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Are You Ready To Eat Lab Meat?

Fancy a burger made from meat grown in a laboratory? Lab-burgers are coming to a supermarket or restaurant near you soon and are going to be big business, predicts entrepreneur and author Paul Cuatrecasas.

“The next major revolution–on a scale with moving from the horse and cart to the automobile–is going to be in food,” says Cuatrecasas, CEO of mergers and acquisitions and strategic advisory firm Aquaa Partners.  

It’s certainly a bold statement, but not hyperbolic. Cuatrecasas has form in spotting market disruptors, as he details in his book Go Tech or Go Extinct. Agriculture and farming are on the cusp of major change, he predicts, with urban agriculture, including the likes of vertical agriculture, underground farming and hydroponics, poised to flourish. And there’s one area he’s particularly bullish on: “The biggest thing will be the development of cultured meat.”

He’s not the only one to reach that conclusion, of course, as anyone who’s read Paul Shapiro’s best-selling 2018 book Clean Meat will know. (The clue’s in the subtitle: How Growing Meat Without Animals Will Revolutionize Dinner And The World.)

What Is Lab Meat, Anyway?

Lab meat, also called cultured meat, clean meat and cellular meat, is muscle tissue that’s taken from animal stem cells and grown in vitro. A single tissue sample from a single cow can be used to make an almost limitless number of burgers.

Although it’s been around for some 20 years, the lab meat industry is now in what academics call its ‘second wave’, with a growing number of innovative startups attracting enormous amounts of investment and media attention.

Among them are the Dutch Companies Meatable and Mosa Meat, Israel-based Future Meat and California-based Memphis Meats (which recently raised a whopping $186 million in funding) and JUST, creators of the $100 chicken nugget.

According to the website of the U.S.-based Good Food Institute, a not-for-profit organisation that promotes plant-based alternatives to meat, “The number of cultivated meat companies grew by 57% and reached a venture capital fundraising record” of $77 million in 2019. And, says the Institute, “In addition to already-invested capital, there is adequate ‘dry powder’ (investable capital) to keep protein innovators growing.”

Learning To Love Lab Meat

Soya milk lattes and veggie burgers made of plant-based protein have gone mainstream. But lab meat? Consumers have not been quite so convinced.

There’s the usual squeamishness about ‘Franken-foods’ as well as concerns about provenance, price (new technology doesn’t come cheap, hence the pricy chicken nuggets) and flavor and texture. In a Dutch study conducted in 2015, researchers found that 9% of participants rejected the idea of lab meat outright and two-thirds were hesitant about eating it.

Regulations for new foods such as lab meat have been a hurdle to the sector but with the FDA and USDA now working together to regulate lab-grown meat, the move to grocery stores and shop shelves in the US is getting closer.

In Europe, the regulation process of ‘novel foods’ usually takes about 18 months. According to Sarah Lucas, head of operations at Mosa Meat, her company will apply for regulation in 2021. “We aim to be in restaurants by 2022, and in supermarkets several years after that,” she says. “There is still a significant amount of work to do to scale up so it’s hard to be more specific than that about when we’ll be in supermarkets. We're working hard to do it as soon as possible.”

If Cuatrecasas’ predictions are correct, lab meat meat will be “affordable by 2022 and, by 2023, will be on restaurant menus and supermarket shop shelves.”

The Pros And Cons Of Lab Meat

Lab meat has its advantages, and Cuatrecasas cites several: “We’d no longer have to breed, feed and take care of [cattle] for three years, [nor to] kill them, process them and ship them.” Eventually, he believes, “The use of animals for meat will decline quickly in the Western world.”

As well as food safety, cleanliness, and predictability, there is also the shortening of the supply chain: lab meat can be grown locally, and supply can be scaled up or down relatively quickly according to demand. Producers can re-work the supply chain to their advantage by selling direct to consumers – a boon in these times of coronavirus.

And, of course, there are the environmental and animal welfare concerns associated with large-scale industrial farming. On its website, JUST says that it is “committed to building a better food system,” while Mosa Meat’s mission is, “to produce real meat for the world’s growing population that is delicious, better for the environment and kind to animals.”

Yet not everyone believes that lab meat is the ultimate solution. A group of animal rights activists launched the website Clean Meat Hoax, which states: “Though we had hopes that ‘clean meat’ might be part of the solution to the many ethical and ecological problems with animal agriculture, we now believe it to be a distraction from the fundamental issues.”

Hanna Tuomisto of the University of Helsinki sums up in a 2019 paper: “Cultured meat production could very well have a role to play in improving the sustainability of food systems in the future, but the technologies are not yet ready for helping with the urgent problems we face.”

The Consumer Decides

Cuatrecasas writes: “When we are able to grow hamburger meat or chicken in the lab at scale, it will no longer be about who has the most pigs in the poke; it is going to who owns the patents, the IP and the know-how…”

Ultimately, he says, where the lab meat market goes next will depend on consumers’ attitudes. “It starts with the consumer, who’s changing how they buy, how they eat and how they sleep.” Whether lab meat flops or thrives depends on how many of us are happy to take that first bite­–but the smart money’s on lab burgers being big.

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In my journalism career I’ve been a wine writer, travel editor and restaurant critic. A former editor of the BBC Food website and past deputy editor of delicious.

In my journalism career I’ve been a wine writer, travel editor and restaurant critic. A former editor of the BBC Food website and past deputy editor of delicious. magazine, I’ve written for publications in the US and the UK, have an out-of-control cookbook collection, a thirst for travel and a crisp addiction. For me, food is not just about sustenance (though that’s nice too), but a way of understanding the world.