The Truth About Lab-Grown Meat

We Homo sapiens have been eating meat since the beginning of our very existence where archaeologists have found marks on bones from hacking tools that suggest we have been carnivorous as far back as 3.4 million years ago when some of our earliest hominid ancestors were beginning to roam the Earth where all that protein and fat content of meat was crucial to the development of humans as we know them where the theory roughly goes that by moving to a meaty diet we were freeing up energy used in digesting plants and diverting it to building bigger brains demonstrating how dietary shifts toward calorie-dense animal proteins potentially enabled encephalization by reducing digestive energy costs allowing metabolic reallocation toward energetically expensive neural tissue expansion across hominin evolution.

Globally we consume over 365 million tons of it every year where the top meat-eating countries like the US and Australia annually eat around 120 kilograms per person and our meat consumption is only set to continue where as developing countries grow richer more people can afford more and more meat and developed nations are also predicted to keep increasing their meat consumption demonstrating how nutrition transition accompanying economic development drives accelerating global meat demand creating unsustainable trajectory as developing nations adopt Western dietary patterns while developed countries maintain high per-capita consumption levels.

This quick and easy access to meat we have now is contributing to a climate catastrophe where the meat industry is one of the biggest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions where one recent study finding food production as a whole contributed a third of all greenhouse gas emissions across the globe where many think it’s time to cut out meat altogether from our diets for good reason but unfortunately it’s hard to reverse these meat-eating trends demonstrating how industrial meat production creates substantial climate forcing through methane emissions land-use change and feed production yet behavioral inertia and cultural entrenchment make dietary transitions difficult despite environmental urgency.

In 1931 Winston Churchill even said we shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium where 82 years later his prediction would become a reality where the first lab-grown burger was eaten in 2013 and since then it has been a race to market for dozens of food tech startups demonstrating how early 20th century technological vision anticipated cellular agriculture possibilities decades before stem cell biology and bioreactor engineering enabled actual implementation creating competitive biotech industry.

The first lab-grown burger was eaten in 2013 and since then it has been a race to market for dozens of food tech startups where lab-grown or cultured meats use practices from regenerative science to grow meat without needing to grow an animal where it all starts with stem cells demonstrating how proof-of-concept demonstration catalyzed competitive cellular agriculture industry applying regenerative medicine techniques to food production creating new biotechnology sector focused on animal-free meat through tissue engineering.

Stem cells are a special type of cell that have the potential to become almost any type of cell found in the body where to harvest stem cells technicians have to go to the primary source of the desired meat directly to the cow where here they take a sample of tissue directly from the animal without killing it or even harming it where from this tissue they then isolate multi-potent stem cells such as muscle stem cells where these are put into a bioreactor with a mixture of nutrients amino acids growth hormones and a special serum called FBS where then by adding different growth factors technicians can prompt the cells to differentiate or turn into the required type of cell like muscle or fat where muscle cells will naturally move together in the suspension to form myotubes demonstrating how directed differentiation protocols guide pluripotent precursors through biochemical signaling cascades toward terminal muscle lineage specification enabling self-organization into functional contractile tissue structures without organismal development.

A single muscle stem cell could be grown into one trillion muscle cell tubes where that’s a lot of burgers and nuggets from one tiny cell but this is as far as innovators have come creating essentially lab-grown ground beef where it’s not possible yet to simply grow a whole steak or a wing or a filet or a chicken breast demonstrating how exponential cellular proliferation enables massive production scaling from minimal starting material yet current technology remains limited to unstructured ground meat products unable to replicate complex three-dimensional tissue architecture required for whole-cut meat mimicry.

There’s one glaring problem here with creating this animal-free meat where it’s not actually animal-free where that special FBS serum I just mentioned that stands for fetal bovine serum which is collected from the dying fetuses of slaughtered cows where it’s pretty gruesome and so far scientists have not found a way to create lab-grown meat without it where if a cow is going for slaughter and happens to be pregnant the fetus is removed and its blood drained all while it dies a slow death where the fetus is kept alive for as long as possible during this process to ensure the quality of the blood remains good demonstrating how lab-grown meat paradoxically depends on slaughterhouse byproducts creating ethical contradiction where supposedly humane technology requires arguably more inhumane practice than conventional meat production undermining foundational animal welfare justification.

To make a single lab-grown beef burger an estimated 50 liters of bovine serum is needed and depending on age a single cow fetus can yield between 150 and 550 milliliters of serum where that means to create a single burger you need the blood of between 90 and 333 cow fetuses where until a synthetic or plant-based alternative to FBS is found slaughter-free widely available lab-grown meat is completely unfeasible demonstrating how extreme resource requirements create absurd scaling impossibility where producing one burger demands hundreds of fetal deaths making current cultured meat production grotesquely inefficient and ethically catastrophic at any commercial volume.

FBS isn’t easy to replace where it contains approximately 1,800 different proteins and more than 4,000 metabolites where FBS prevents the replicating stem cells from committing suicide where normally cells have a mechanism that tells them they’re growing in the wrong place and shuts it down where this is normally a good thing and keeps different parts of the body developing properly but when cells are growing in a metal tank and not a body this warning system needs to be turned off and for whatever reason FBS works almost completely universally where when added to any type of cell that cell will start to replicate and grow whether it’s chicken beef fish or muscle skin or liver cells where other serums do exist but none are so versatile demonstrating how fetal bovine serum’s extraordinary biochemical complexity containing thousands of proteins and metabolites enables universal anoikis suppression across diverse cell types through poorly understood mechanisms making replacement extremely difficult despite ethical imperatives.

Some scientists have succeeded in creating synthetic serums but all of them are hyperspecific to the type of cell being cultured where none are capable of replacing FBS to culture all possible cell types however recently a glimmer of hope has emerged in one company producing a synthetic alternative something they call FastGrow where they say its components are not derived from human or animal and it promises to be able to replace FBS for a range of different cell cultures where in general creating serum-free media is hugely expensive where a recombinant protein like transferrin can go for 260 dollars a gram where growth factors like TGF-beta can cost several million dollars a gram more expensive by weight than diamonds where the price tag for FastGrow as a whole is around 2,640 dollars per liter demonstrating how synthetic serum alternatives face extreme cost barriers from recombinant protein production making supposedly animal-free solutions prohibitively expensive despite solving ethical problems creating new economic impossibility.

The cost of lab-grown meat will be a nearly impossible hurdle to overcome where a pound of lab-grown meat using current technology and at current scale is estimated to cost around ten thousand dollars according to the Good Food Institute where there are a few reasons why lab-based meat is so expensive where first the regular animal-based FBS is between 300 and 700 for a liter and to scale up lab-grown meat companies need a large volume where some estimate 50 liters are needed for a single burger and if moving away from FBS is the goal as we discussed synthetic versions are likely to be even more expensive demonstrating how current production economics create cost barrier four orders of magnitude above conventional meat making commercial viability impossible without dramatic technological breakthroughs reducing input costs especially serum whether animal-derived or synthetic alternatives.

To create the kinds of volumes of meat required for the carnivorous public huge bioreactor vats will be needed to grow the meat products where to acquire one kilogram of protein from cultured muscle cells the meat company would need a bioreactor with a volume of about 5,000 liters where that’s like the biggest beer fermenter that exists all for a single kilo of meat where cells have to be kept at a fairly low density so these massive tanks are needed until researchers learn how to raise a higher density culture and there are other problems too where a vat of cultured meat has no immune system where if a virus particle gets in that can infect the cells it absolutely will where this would kill the cells and kill the entire batch of product where food grade facilities wouldn’t be good enough to prevent such an infection where they’d need to be pharmaceutical grade to keep the meat cells free from any contamination and you can bet a pharmaceutical grade facility will be way more expensive than a food grade one demonstrating how low cell density culture requires enormous bioreactor volumes creating scaling challenges while absence of immune protection demands pharmaceutical-grade sterility making facility costs prohibitive and viral contamination risks catastrophic for production economics.

In 2020 Singapore became the first country to approve lab-grown meat for commercial consumption where food journalists were on the fence about the flavor and texture of US company Eat Just’s chicken nuggets where it wasn’t bad but it wasn’t quite like chicken either where scientists are still working on getting that juicy bloody melt-in-the-mouth element of meat into lab-grown versions where as real meat contains thousands of flavor molecules from proteins fats ketones alcohols and other compounds demonstrating how regulatory milestone enabled first commercial sales yet organoleptic properties remain deficient compared to conventional meat as complex flavor chemistry involving thousands of molecular species proves difficult to replicate through simplified cell culture requiring extensive food science innovation.

Despite these massive financial barriers many are still holding out hope where the Good Food Institute recently published an optimistic analysis where they think that addressing certain technical costs will lower the production price from over ten thousand dollars per pound today to about two dollars and fifty cents per pound over the next nine years where they believe that the costs of certain aspects of the process like growth factor costs may indeed go down as the industry matures where they predict that one day soon growth factors can be produced through recombinant expression where bacteria or yeast are genetically modified to produce certain desirable proteins where take genome sequencing where the first genome took about a billion dollars to sequence where now 20 years later it’s around a thousand dollars where judging by the 300 million euros of investment in lab-grown meat companies in 2020 alone there is hope if not an expectation for this kind of trajectory demonstrating how optimistic projections invoke Moore’s Law analogies from other biotechnologies like genome sequencing to argue exponential cost reductions possible yet critics question whether cellular agriculture faces different scaling physics making such price decreases less plausible than silicon-based or enzymatic technologies.