Scientists are working to create meat that comes from a laboratory, not an animal.
Advocates of ‘in vitro meat’ say it could satisfy the world’s growing appetite for meat with less pressure on the environment.
Jason Matheny: The question, I think, is not what’s natural, but what’s best. What’s best for our health, what’s best for the environment.
That’s Jason Matheny, director of New Harvest, a nonprofit research organization for in vitro meat.
Jason Matheny: If we can produce our meat in a cleaner and healthier way, like producing it in vitro, then we could satisfy our global demand for meat, but without all its attendant problems.
According to a 2006 U.N. report, the livestock industry contributes nearly 20% of the world’s greenhouse gases and takes up about 30% of the planet’s useable land. But in vitro meat is grown in what Matheny calls ‘a nutritious soup’ inside of an incubator, which fuels development of muscle cells and connective tissue.
Jason Matheny: It wouldn’t be a whole animal, it would just be the cuts of meat that would be edible. Doing this would dramatically increase the efficiency of meat production.
The final product would look as familiar as a hamburger. In vitro meat could end up in grocery stores within the next five to ten years.
Our thanks to:
Jason Matheny
Director, New Harvest
Ph.D. student
Bloomberg School of Public Health
Johns Hopkins University
Baltimore, Maryland
This is a gross and unnaturally disgusting way to “eat to live.”
Total insanity and a giant waste of time, money and natural resourses.
Taking this to the next obvious step, a colleague of mine has a website on how meat growing robots will revolutionize the way we eat. http://www.meatgrowingrobots.com
Is crowding thousands of cattle into a pen and letting tons of waste float around in giant manure lagoons, making entire towns smell and causing our water to become helplessly polluted, not a “gross and unnatural” way to eat?
The way I see it, if meat consumption is growing, we need to find a substitute for the way we raise meat now. It’s unsustainable and unhealthy for both humans and the environment.
I groused a month ago about “Earth&Sky” running an information-free piece on the Future of Energy which was basically a commercial for the benevolence of Shell Oil Corp.
The new Scientology/ClearChannel-sounding tagline, “a clear voice for science” had been added at that juncture… and Joel Byrd, longtime co-host was nowhere in evidence.
Today’s broacast featured a very young-sounding woman completing the shoedropping by replacing Deborah Block… and touting the virtues of ‘in-vitro meat grown in a nutritious soup’ replacing the need for livestock.
Why then use chicken, cattle and fish for protein-replication? Human flesh would be far better tailored to the dietary needs of Our NeoCon Globe…
This syndicated show has become as carcinogenic as In-Vitro Meat promises to be… it needs to be dropped like second shoe.
Isn’t this an oximoron like clean diesel?
Hello Ned and all, thank you so much for taking the time to comment here.
Ned, it’s Joel Block and Deborah Byrd … and we’re both still with EarthSky. And ‘a clear voice for science’ has been our tagline for several years now.
That’s exactly what we’ve always aimed to be: a voice for science. In the 1970s, 80s and 90s, we tried to sound the scientific alarm for global warming and a world environment degrading due to human activities. Now so much damage has been done – and continues to be done. The world is getting warmer. Global population is still growing, and people aren’t showing any sign of wanting to use fewer natural resources. Can science help us humans survive this century? We at EarthSky believe it can. An oil company moving toward alternative energy? Sure! A food company creating a nutritious source of protein no one imagined before? Absolutely. We at EarthSky believe in the infinite creativity and adaptability of the human spirit.
Would I go back to a simpler time if I could? I would. But there’s no going back, for any of us.
Please respond! I’d love to speak with you more about this.
Many thanks,
Deborah Byrd
Meat is so expensive now that average people can not afford to buy it. If above mentioned Frankenmeat becomes available it better cost less than half the price of real meat.
I didn’t hear this show as advocating for in-vitro meat – I turn to PETA for that.
Personally, I think it’s neat that meat is being developed as an alternative for meat.
The comment ‘in vitro meat is grown in what Matheny calls “a nutritious soupâ€â€™ scares me. Define nutritious – manufactured vitamins, synthetic hormones, partially hydrogenated fatty acids, and short chained protein molecules? I’m sorry but I just can’t conjure up the faith to believe that anything that comes out of a test tube and grown in a soup of chemicals is going to be better for me than the natural product it is imitating. It might be cheap but my gut feeling is that you’re getting what you pay for.
Out of curiosity, will it be Kosher?
Deborah: I seriously doubt you would want to go back to an earlier time. If you got sick, you would want the best that medical science has to offer in transplants, vaccines, and surgeries and not a “witch doctor”! You wouldn’t write for “Earth & Sky” not to mention the “internet”. You would get mail via “Pony Express”. I wouldn’t tell time with a watch, but by “The Sun”.
It would be interesting to know exactly what is needed to make this meat free meat.. but anything that stops some animals going through the trauma they do before we eat them sounds good to me, also most of the meat I buy these days has no taste and the steaks are tough, and I am trying as many different places as possible, basically I am in favour of this.
Hi ap,
When I said I would go back to a simpler time if I could, I didn’t mean pony express days. I meant maybe 1968. I was a junior in high school then and I remember it as a less complicated world. Then again maybe we all think of our youth that way!
Actually, though, I also think this is a wonderful time to be alive. Sometimes I wish I could live another 100 years, to see how it all turns out!
Deborah
Animal free meat!? What does that even mean? That is like saying tree free wood (which I am more in favor of). We put enough artificial chemicals in our mouths as it is, we should not have started modifying food and we definately should not continue.
In my interview with Jason Matheny, he said that producing in-vitro meat is not much different from producing other biological products like yogurt. The “nutritious soup” referred to in the show consists of amino acids, sugars, and vitamins, which are housed in an incubator. These natural ingredients feed the ordinary growth and division of animal tissue cells. The cells eventually fuse together, and create muscle and connective tissue. That’s the part of the animal which we eat as ground beef, chicken nuggets, sausage, etc.
Matheny pointed out that livestock don’t grow meat very efficiently – a lot of their energy goes into producing bone for their skeletal structure, and doing other things we can’t eat. As raising animals for human consumption has a large impact on the environment, so-called “animal free meat” is a way of meeting the world’s increasing demand for meat in a more efficient way.
Paul, I agree – tree free wood would be great! Maybe someone is already working on this. It would solve even more of our environmental problems.
Lindsay,
Thanks for the answer to the “nutritious soup” question. I’m thinking as long as hormones and other unnatural “additives” aren’t added in then it may very well be a good alternative in many foods.
I’m curious if coloring and flavoring additives will need to be mixed in to imitate beef, pork, lamb, chicken, turkey, etc…? Or can different “flavors” and textures of meat can be grown to order?
Low cholest. meat that tastes good – now that would be a hot item!
For more information about the process, see our 2005 paper for Tissue Engineering, a version of which is here:
http://www.new-harvest.org/img/files/Invitro.pdf
Regarding whether food is natural or unnatural, in our FAQ
http://www.new-harvest.org/faq.htm#6 we wrote:
Arguably, the production of cultured meat is less unnatural than raising farm animals in intensive confinement systems, injecting them with synthetic hormones, and feeding them artificial diets made up of antibiotics and animal wastes. At the same time, the conventional production of meat has led to a number of unnatural problems, including high rates of ischemic heart disease and foodborne illness, as well as soil and water pollution from farm animal wastes.
Unless we’re hunter-gatherers, we’ve already opted for an unnatural food system. So for me it’s less a question of what is natural, and more a question of what’s healthy, sustainable, and ethical.
Jason,
Thanks for the links! I’m sure you’ve heard the questions and concerns I raised in my earlier comment before and I appreciate your taking the time to respond. With all of the unhealthy and unnecessary additives in processed foods today, it is a natural concern when something new comes out of the food lab.
After reading the information on your web site, it is evident that my questions (and quite a few others) have been well considered and accounted for in your research. With that knowledge, I must say that my former concerns are alleviated. I’m looking forward to trying it when it makes it to my local grocery store.
as carcinogenic as In-Vitro Meat promises to be
Frankenmeat
synthetic hormones
anything that comes out of a test tube and grown in a soup of chemicals is going to be better for me than the natural product it is imitating
Gotta love it!
“Synthetic” meat sounds good to me. Since I am hooked on taking synthetic hormones just to stay alive (as a Type 1 diabetic), and those hormones are created in a test tube, and the previously available “natural” product came from pigs or cows, well…
I wonder if they’ll be able to produce my catfish fillets, and be as tasty, as the one’s I catch locally?? hmm…
Are there any jobs in the field of creating synthetic meat?
The Peta X-Meat Prize is the single most practical applied problem in the history of life on this planet, because it gets to the fundamental question: how can we minimize life eating off other life?
My YouTube videos on the subject. I am creating more, but for some unknown reason I cannot upload any more. Some error message interrupts midway every time.
Species 1 of 4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkJ2BI8sWx4
Species 2 of 4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvELE6z4JTg
Species 3 of 4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qScGis_W894
Species 4 of 4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8IGavhmJQU