lab-grown meat is coming to a grocery store near you. are you ready for it?

Farm to table protein is about to become lab to table. The environmental benefits could be massive, but will people be willing to eat it, and can they afford it?

No matter how much we’re told that meat production is, technically, an environmental disaster, we want more and more of it. And while vegetarians and vegans argue that we no longer need meat, the current medical consensus is that we very much benefit from it, and it’s the easiest way for us to get iodine, iron, zinc, and vitamins, as well as many fatty acids that make it easier to absorb fat-soluble nutrients. We shouldn’t go overboard with it, and an all-meat diet is a very stupid idea, but adding lean meats to diets rich in vegetables, nuts, and healthy oils has significant positive effects. Still, we are faced with the inconvenient question of how we could make meat more ethical.

We could collectively decide that fine, we’ll make do with supplements and refuse to touch meat. We’d need to convert 78% of the planet to this view, as well as those in the current 22% who are currently vegetarian by necessity rather than choice, which number in the many hundreds of millions. But if we were successful, we’d shave 60% off our food emissions, or a total of 15.6% of our global greenhouse footprint. That’s not going to fix climate change, but it’s a significant step forward if combined with all the other things we’re working on right now. And it will also cut off one of the biggest sources of antibiotic resistance today: industrial animal framing.

Sadly, there’d be no more meat. We could rationalize that it was bad for us anyway as it was often tainted with hormones, antibiotics, and filler, assembled from around the world, and some meat products have even been linked to certain GI cancers. But that would just be coping with the loss of our tasty steaks. The reality is that we would still want and need meat, and many of the horrors of the meat industry today are choices to cut costs and lower quality that can be fixed with oversight and regulation, and not ironclad facets of animal farming. Likewise, the much talked about Aporkalypse was badly misreported and overblown. So, what do we do now?

where meat meets science

Enter lab made meat. No longer a fantasy, or an experiment with $330,000 burgers, it has USDA approval to be served at restaurants and sold in grocery stores near you as quickly as the companies creating it can provide it. And according to food critics, the lab chicken very much tastes like chicken. Well, mostly. Due to the cost, about half of the final product right now are plant-based fillers that try to combine with the cultured meat, but this is not a permanent feature. Once production finally scales up, it would be indistinguishable from the real thing because it would be the real thing, just grown in a spinning bio-reactor instead of a coop, or, more likely, a tiny pen.

There are two ways to grow meat in labs. The first is to take some cells from a muscle biopsy of an animal, i.e. an actual cow, or chicken, or fish. Then you place it in a broth of nutrients and seal it in a perfect environment for those cells to grow and develop into more muscle tissue. That environment could be a petri dish or a bio-reactor, but fundamentally, it just needs to be clean. The other way is identical, but using animal stem cells which can, in principle, divide forever and would be more scalable, though some scientists are concerned they could rack up too many mutations over years of use, and cause unknown production issues down the road.

Either way, when the end result is cleaned from the nutrients, packaged, and cooked, it’s just like the meat we eat now from a biochemical standpoint. One could argue it’s even better since there’s no prophylactic use of antibiotics to a disturbing degree, or zoonotic diseases found in factory farms, or actual slaughter of the animal for meat, which happens about 80 billion times a year today. In the future, the end result could even have added nutrients and fewer fats or enzymes associated with negative health outcomes, although that part is very much in contention for both ethical and scientific reasons. Still, for now, it’s slowly but surely headed to your plate.

why scaling up is hard to do

But lab grown meat isn’t a panacea. Right now it’s a pharmacy grade product which is made in small batches. That’s great for the Michelin star restaurants which want to try and serve it as a novelty, but impossible for feeding billions of people. Production will need to scale up many orders of magnitude, and how it’s done is also critical. Already there are vocal opponents and critics who worry that meat labs will dethrone farms to then waste terawatt hours from dirty sources growing meat, and enabling more of us to eat something they consider bad for our health, period. To an extent, this is fair, and very much the same problem another food panacea, vertical farming, faces.

It should be noted that the critics’ estimates for the impact vary almost unreasonably widely, with the same studies saying lab grown meat could raise emissions from meat production by 26% or lower it by 80% in one breath. We can only have one takeaway from this: we don’t know what will happen next. The only thing we do know right now is that the goal should be to make the production labs as energy efficient as possible, and lock in as many renewable sources for them as we can. Ultimately, the question is not as simple as just measuring emissions. It’s about safety and sustainability of food over the long term because what we’re doing now is the exact opposite of both.

We will also need to understand that a lot of farmers may be out of a job if lab grown meat explodes and they relied on animal husbandry as a primary source of income. It will also be viciously opposed by people who are just fundamentally distrustful of new technology. Somehow, it’s very difficult to see Luddites protesting vaccines, 5G, and GMO plants as a plan by a totalitarian New World Order to cull humanity, rushing out to buy a package of lab grown chicken for dinner. Likewise, dedicated vegans will be arguing that lab grown meat is still murder and that meat is still terrible for you, even if the science is out on that, because they want moral superiority, not a solution.

Any operation will have to scale with all of the above in mind, and it will have to work because we need far more control over our food supplies and logistics. Right now, we are struggling to control disease and parasites in our meat and fish farms, creating a whole host of multi-drug resistant superbugs that endanger our health, and a global network for moving meat around is blasting gigatons of pollution into the air. We need some major changes to make serious, long term dents in systemic problems that we barely tried to tackle for the last six decades. And this is not to mention that if we start really exploring space, we’re not exactly going to be bringing cows with us…