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

by Paul Shapiro

Farm subsidies cost the American taxpayer about $20 billion every year, more than double the EPA’s budget, mostly to support wealthy corporate farms.”

In other words, the meat industry receives indirect agricultural subsidies that at least somewhat artificially reduce the cost of the most expensive part of their business: the corn and soy grown to feed billions of animals. But just how much ending such livestock feed subsidies would increase the cost of meat is unclear. Some agricultural economists, like Purdue University’s Jayson Lusk, contend it would perhaps

only increase prices by 1 percent. But there are other subsidies that aid industrial animal ag, too, such as “surplus buy-ups” in which USDA helps industries that produce more than consumers want by purchasing their surplus eggs, pork, or other unwanted commodities. The foods then get dumped into federal prison cafeteria programs and other federal food programs. And perhaps more importantly, many of the costs of animal agriculture, including environmental and public health, are largely externalized and not reflected in meat prices.

“It takes twenty-three calories of inputs to produce one calorie of beef. Our production techniques are aiming to make this three to one.”

“DESTINATION: World’s Largest Meat Company By 2030.” So reads the sign just inside the entrance of the Project Jake lab.

There are thirty-five million cattle slaughtered for food annually in the United States, compared to nearly nine billion chickens. That means that for every one cow who enters a slaughter plant in the United States, 257 chickens enter at the same time. Put another way, when you include turkeys, that’s nearly three hundred birds killed every second of every day inside slaughter plants around the clock—just in America alone.

Hampton Creek is spending a colossal one-third of its budget on research and development. Traditionally, the global food industry is the stingiest among major sector spending on R-and-D, often setting aside less than 1 percent of its budget for the matter. This is in contrast to the highest R-and-D investors—like computing (25 percent), health care (21 percent), and automobiles (16 percent). The food industry has been far more focused on marketing existing products than developing new ones.

“If you can think of anything else I could be doing to prevent over a million life years of suffering per hour, let me know.”

Fischer was working toward forming his own clean-meat start-up before he got the call from Balk.

“When I get up in the morning, I’m thinking about avian satellite cell culture. When I go to sleep, I’m thinking about avian satellite cell culture. It’s probable that I know more about these particular cells than anyone else on earth, and let me assure you: they’re easier to work with than cattle or other mammalian cells.” So says Paul Mozdziak, poultry science professor at North Carolina State University.

had brought his graduate student Marie Gibbons on board with the funds. Their goal is simple: to help establish an animal cell line that can be used as a common research tool by academic researchers at other universities.

Part of his message to these companies is that the focus on growing cattle and pig muscle cells to produce beef and pork is noble, but just from a technological standpoint, Mozdziak argues that chicken and turkey cells are much easier to work with. “First things first, they grow a lot better in culture than mammalian cells do. They have better plasticity—you can get them to do what you want much more easily.” Interestingly,

he’s not sure why, but Mozdziak points out that with mammals, it’s easier to work with cells biopsied from younger animals, whereas with birds, a more mature animal has better satellite cells with which to start.

Ranchers whose cattle spend their time grazing are often those spearheading the lobbying efforts for shooting wolves in the United States and for rounding up wild horses.

Just as the company licenses its plant proteins to the giants of the food industry to enable them to make their own products egg-free, Tetrick intends to leverage its discovery of plant-based media sources to enable other clean meat companies, as well as hopefully—one day soon—the Tysons and Perdues of the world. In other words, Hampton Creek wants its competitors to be producing affordable clean meat, too, with its technology of course.

“Antibiotic-resistant infections are linked to at least two million illnesses and twenty-three thousand deaths in the United States each year,” Consumer

Sadly, forty-eight million Americans are sickened annually from food contaminated with Salmonella and other pathogens. And the biggest source of the problem is chicken and turkey meat. “More [food-borne illness] deaths were attributed to poultry than to any other commodity,” reports the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Foie gras is graded by its iron content and number of blood vessels (the less of each, the better). As a result of its production method in which they can control these factors, Fischer projects that Hampton Creek’s product will be “the world’s highest-grade foie gras.” Whether this will be enough to revolutionize the $3 billion global foie gras market is yet to be seen.

(there are even stem cells at the root of a detached feather,

Hampton Creek’s drawnup models for a future four-hundred-thousand-square-foot meat-production facility: two hundred bioreactors, producing seventy-six pounds of bluefin tuna per second,

The plan right now is to make the first sale of an animal product made without requiring the use of an animal by 2018, at a price “within shouting distance” of the conventional product, says Tetrick. When I press him as to what he defines as “shouting distance,” he offers 30 percent higher as a goal for the initial commercial offerings.

piece. Solina Chau, the face of Li Ka-shing’s Horizons Ventures,

2015 Oklahoma State survey that found that more than 80 percent of Americans, the same number who say they support labeling foods containing GMOs, say they support “mandatory labels on foods containing DNA.”

late 2016, the FDA finalized a rule that allows food companies to determine if their ingredients are GRAS without having to wait, sometimes for years, for the FDA to conduct its own studies. The new rule was condemned by groups like the Consumers Union, which argued in favor of modifications to the rule that would’ve required independent experts to conclude if an ingredient is GRAS rather than let the food company conduct its own studies to make that determination on its own. The FDA retains the ability to challenge any ingredient’s GRAS designation, but the company itself now makes that determination first.

In Europe, the government exerts much more control over such designations. The European Commission (EC) publishes a list of “Novel Foods,” which it defines as “food that has not been consumed to a significant degree by humans in the EU prior to 1997,” the year in which this regulation took effect. Some of these foods, such as chia seeds and agave syrup, aren’t actually new but were simply not consumed in the EU until recently. Others, meanwhile, are actual products of biotech, such as oils enriched with phytosterols to cut cholesterol. Of the ten categories the EC uses to classify these novel foods, one seems specifically intended to address the issue at hand: “Food consisting of, isolated from, or produced from cell culture or tissue culture derived from animals, plants, microorganisms, fungi, or algae.” Another of the categories includes, “Food consisting of, isolated from, or produced from microorganisms, fungi, or algae.”

Novel foods can be sold in the European Union—many Europeans are happily enjoying their chia seeds today, for example—but only after the EC has determined them to be safe for consumers. Even then, the...

Many clean meat enthusiasts are in agreement on this point: if cellular-ag-produced foods fail because the plant-based protein companies become wildly successful, they’ll all be thrilled. They mostly look at clean animal products simply as a concession to human nature—people really want to eat meat from animals, and this is a much better way to produce it.

And research by animal advocacy groups themselves shows that 86 percent of vegetarians eventually return to an omnivorous diet.

In recent years, dozens of “ag-gag” bills have been introduced throughout the nation, all intended to prevent transparency in the meat industry. Some go so far as to make it a crime simply to take a photo or video of a slaughter plant or factory farm. Idaho’s and Utah’s laws doing just that were struck down as unconstitutional. Others essentially make it illegal for a potential undercover investigator to gain employment at an agribusiness operation. Iowa’s law doing this is still in effect.

there isn’t a single federal law relating to the treatment of animals on farms.

Upton Sinclair, author of the fictionalized exposé of meat packing facilities, The Jungle, when he observed, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

well. “It’s important to realize that change does not necessarily need to start with clear moral attitudes,” she notes. “In some cases people adopt attitudes that accompany the behavior that they are already demonstrating. In this case this might mean that when people get used to eating cultured meat, the idea of factory farming or killing animals may gradually become stranger and less acceptable.”

conservative Fox News pundit and Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer believes future generations will likely look back in horror at our treatment of animals. But he recognizes that what will lead to that may not be humane sentiment at first. Eating animals will fall by the wayside for many of us, and he says it will be “largely market-driven as well. Science will find dietary substitutes that can be produced at infinitely less cost and effort. At which point, meat will become a kind of exotic indulgence, what the cigar . . . is to the dying tobacco culture of today.”

nincompoop.” In other words, if you eat pork, you’re probably more resistant to believing studies finding that pigs are even smarter than dogs. If you eat a lot of chicken, it’ll likely be hard for you to accept that chickens have language, good memories, and can even do basic math. (All true, by the way.)

As evidence shows time and again, we like to think that our behavior flows from our logically considered beliefs, but in reality, we almost always adjust our beliefs to comport with the behaviors we want to engage in.

it’s easier to act your way into a new way of thinking than to think your way into a new way of acting.

respondents were given either beef or nuts to snack on during the study, after which they were asked about the intelligence of cattle. Unsurprisingly, those who’d been given beef thought cows are far more dimwitted than did the nut consumers.

So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do.

Buckminster Fuller was referencing when he declared his axiom: “To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”