alternatives to see what cells grow well in Gatorade and power raid did surprisingly well here's Gatorade at 40% concentration the cells look pretty healthy nice and green good morphology not too much dead stuff but at 50% there was a sharp fall off and everything dies that really illustrates the need to get your nutrient liquid perfect for the cells that you're growing or you won't have any cultured meat the other issue that they are trying to Grapple with is scaling up the bioreactors Biore reactors are really expensive and the facility with the most of them is not growing cultured meat South Korea is now home to the world's biggest biopharmaceutical Factory the company invested roughly 1.4 billion on this plant it's as big as 29 football fields put together and spans 23.8 million squ M that plant has a lot of bioreactors and when you add the capacity of all of those up you get just over 250,000 L which sounds like a lot until you hear this the average Tyson plant in the US for cows produces about 330 million pounds of meat a year if you were to take the biggest cell culture facility in the entire world the biggest one in the entire world which is Samson biologics in South Korea and that was to run every single hour for an entire year it would produce less meat than Tyson produces in a day so you'd need something much bigger than that facility to even scratch the surface a few years ago the company eat just announced that they were going to make a facility with 10 huge 250,000 L bioreactors some people speculated that the cells might not even grow very well in a bioreactor that is that beak because it hasn't been tested at that scale before and others said if there's any contamination you're just going to lose so much allil at once that it's not a good idea I guess we'll never know because at the moment it just is in legal trouble they're being sued for over a million dollars by the company that was supposed to make those bioreactors for allegedly not paying their bills another company upside last year announced that they were going to start building a big scaled up operation and then only 5 months later said the whole building was paused you see investment in cultivated meat companies is on a downward Trend possibly because nobody has solved that scaling up problem and so nobody has got it to Market in bulk yet basically the cultivated meat companies need to come up with a cheaper way of doing this or it's not going to be commercially viable some people are pivoting and coming up with the idea of doing hybrid products which are a mixture of plant-based and cultivated meat cells to get the right taste e just has launched their product good meat 3 which is just 3% cultivated meat some people questioned whether they should be able to call it a hybrid product when the percentage of cultivated meat cells is so small and certainly it's not what they were initially promising this is manufacturing chicken at scale and the end product is not plant-based chicken it's not some different form it is literally chicken I think lower percentages are the way to go now it allows us to make more at a lower cost why we ultimately figure out how to increase a percentages to a higher and higher level so it turns out if you want more chicken in your cultivated chicken they need to solve three problems they need a solution to the Biore reactors that is cheaper possibly whole new technology that doesn't even exist that someone invents just for this industry they need a cheaper alternative to the nutrient liquid which as we said they've already done some research into that but a lot more is needed and possibly they need to make a change to the cells that they're using in the first place you see we mainly eat beef pork lamb chicken because they taste good they've got a good amount of meat on them and because they're easy for us to farm but cell cultivated in a tank in a bioreactor is a completely different type of farming so they may not be the best type of cells for that what would be the best cells for cultured meat they would of course grow really quickly they' grow to really high densities they' grow in dirt cheap media basically Power Aid they would last forever and they would be really tasty safe and resistant to Shear so you can scale them up the odds of beef chicken or pork being anywhere near close to the front of the best possible things that we can be producing to scale cultured meat as quickly and as economically as possible is nearly zero that's a CEO of the company that made headlines a few years ago for making a giant woolly mammoth meat ball a company called vow an Australian cultured meat start up use genetic information from an extinct animal and they took the DNA sequence from a mammoth muscle protein and filled in the gaps with cells from an elephant the mammoth's closest living relative the mammothmeatball they're currently doing studies with muscle cells from all different types of animals to see what actually grows the best in a bioreactor which brings me to the question what animals would you like to take taste if you knew that the animal itself was going to be unharmed are there things that you would like to try that you currently can't and also is there anything that you wouldn't try that you don't want to taste I feel like this is going to be more culturally influenced it's going to depend on where you're from as to what you think is okay to eat and what you don't want to eat but let me know in the comments what you will try or what you don't want to try and what if no animal solves all of those problems there's nothing that actually suits to grow in a bioreactor and so then their only option is to take little bits of DNA from different ones to make the perfect thing that's going to grow to be able to grow meat like that would you want to eat something that's been genetically modified in that way to make something totally new that's not actually an animal you've ever heard of we use this technology to engineer entirely new types of food from the ground up so it's our goal that in the future you'll purchase meat based on Brands and you'll have familiarity with the experience of eating those Brands and why you choose them not based on the animals that they come from the CEO from EJ also said in an interview that it's more likely than not that a crisper enabled cell line will ultimately be needed to make this work and they've been looking into that for three plus years now obviously if they switch to that they're going to have to get FDA approval to sell that line because it's completely different to what they have been promoting and talking about before I have so many more questions we haven't even had a chance to look at the nutritional composition of this food yet like red meat from a cow has hem iron in it from hemoglobin from the blood and we can absorb that really readily and well that's why it's a good source of iron this meat's not going to have that if it's red meat that has no blood so it's going to be completely different but all of that aside I think this industry is at a very pivotal moment where with the de in funding a lot of the companies are not going to make it and if the other ones don't work together and share their research I'm not sure if many of them will make it through what do you think let me know in the comments with thanks to my amazing patrons for your support that allows me to do this research and summarize this area for you make it a great week by being kind to others and I'll see you on Friday\n"
