I’ve often said that the market for lab-grown, or ‘cultivated’ meats has already been overtaken by advances in plant-based foods and an emerging interest in straight-up vegetarian eating. But Real Meat may yet have a future…
A new development in the ‘cultivated meat’ sector may portend a future for such products after all. Scientists have discovered a way to scale up production of humanely-created ‘lab-grown’ beef and chicken…
Pork the proving ground
Last June, a team at University of Edinburgh’s Roslin Institute (HURI) made a big breakthrough, which made mass-produced, more affordable artificial bacon possible. Now a similar study, by researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Believer Meats, marks a major step towards making mass-cultivated beef and lamb affordable.
The HURI program demonstrated how cow cells can become naturally regenerative indefinitely. That makes it much easier and cheaper to perform the front-end stages of culti vated meat production. Previously, cells derived from cattle tissue required genetic modification in order to become immortalization. And that was turnoff to some potential customers for the products.
“This work adds valuable new insights to the rapidly expanding knowledge base supporting cultivated meat development. Spontaneous immortalization attempts often fail because researchers simply abandon the process when cell growth slows,” said Dr. Elliot Swartz, Sr. Principal Scientist for Cultivated Meat, The Good Food Institute. “This study, demonstrating for the first time that bovine cells can be spontaneously immortalized, marks an exciting advance.”
But Swartz emphasizes that the real breakthrough is that the process, “provides a roadmap for non-GM (genetically modified) approaches to be used for commercial cultivated meat production across the full range of animal species used in food production.”
What kind of future?
The question remains… What ki9nd of future might ‘cultivated meat’ have? I’ve postulated in the past, that ‘real’ meat may, in the not too distant future, become a specialty, luxury commodity sold at exclusive boutique shops or by luxe online suppliers. But that prediction was based on the continuing (at that time) high cos of cultivated meat and the seemingly unconquerable barriers to affordable mass production.
With the HURI breakthrough, the future begins to look, potentially, a lot brighter for real meat…
My take
One of the main benefits from recent cultivated meat experimentation has been the ability to grow realistic looking, chewing and tasting cultivated meats.
So… The jury on lab-grown meat is back in deliberations – with new instructions from the judge…
~ Maggie J.