UNTIL four years ago, stem-cell biologist Sandhya Sriram had never eaten seafood. Then she visited a shrimp farm in Vietnam and realised she had to give it a go – which was odd, given what she saw there. The conditions were “disgusting”, she says. The shrimp appeared to be growing in sewage, and were drenched in antibiotics and bleach to clean them before consumption. “These are things that should never be associated with food. That was my motivation.”
Sriram went home to Singapore, quit her lab job and started a company called . With co-founder Ka Yi Ling, she set about discovering how to grow shrimp muscle tissue from stem cells – in other words, how to create shrimp meat without actual shrimp.
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Shiok is now close to doing something that has been talked about for decades but never realised: putting lab-grown meat onto people’s plates. Sriram says her company is on course to launch its cultured shrimp meat next year, an ambitious goal that would put Shiok at the forefront of a food revolution that could be a game changer for humanity. It is also the first step towards an alternative to an industry that has done terrible damage to the environment, poses an existential threat to human health and causes untold suffering to billions of animals every year.
It is too soon to declare that the age of cultured meat has arrived, but as commercialisation nears, difficult questions are being asked and there are many unknowns. Will regulators approve it? Will consumers eat it? Is it safe? And is it as environmentally benign as proponents claim?
The dream of growing meat in a lab instead of on a farm goes back 25 years. The first patents were issued in 1995, and in the early 2000s, NASA funded research with the aim of finding new ways to make nutritious food for long-distance space travellers.
Things got more serious in 2013, when a patty made from cow muscle fibres grown in a lab was cooked and eaten at a press conference. This was a “defining moment” for cultured meat, says sociologist Neil Stephens at Brunel University London, elevating it from futuristic possibility to practical reality.
Companies quickly sprang up all over the world, driven by a desire to right the wrongs of livestock farming. Unlike the real thing, cultured meat is almost cruelty-free: aside from biopsies to obtain stem cells, no animals are harmed. In theory, the environmental footprint – all that land, water and pollution – shrinks to almost nothing, although this is the subject of much debate. Perhaps best of all, antibiotics become unnecessary. In return, we get sin-free real meat, in as large a quantity as we can eat.
Cellular agriculture
Back in 2013, the technology was nowhere near ready for the market; the burger took three months to grow at a cost of about €250,000. Mark Post, at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, the scientist behind the project, said it would take 10 or 20 years to make it commercially viable. But things have moved faster than he anticipated. That doesn’t mean cultured burgers, let alone steaks. Those are still at least five years away, according to Stephens. Seafood is a different story.
“We might see the first commercial sale soon, maybe in the next year,” says Stephens. Shrimp or other crustacean meat will be followed by salmon, tuna and white fish and then mammal and bird meats. Other animal products such as milk, leather and wool are also in development.
As this “cellular agriculture” industry develops, new battle lines are being drawn. Cultured meat will be the biggest disruptive technology to hit the food industry since genetic modification. How will the conventional meat industry respond – embrace the new technology or fight it tooth and nail? “It’s all to play for in this space,” says Richard Parr at the Good Food Institute (GFI), a US non-profit organisation that promotes the development of alternatives to animal products.
The cultured meat technology being refined by Shiok and other companies – there are about 30 firms doing this around the world – is essentially the same as that used to grow the €250,000 burger. The main ingredient is a culture of muscle cells (often with fat cells too) growing on a support structure called a scaffold, bathed in a liquid medium containing nutrients and growth factors (see “How to grow meat“). The medium stimulates the cells to proliferate, whereupon they spontaneously organise themselves into muscle tissue, aka meat.
The technology hasn’t stood still. Back in 2013, the standard culture medium was bovine fetal serum extracted from unborn calves, which was both expensive and ethically troubling. The industry has now developed animal-free alternatives using ingredients grown in genetically modified bacteria.
There are still technical challenges to overcome, principally scaling up production and getting the taste and texture right. Yet these are widely seen as solvable in the near future. Nobody has yet achieved mass production, but some companies can already produce enough meat at an affordable-enough price to launch a product in a restaurant, says Elliot Swartz of the GFI. And while texture matters a great deal if you want to grow a steak, it isn’t so important for minced beef or shrimp.
This is one reason why Sriram is so confident in Shiok. “Shrimp is only muscle and not any other tissue,” she says. “We don’t have to worry about fat or connective tissue. Definitely, crustacean cells are easier than land-based animals.” Shiok doesn’t even have to grow whole shrimp, just recreate the minced shrimp that is a staple in Asian cooking. Last year, the firm demonstrated a prototype, and is prepping for an .
“Unlike the real thing, cultured meat is almost cruelty-free”
Another reason for the confidence coursing through the veins of the cultured meat industry is the success of plant-based meat substitutes such as the Impossible and Beyond burgers and the vegan sausage roll sold by the UK bakery chain Greggs. But there are also some salutary lessons from plant-based meats. Despite their vegan halo, there is a growing awareness that they are ultra-processed foods often high in fat and salt. Worse, many of the products flooding onto the market aren’t good enough, says Robert Lawson, the former head of meat-substitute company Quorn. “Consumers are open to trying, but they will walk away if they eat rubbish.”
The cultured meat industry is aware of this risk. “We should always remember that we are no different from any other food products out there,” says David Wagstaff of US company JUST, which is developing cultured chicken meat. “Taste, quality, consistency are the fundamentals to any product and if you don’t get those three right, it doesn’t matter how welfare-friendly you are, people won’t buy your product again.”
This wariness is one of the biggest barriers to commercialisation, says Swartz. “What’s holding them back is the burden of being the first to release a product. If it isn’t really good, then it could make people less excited than they could be.”
Beneficial bugs
The cleanness of cultured meat compared with farmed alternatives might be problematic. Conventional meat has a microbiome that, assuming the bacteria are benign, protects against food poisoning because the resident bacteria outcompete hostile interlopers.
But cultured meat comes out of the bioreactor sterile and is a sitting duck for bacteria. “Uncolonised meat is dramatically attractive to bacteria and they can grow very rapidly,” says microbiologist Elizabeth Wellington at the University of Warwick, UK. “That’s how food poisoning happens.” It may prove necessary to inoculate cultured meat with benign bacteria to eliminate this risk, she says.
Another obstacle is red tape. Before cultured meat can be sold and eaten, regulators will have to be satisfied that it is fit for human consumption. As yet, it isn’t clear how the regulatory system will work. “Lab-grown meat is so innovative that we don’t have an example to follow,” says Justyna Pałasińska at Pen & Tec Consulting in Reading, UK, which helps food companies negotiate the regulatory labyrinth. Another unknown is what the labelling requirements will be, which could have a huge influence on consumer perceptions.
That is a further reason why eyes are on Singapore: its regulatory regime is seen as being more friendly to cultured meat than those of the US or European Union. Last November, the Singapore Food Agency (SFA) released the country’s , in part to respond to looming food security issues. The island city state has almost no agriculture and imports 90 per cent of its food. Cultured meat is seen as part of the solution, says Kelvin Ng at the Singapore Agency for Science, Technology and Research.
This will increasingly become a consideration elsewhere, says Charles Godfray, director of the Oxford Martin School at the University of Oxford and co-author of a recent World Economic Forum . “We can feed 7 billion, but by mid-century, food security will be an issue.”
The SFA wouldn’t comment about whether any company has yet submitted a novel food for evaluation. Shiok told New Scientist that it will file one later this year and the SFA says it will process applications in just three to six months. Once the regulatory authorities receive an application, the key question will be whether the meat is safe to eat. This may be trickier than it sounds. One selling point is that it is “clean”: that, unlike carcass meat, it won’t be exposed to dangerous bacteria during processing. “We don’t have to slaughter animals, so there is less susceptibility to contamination from faeces,” says Neta Lavon of Israeli company . But, ironically, cultured meat may be too clean (see “Beneficial bugs”).
Other food-safety issues may come to light too. One possibility – albeit a remote one – is that the cells will produce toxic metabolites, perhaps misfolded prion proteins similar to the ones that cause bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE). Growth medium residues in the meat may also be problematic, says Pałasińska, and there is zero data about possible long-term effects.
Even if regulators clear it, will consumers eat it? As a rule, tastings of prototypes generate positive reviews. Liz Specht of the GFI has tasted two cultured meat products: and salmon by a company called . Both were impressively authentic, she says – although they were prepared by professional chefs, which may be hard to replicate at home.
And even if the final product is excellent, that is no guarantee of acceptance. As proponents of genetic modification found, even demonstrably superior food can be doomed by consumer perceptions. In a recent survey of attitudes in the US, more than 60 per cent of people said they were willing to try cultured meat, but about 40 per cent said they were put off by its unnaturalness.
Until the food actually gets on to the market, with whatever labelling is mandated, there is no way to know how it will be received. “Cultured meat is still an abstract idea, it’s not something we can test consumer acceptability for,” says Laura Wellesley at independent UK policy institute Chatham House, who co-wrote a . Finding the right name for these new products will be crucial (see “What’s in a name?”).
One obvious selling point is compassion, both for animals and the planet. Cultured meat isn’t entirely animal-free because of the need for cell lines, but its welfare issues are negligible in comparison with conventional meat. One small farm could meet the global demand for cells, says Lavon.
What’s in a name?
Getting the right name for alternative meats will be crucial to their success. Over the years, cultured meat has acquired many prefixes: in-vitro, lab-grown, cultivated, cell-based, clean, animal-free, synthetic, fake, slaughter-free. Unsurprisingly, consumers .
Cultured meat also has a reputation for being greener. This seems a reasonable assumption: conventional livestock farming contributes around 15 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions and is a voracious consumer of land, water, energy and pesticides. Shrimp farms are also a destroyer of coastal habitats, especially mangroves and salt marshes.
To produce 1 calorie of edible meat, on average, it takes 7 calories of agricultural inputs, says Kurt Schmidinger of Austrian NGO . For cultured meat, the GFI says it is 3 to 1.
Cultured meat’s green credentials, however, aren’t a proven fact. They are usually based on a . It found that producing a tonne of cultured beef would require less than 1 per cent of the land needed for the same amount of cow meat, about 4 per cent of the water and about half the energy. It would also generate just 4 per cent of the greenhouse gas emissions.
“Radical change in the food system is going to be forced upon us at some point”
Environmentalists are increasingly challenging this assessment. “Cultured meat may not be the silver bullet for sustainability that innovators are suggesting it is,” says Wellesley. “There are big questions still to answer in terms of energy intensity.”
According to John Lynch, a climate scientist at the University of Oxford, the numbers in that 2011 paper are highly speculative and based on an optimistic scenario that is now out of date. He recently ran a new greenhouse gas analysis and concluded that, in the long run, cultured meat may actually be worse for the climate. That is largely because it exchanges the methane emissions belched out by the digestive system of cattle for carbon dioxide. Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas, but doesn’t stay in the atmosphere for long, whereas CO2 hangs around for centuries. Unless cultured meat production is fuelled by decarbonised energy, its global warming potential could be very high, says Lynch. Yet until the technology matures, it is all speculation. “We still have no idea at all how realistic these footprints are,” he says.
Clean eating
One advantage that seems unarguable is cultured meat’s freedom from antibiotics. “Worldwide, 80 per cent of antibiotics are used in agriculture,” says microbiologist Elizabeth Wellington at the University of Warwick, UK. That is largely down to intensive farming, in which animals are kept in close proximity and bacteria can spread like wildfire. Antibiotics are given to promote growth too. This use is contributing to the rising tide of antibiotic resistance that is a greater threat to human health than climate change, according to Bruce Friedrich at the GFI.
In that respect, clean meat is clean. “We don’t need to use antibiotics, it’s as simple as that,” says Stephanie Wallis, chief scientific officer of Higher Steaks, the UK’s only cultured meat company and the only one anywhere that is attempting to grow bacon.
Another key unknown is how the incumbent meat industry will respond. Up to now, it has sent out mixed messages. On the one hand, it sees cultured meat as a threat and is going to great lengths to pull the rug from under it ahead of launch. In the US, for example, the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association has been the authorities to ban the upstart industry from describing its products as “meat”. In Europe, an organisation called is running adverts on the Brussels metro trying to warn consumers off cultured meat. “There’s an organised opposition emerging and that says something about the maturity of the technologies,” says Stephens.
But at the same time, the conventional meat industry wants a slice of the pie. Tyson Meats, the world’s second-largest meat producer, recently disinvested from plant-based protein company Impossible and put money into Memphis Meats and its cultured meats instead, a decision that industry observers say shows where it thinks the future lies. “They don’t want to be the next Kodak,” says Swartz, referring to the camera company that went bust after rejecting digital photography.
If Shiok doesn’t make it to market first, there are plenty of other contenders. One is another seafood company called BlueNalu, which in December demonstrated its and recently revealed in the US. Other contenders are , and Mosa in the Netherlands. Both have said they hope to be ready to launch within the next three years.
Those initial launches are likely to be in restaurants rather than shops, in part because of a lack of large-scale production, but also to replicate the success of plant-based meats, which created a buzz by offering limited-edition dishes in trendy eateries. Full-scale launch into supermarkets is probably still several years away – at least five, says Stephens.
Nonetheless, mass-market cultured meat is coming. There is simply no other way to keep up with growing demand for meat, says Friedrich (see “Appetite for meat“). Last year, UK-based consultancy Kearney forecast that, by 2040, cultured meat will account for 35 per cent of global consumption of meat and vegan, meat-like products, with conventional meat down to 40 per cent. “Radical change in the food system is going to be forced upon us at some point,” says Godfray.
Back in Singapore, Sriram and her company are betting the farm on it happening sooner rather than later. “In Singapore Malay slang, Shiok means fantastic or delicious,” she says. Proof of that will be in the eating – and soon.
