Will lab-grown meat save the planet?

More and more people eat meat. It’s a fact. Meat isn’t that special anymore as it was a long time ago. In the past, you only ate meat on Sundays. It was expensive and it was difficult to make. You had to go to the butcher, who slaughtered the animal or you even did it yourself. But nowadays, you go to McDonalds and you buy a burger for 1€. It’s almost nothing. Thousands of animals are kept in massive factory farms, where they just eat and grow. Until they get slaughtered. Scientists already say that this kind of factory farming plays a big role in global warming. So what can we do? Maybe, scientists found the solution: cultured meat.

What is cultured meat, you may ask yourself? Well, when I heard of it for the first time, I was amazed and scared at the same time. Essentially, cultured meat or (how scientists call it) in-vitro meat is produced in a lab instead of an animal. In theory, cultured meat has the same taste, the same structure and the same ingredients, but no animal had to live and suffer for it.

The idea for the cultured meat came from Jason Matheny in the early 2000s, who also founded the first non-profit organization for in vitro meat research. After a few years of development, the first cultured meat was shown by Mark Post, a professor of the University of Maastricht. It was just a little burger patty, so only very few people could actually taste it. But those who tasted it didn’t notice a big difference between normal meats.

So now you may ask, how it actually works. How do scientists grow meat but without an animal? The whole process is pretty complicated, but you can divide the production into three main steps. First of all, you need to select the right cells to start on. Multiple types of cells qualify for that job, but there is not the perfect cell for the meat growth. So you have to make compromises to find the perfect cell type. The second step is to apply the growth medium. The growth medium is the nutrient the cell needs to grow. You can say that it’s the food for the cell. After that, the cells are placed into a bio-reactor to supply the cells with the energy they need. The last step is the scaffolding. The scaffold is the component that gives the cells the structure and order of meat. Without it, the cells would just float around and go all over the place. The perfect scaffold is edible, so it doesn’t have to be removed afterwards.

After that technical part I also want to show the advantages of cultured meat over real meat. We know that meat out of the lab tastes and looks the same like real meat. But it is also much better for the environment because you don’t have the methane pollution that is made by factory farming. It is much more water and energy efficient as well because animals need food, which requires energy and water to make. With cultured meat, you can invest all the energy into the meat production, which is not the case with animal farming because the animals don’t use all their energy for producing meat but for walking and all the other stuff they do. So you see, this is why cultured meat could be such a huge step against the global warming.

But what’s the problem? Why is meat out of the lab not a big thing already? That’s because it’s still pretty expensive and difficult to produce. There are still a lot of challenges and problems to solve. But there are several companies working and researching on cultured meat.

So all in all you can say that cultured meat is the future. Maybe someday, we won’t even have conventional meat anymore because the lab meat is so good and cheap. But until that happens, there still has to be a lot of researching done and a lot of time will pass.

Max L.

Main source: Wikipedia