Test Tube Burgers?

April 25, 2008

I’ll be honest. One of the big reasons that I’m a former vegetarian is that, despite my nagging guilt about eating something with a disturbingly cute face and my concerns about the serious environmental problems caused by raising massive numbers of animals for food, I finally just got sick of a steady diet of tofu burgers. You can slather them in mustard, mayonnaise and/or barbecue sauce, top them with a big juicy slice of vine-ripened tomato, and wash them down with a sip of Fosters’ new environmentally-friendly lager, whose brewing process uses a microbial fuel-cell process to generate energy from the byproducts. But despite all that taste bud obfuscation, when it comes down to it, you’re still chewing on bean curd.

But at last, there may be a near-future solution for those of us who are reluctant carnivores. Instead of raising and slaughtering animals for their flesh, what if the muscle cells that make up meat were cultured and grown in big vats in laboratory-factories?

The idea has been around for quite a while. Back in the late 1980s, the late academic and futurist  Michael Hooker went around giving speeches in which he predicted that in vitro meat would be a staple of the 21st century. The actual science to support the notion came along a decade or so later, when Touro College bioengineer Morris Benjaminson and colleagues successfully took chunks of muscle tissue from a goldfish, immersed them in a vat of nutrient-rich liquid, and succeeded in growing miniature fish fillets. As this 2002 New Scientist article details, the Benjaminson and his research team actually went a bit further to test the artificial food’s palatability:

To get some idea whether the new muscle tissue would make acceptable food, they washed it and gave it a quick dip in olive oil flavoured with lemon, garlic and pepper. Then they fried it and showed it to colleagues from other departments. "We wanted to make sure it'd pass for something you could buy in the supermarket," he says. The results look promising, on the surface at least. "They said it looked like fish and smelled like fish, but they didn't go as far as tasting it," says Benjaminson.

Benjaminson envisioned in vitro meat as a potential food source for NASA astronauts on lengthy space voyages, but animal rights activists quickly glommed onto the concept as well. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has offered a $1 million reward to the first scientist who can develop a palatable synthetic meat and sell it to the public by 2012. As part of the contest, PETA proposes holding a taste test, using a cruelty-free fried chicken recipe. 

Others are proposing in vitro meat as the solution for feeding the world’s burgeoning population without further straining the environment. Norway recently hosted the first-ever In Vitro Meat Symposium, at which researchers released a European study projecting that synthetic meat could be produced for a little more than $5,000 a ton, a cost that would make it competitive with meat from animals. Along these lines, Dutch researchers are forging ahead with efforts to grow ersatz pork chops (here’s a Reuters article on that).

In this country, New Harvest, a nonprofit research organization, is working to fund research and development of meat substitutes. (Here’s New Harvest’s FAQ on in vitro meat.) New Harvest co-founder and director, Jason Matheny, thinks that manufactured meat could be in supermarkets within a decade. In an email, he argues that it will be vastly better for us, in a variety of ways:

Cultured meat has the potential to be healthier, safer, less polluting, and more humane than conventional meat. Fat content can be more easily controlled. The incidence of foodborne disease can be significantly reduced, thanks to strict quality control rules that are impossible to introduce in modern animal farms, slaughterhouses, or meat packing plants. Inedible animal structures (bones, respiratory system, digestive system, skin, and the nervous system) need not be grown. As a result, cultured meat production should be more efficient than conventional meat production in its use of energy, land, and water; and it should produce less waste. Since meat production is responsible for even more greenhouse gas emissions than the entire transportation sector, it's critical that we develop a more efficient alternative.

Perhaps the biggest question: How eager will we all be to pick up a package of synthetic ground sirloin patties and throw them on the grill? Are we willing to eat something that was nurtured in a nutrient-rich solution, rather than on pasture grass? Are we willing to embrace and consume something unnatural, for the sake of the planet? Or does the very idea of synthetic food conjure up unappetizing memories of the late Charlton Heston revealing the actual ingredients of Soylent Green? Express your opinion below.

Comments

[Chico]

So what does in vitro meat taste like? And dont say "just like chicken"!

[Astroboy]

Soylent Green is people!

[Captain Carrot]

Humans don't really need meat, whether its real or synthetic. The same is true for other animal products, such as milk or eggs, though there's nothing wrong with consuming them as long as the animals are treated humanely. You can get all the protein you need by combining other foods, such as beans and rice. Following a vegetarian or better yet a vegan diet is not only good for you, but it's good for the planet as well.

Additionally, those of us in developed countries would do well to reduce our personal food consumption by 25 to 30 percent. We tend to eat much more than we need to live. If everyone in the U.S. and Europe learns to be satisfied with a little less, that might help to alleviate rising food prices in the rest of the world, where many people are struggling just to survive.

[Dina Globeluver]

More food for the world, less breeding animals just to eat them later, very interesting experiment in my opinion.

[caffeine driven stress magnet]

This is from an article on in vitro meat in Beef Magazine (Yes, there really is such a publication!) http://beefmagazine.com/mag/beef_testtube_meat/

Current technology only allows the growth of very thin layers of tissue, which would be suitable for grinding into such traditionally processed meats as hamburger, sausage, chicken nuggets or fish sticks. While current technology could produce a product with an identical flavor and texture to existing processed meats, it's nowhere close to being able to produce a steak. To grow large, three-dimensional pieces of tissue, it's necessary to grow blood vessels to supply nutrients to interior cells.

[Natural Man]

I wouldn't eat nothing that came out of a laboratory...

[Seth Bradley]

I wonder if eventually it might be possible to produce in vitro meat at a much lower cost than conventional meat. If we could provide a cheap, affordable protein source to impoverished nations in Africa and elsewhere, we could better the lives of millions of people--and in the process, help prevent additional environmental destruction.

[Bob]

One of the good things about the "fake" meat products that have been around for years is that they can be engineered to provide the ideal balance of vitamins and nutrients. They are generally low in fat and moderately high in protein. The main problem with these products is that many meat eaters find the taste lacking or even objectionable.

I think that in vitro meat could follow the example of the faux meats, providing a healthier alternative to the uncertain and disease-plagued livestock industry. It would also have a more familiar and acceptible taste for those who eat meat.

[iluvjorma]

didn't some crazy scientist in the early 1900s grow a chicken heart in a laboratory and keep it alive for like 20 years?

[Barbara]

yeah, but he didn't cook it and eat it, did he?

[Aurora Cooney]

There is already a cheap, affordable protein source that could feed all the improvished nations in Africa and elsewhere...unfortunately, it's being fed to the farm animals in order to feed our greedy habits. If you gave up a vegeterian diet because you were tired of soy burgers, then you don't have much of an imagination. I cook fabulous vegan meals using whole foods...rarely do I use processed soy products.

[Vegan Vengeance]

I agree. He's really a self-absorbed idiot.

[Meat Lover's Pizza]

so if the meat comes from a laboratory, should we call it Test-tube steak? HAHAHA

[Heather Moore]

While the idea of eating meat that is grown in a laboratory may make some people—especially vegans like me—a bit squeamish at first, you have to agree that in-vitro meat is an appetizing alternative to the current method of meat production. Not only would billions of animals be spared, our health would improve, we'd have more food to go around, and pollution, greenhouse gasses, and deforestation would be halted considerably.

But until in-vitro meat is a reality, there are plenty of other vegetarian alternatives. See www.VegCooking.com for recipes and product suggestions.

[Vegetarian but not Vegan]

It sounds like a good idea, but I don't know if I actually could eat the stuff, unless I had more information about the long-term health effects.

[Manny]

I don't see much here about the safety of eating meat from a laboratory. Would it be exactly the same as natural meat, or would there be some differences because of being grown in a vat of chemicals? This is something that must be answered.

[Burger King]

Remember what Bismark said, about how people are better off not knowing how either laws or sausages are made. If the burgers are bigger and juicier, who cares whether they come from a laboratory or a cow?

[Royale With Cheese]

Just don't tell people that it came from a test tube, and they'll be asking for seconds.

[Granola Head]

I wonder what the presidential candidates think about test tube meat? The only vegan to run for president was Dennis Kucinich, and he's out now.

[Joey]

Remember when Walter Mondale asked, "Where's the beef?"

[Jason Tobias]

This is from Jamais Cascio's Open the Future blog
http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/cascio20080407/

...Often, the issue really isn’t technology, but expense and willingness to change. Driving the cost of alternatives down to make them competitive with the depleting resource can be difficult; even more difficult can be getting people to accept a substitution service that isn’t exactly like the old one (even if it’s objectively “better"). Cultured meat would be far and away better than today’s meat processing industry—environmentally, ethically, health-wise—but, even if the product looked, tasted and felt just like “real” meat, a substantial number of people would likely avoid it simply because it was weird.

[Zeke Tolliver]

Interesting. I think that "test-tube meat" is part of a logical progression in finding ways to feed the world while the "natural" means by which to grow food is infringed upon by development. Of course, if this were to become a common means of producing meat, the very animals some of you wish to protect would become "expendible" and far fewer resources would be diplomated to furthering their survival. Not to mention the fact that the required habitats would no longer be needed and be developed more quickly. So, in the long term the great plains used to feed cattle would no longer be needed and would eventually disappear, I think. Basically, I'm not so sure that vitro meat would be as friendly to the environment and to the furry animals as some of you/us would automatically think. In addition, starvation is one of the means by which nature keeps her populations in check. Finding ways to synthesize food helps to sustain a larger world population (if used for the greater good), it doesn't solve the over-all problems of a world growing world (over)population. However, I think that the development of this techology is important to the future survival of our species. I can see the positives as well as the negatives. I think the only road block to this technology is a negative perception of test-tube food.

[Sebastian]

Interesting. We may have a future in which test-tube humans (the results of cloning) dine on test-tube meat. Will anything be real?

[Amanda]

People with aversions to eating something produced in a laboratory should remember that most processed foods are made with chemicals that would never be found in nature. Thus, if someone is opposed to eating lab grown meat they should probably refrain from eating just about everything short of organic fruits and vegetables.

That being said, growing meat in a test tube does seem a bit creepy and sounds like it belongs in a sci-fi movie. But the future is now, and it does seem to offer solutions for animal rights and world hunger.

[Horatio]

In Bill McKibben's book "The End of Nature," he talks about the extent to which humans have altered the environment, so that "natural" is kind of a misnomer at this point. Even when Americans eat "organic" fruits and vegetables, they're often fruits and vegetables that aren't native to the places where they were grown, and they've been altered by generations of cross-breeding. The same is true of farm animals. Beef cattle, for example, were brought to North America from Europe, and farmers replaced the hardy wild turkey with a weak, unhealthy domesticated version.

In view of all that, I don't see why eating meat grown in laboratories would more unnatural than what we eat now.