Synthetic Meat Means Better Animal Welfare, Less Harm to the Environment, and It’s Improving Rapidly

The first tasting of a synthetic hamburger obtained by multiplying animal cells in a bioreactor took place on August 5, 2013, and was considered reasonably successful: although the cost of that initial production was obviously exorbitant, as befits a proof of concept (€250,000), the exponential growth of the cell cultures — about ten weeks to obtain enough cells for a hamburger, but only twelve weeks to be able to produce a hundred thousand — make economic exploitation quickly viable, and the organoleptic characteristics were perfectly acceptable. As a reference, only about two thousand hamburgers are obtained from one cow, and to do this it must be kept alive and healthy for about eighteen months before slaughter.

Eight years ago, however, we were talking about obtaining a hamburger: minced meat, i.e., cells with practically no structure. The shortcut was obvious: why go through the complexity of obtaining a cell culture with structure, if we were then going to present it in the form of a hamburger? The reality was that culturing the cells in the bioreactor to structure themselves in the form of muscle, tendon or vascular tissue was beyond the reach of the technology at the time.

Now, scientists at Osaka University have succeeded in creating a steak of the legendary Wagyu beef, with its characteristic fatty marbling intermingled with muscle tissue, completely synthetically, starting with just a few cells from a living animal. In addition to culturing the cells, they have managed to differentiate them into the corresponding muscle fibers, adipose tissue and blood vessels, and then structure them in such a way that the result is similar to that of a complex tissue obtained from a living animal. The result, with all the data and with additional images and videos, has been published in Nature Communications.

The implications of obtaining meat from cultured cells instead of from a live animal are enormous, and cover multiple issues:

1. Reducing the number of existing livestock farms, where the treatment of animals, turned into mere products, are brutally mistreated. Humans, in many ways, have decided not to look at these authentic animal concentration camps, to ignore the suffering they produce, and to enjoy their products, which reach us in very clean polystyrene trays shrink-wrapped in plastic, or directly cooked on the table.
2. The climate emergency: in terms of emissions, there are few things more aberrant than raising animals in captivity for their meat. For every 100 grams of beef, 105 kilos of greenhouse gases are produced, mainly from the conversion of natural areas into pasture and cropland for feed, and from the methane resulting from digestion, not including transport and respiration.
3. Antibiotics: the regular and massive use of antibiotics in animal fattening generates increasingly resistant bacteria, which produce diseases that are more difficult to treat or a growing number of common complications.
4. Inefficiency: an enormous amount of the energy consumed by an animal never reaches those of us who consume its meat, and is used to build bones, blood, feathers, hair, or for its daily activities. Thirty-four calories are needed to produce one calorie of beef.
5. Water use: 34,000 liters of water are necessary to cover the production of feed, drink and the service and cleaning needs necessary to obtain one kilo of veal, which results in a conversion equation of 112 liters of water per gram of protein produced. In addition, we must consider the contamination of aquifers by animal waste in industrial quantities, which ends up generating bacterial proliferation or anoxia downstream.
6. Land use: around 80% of the land devoted to agriculture is used for cattle grazing or to obtain their food, rather than to obtain plants for human consumption. It is estimated that 80% of deforestation is related to this use.
7. The regular consumption of meat obtained under current conditions results in multiple diseases, from cancer to cerebrovascular complications, obesity, diabetes, encephalopathies, salmonella, listeria or E. coli.

The idea, therefore, is not necessarily to stop consuming meat, which although it is an option, tends to go against centuries of cultural conditioning and elements strongly encoded in the human species, and to obtain it through efficient processes of cellular multiplication, instead of raising animals in appalling conditions to exploit a small part of them. When we can cultivate cells industrially, we will have a range of options: from avoiding diseases to mitigating some of the side effects of meat, introducing, for example, compounds that make it healthier without losing its characteristics. This is just one approach to the problem of meat: cell cultures, so-called clean meat; without also exploring vegetable meat substitutes, as companies such as Impossible Foods, Beyond Meat and many others are doing and that can now be easily found in supermarkets or fast food chains.

Many billions of dollars are already being invested in a sector with huge global potential and where establishing a foothold already represents immense income and that has many implications for the future. Granted, there may be few things that can beat a good medium rare steak… but trust me: we will all give them a try.

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This post was previously published on Medium.

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