Clean Meat: How Growing Meat Without Animals Will Revolutionize Dinner and the World

by Paul Shapiro

The World Wildlife Fund points out this fact, observing that “the expansion of soy to feed the world’s growing demand for meat often contributes to deforestation and the loss of other valuable ecosystems in Latin America.”

The Center for Biological Diversity

“Take Extinction Off Your Plate,”

“Preventing catastrophic warming is dependent on tackling meat and dairy consumption, but the world is doing very little,” warns the Britain-based Royal Institute of International Affairs,

Chatham House,

2011 study published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology by an Oxford University researcher, Hanna Tumisto, estimated that cultured beef could require up to 45 percent less energy, 99

percent less land, and 96 percent less water than conventional beef.

90 percent of the GM crops planted in America are fed to farm animals.

carneries?),

“Eat Meat, Not Animals.”

Good analogy between the decline of the whaling industry due to market forces from petroleum, and potential decline in factory farming from clean meat.

Kerosene, which is derived from petroleum, offered a much better yet more affordable alternative to whale oil.

in just thirty years, the whaling industry was decimated, shrinking 95 percent, largely, though not entirely, because a better, cheaper alternative arose and supplanted it.

open and flagrant abuse of equines on a daily basis and consequently founded the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) in 1866.

Wayne Pacelle, CEO of the Humane Society of the United States, remarks in his book The Humane Economy, it “was primarily Henry Ford and not . . . ASPCA founder Henry Bergh who was at the wheel in dramatically reducing cruelty to horses in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.”

“An In Vitro Edible Muscle Protein Production System (MPPS).”

according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, more than a quarter of the earth’s ice-free land is used for livestock grazing,

third of our cropland is devoted to feeding our farm animals.

that the Netherlands, pressed by a number of committed environmentalists in its government, had for years been investigating alternative protein sources derived from plants rather than animals.

Dutch government initiated a project, Protein Foods, Environment,

Technology, and Society (PROFETAS), which championed pea protein production as an efficient protein of the future, in part since peas cou...

Willem van Eelen, had for years been trying, with only modest success, to culture meat.

$2 million euros would soon be devoted to the experiments, which would be carried out at three Dutch universities.

“In Vitro–Cultured Meat Production,” was published in the journal Tissue Engineering in 2005. In the paper, three tissue-engineering researchers—Peter Edelman, Doug McFarland, and Vladimir Mironov—joined Jason Matheny in laying out the case for the potential of this new technology.

In the end, Matheny’s small group of friends settled on “cultured meat.”

The results were pretty stark. In the two surveys GFI conducted, “cultured” ranked fourth out of five in terms of consumer acceptance. In first place was a term Matheny had considered in 2005 but ultimately decided against: “clean meat.”

with Susie Weintraub, an executive vice president of strategic marketing and business excellence for Compass Group, the largest food service company on earth. In 2016 Fortune magazine named Weintraub “one of the most innovative women in food,” and she’s often regarded as among the most powerful people in the food industry.

Subsequent polls and focus groups conducted in 2016 by Animal Charity Evaluators and in 2017 by New Harvest both confirmed what GFI had found: “clean” substantially outperformed “cultured,” leading most of the companies in the cell-ag field to switch from “cultured” to “clean.”

New Harvest Cultured Tissue Fellowship, a collaboration with Tufts University in which one student will study in the school’s Tissue Engineering Research Center as a postgrad.

At the end of her studies, Natalie Rubio, the

first fellow in the program, will hold the first-ever PhD in c...

“Start-ups keep their intellectual property private,” Datar says. “It’d be a shame for any one company to control the IP on how to grow meat. In my opinion, at this point in time, open-source academic research will do a lot to advance the science of cultured meat. Once the base technology is advanced enough, then we can

get into competition.” Because of this view, New Harvest now bills itself as a research institute, and its staff of three acts as support and a funding source for its team of research fellows.

“There are basically three things that can happen going forward,” Brin predicts. “One is that we all become vegetarian. I don’t think that’s really likely. The second is we ignore the issues and that leads to continued environmental harm, and the third option is we do something new.”

the Gallup poll actually found that the lowest income respondents (earning less than $20,000 a year) ate the least amount of fast food, while higher earners (more than $75,000 a year) ate the most.

The only other person involved in the project at that time who shared Post’s passion was food chemist Peter Verstrate.

Sara Lee agreed to become a corporate partner in a Dutch government-funded experiment—the same one that Jason Matheny had successfully lobbied to fund.

Post figured he needed to grow about twenty thousand bovine muscle fibers

from his starter cells to have enough meat for a burger.

no matter how you slice it, Post and Verstrate can grow cattle muscle a whole lot faster than a cow can, and once at scale, a whole lot more muscle than any herd of cows could in that same time.

Using this culturing process, Post calculated, one sample from one cow could, in theory, produce twenty thousand tons of meat, or more than four hundred thousand cows’ worth of beef—enough to make about 175 million Quarter Pounders.

To Friedrich’s mind, there’s ample reason to suspect the sector needs private companies like Mosa Meat and its even newer competitors, and it needs them now. For starters, there are resources that will flow to a private venture that won’t flow to a public one. If there were no private companies, the movement would be leaving millions of dollars on the table; millions of dollars that could otherwise be developing this technology. Few of the venture capitalists we’ll meet later in this book who are funding these start-ups would otherwise have been offering university grants. Equally important is whether many of the people in the for-profit tissue-engineering world who work for corporate salaries would even be willing to work

in an academic institution on a grant. In other words, one would presume the best tissue engineers in the world know that they can command much higher paychecks at companies rather than at schools. Some of the best will be willing to work in academia, but many likely won’t, and their absence from the field could slow the commercialization of clean meat considerably.

Research indicated that the serious focus and scale-up efforts needed for this endeavor weren’t suited to an academic environment like Post’s lab. “In academia,” Valeti says, “the emphasis is on grants, publications, tenure, and crippling university overheads and indirect costs.” In addition, many of the systems were set up to support organregeneration work, not what Valeti and Genovese were trying to accelerate.

Scientists are working towards producing meat by using animal cells instead of living animals. This new method of harvesting meat is called “cultured meat” and will likely be available to the public within the next decade. It is important to note that cultured meat is real animal meat, so it should not be confused with current meat substitutes which are made from plants. If cultured meat is proven safe by long-term research, tastes the same as current/conventional meat and is priced affordably, would you eat cultured meat?

Among the fifteen hundred adults, the numbers were similar: 62 percent were willing to eat it without knowing its benefits, while 72 percent were willing once they knew of those benefits.

Despite the fact that his meat doesn’t use GMO technology,

The fish was first submitted for FDA approval twenty years prior to its approval, despite the FDA concluding the fish is safe for humans to eat.

One of the skeptics is synthetic biologist Christina Agapakis. The scientist, who earned her PhD in biomedical sciences at Harvard, wrote a piece denouncing what she sees as the false promise of cultured meat. “Cell culture is one of the most expensive and resource-intensive techniques in modern biology,” she warns. “Keeping the cells warm, healthy, well-fed, and free of contamination takes incredible labor and energy.” It’s one thing to spend like that for medically therapeutic uses, but no one’s going to drop those kind of dollars for food. “Grand technological fixes can look good if you don’t peer too close at their workings. But as should be clear once you examine the case of in vitro meat, the meat problem won’t really be solved with flashy tech.” The only real solution, Agapakis believes, is for humans just to eat less meat.

These insurance subsidies lower the price of crops like corn, helping factory farmers, for whom feed costs can reach 70 percent of production costs.