[Beef, chicken and dairy made from cultured cells could offer a
smaller footprint than conventional farms. Companies are working on
scaling up and bringing prices down. ]
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GETTING LAB-GROWN MEAT — AND MILK — TO THE TABLE  
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Bob Holmes
December 22, 2022
Knowable Magazine
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_ Beef, chicken and dairy made from cultured cells could offer a
smaller footprint than conventional farms. Companies are working on
scaling up and bringing prices down. _

, Peter and Maria Hoey

 

Diners at the swanky Atelier Crenn restaurant in San Francisco expect
to be served something unusual. After all, the venue boasts three
Michelin stars and is widely considered to be one of the world’s top
restaurants.

But if all goes according to plan, there will soon be a new dish on
the menu that truly is remarkable: chicken that was never part of a
living bird.

That peculiar piece of meat — likely to be the first of its kind
ever sold in the US — comes from a radical sort of food technology
now in development, in which meat is produced by culturing muscle
cells in vast tanks of nutrients. A similar effort — to culture
mammary cells — is also underway and may soon yield real milk
without cows.

The company behind Crenn’s chicken, California-based Upside Foods,
got a thumbs-up in November 2022 from the US Food and Drug
Administration, which said it had no concerns about the safety of the
technology. (The company’s manufacturing facility still requires a
certificate of inspection from the US Department of Agriculture.)

This cellular agriculture, as some of its proponents call it, faces
formidable technical obstacles before it can ever be more than a
curiosity. But if it does reach the mainstream, it offers the prospect
of a cruelty-free source of meat and dairy — potentially with a
smaller environmental footprint than conventional animal products.

Conceptually, cellular agriculture is straightforward. Technicians
take a small tissue sample from a chicken, cow or other animal. From
that, they isolate individual cells that go into a bioreactor —
basically a big vat of nutrient solution — where the cells multiply
manyfold and, eventually, mature into muscle, fat or connective tissue
that can be harvested for people to eat.

Products in which these cells are jumbled together, as in ground meat,
are easiest to make, and that’s what most cellular meat companies
are developing, at least initially. But Upside has a more ambitious
goal: to create chicken with whole muscle fibers. “We’ve figured
out ways to produce that textural experience,” says Eric Schulze,
Upside’s vice president of product and regulation. He declines to
explain exactly how they do it.

The process takes two to three weeks from start to finish, regardless
of whether they are making chicken or beef. That’s much faster than
the eight to 10 weeks required to raise a fryer chicken, or the 18 to
36 months needed for a cow. “We’re doing a cow’s worth of meat
in 21 days or less,” says Schulze.

One cellular meat product is already available commercially, though
not in the US. In Singapore, a few restaurants and street vendors now
offer a chicken nugget that contains a mix of cellular meat and
plant-based ingredients. The product sells for about the same price as
organic, farm-raised chicken, but the true cost of production is
higher. “We’re selling it at a loss, for sure,” says Vítor
Espírito Santo, senior director of cellular agriculture at Good Meat
[[link removed]], the US-based company producing the nugget.

But the cost should come down once the company expands to larger
scale, Santo says. “Everything we do right now is more expensive
because we are using a 1,200-liter bioreactor. Once we are producing
in 250,000 liters, it will be competitive with conventional meat.”
The company is now working on gaining approval in the US.

Meat isn’t the only animal product that can come from cell cultures.
Several companies are working to produce milk by culturing mammary
cells and collecting the milk they secrete. For example, Opalia, a
Montreal-based company, grows mammary cells on the surface of a
three-dimensional, branched structure that resembles the lobules of a
real udder, says CEO Jennifer Côté. The cells secrete milk into the
structure’s lobules, where it can be collected and drawn off. Some
other companies, such as North Carolina-based BioMilq, are using a
similar technology with human mammary cells to produce human breast
milk
[[link removed]].
None are yet on the market.

In some ways, the process for making milk is easier than producing
meat because the cells themselves don’t need to be harvested and
replaced. “The cells we use can stay alive for multiple months on
end,” says Côté. That means the company can concentrate on
developing cells that secrete a lot of milk, rather than ones that
divide rapidly. Moreover, she adds, because the cells themselves are
not part of the product, Opalia can genetically modify its cells
without the milk itself being a GMO product.

Proponents hope that cellular meat and milk can eventually offer
several big advantages over the conventional versions. By cutting
animals out of the process, cultured products do away with most of the
animal-welfare issues that beset modern factory farms. Meat and milk
that come from clean culture facilities instead of manure-laden
farmyards should also be less likely to carry food-borne diseases,
says Elliot Swartz, lead scientist for cultivated meat technology at
the Good Food Institute [[link removed]], a Washington
DC-based nonprofit organization supporting alternatives to meat.

Enthusiasts also claim that cell-based products should be more
sustainable than conventional animal products, because farmers will no
longer need to feed, water and house entire animals just to harvest
their muscles. It’s hard to know whether this benefit will pan out
in reality, since the technology is still under development. Only a
few studies have tried to estimate the environmental impact of
cell-based meat, and all have made huge assumptions about what future
technologies will look like
[[link removed]].

One thing seems clear, however. Cell-based meat relies heavily on
electricity for tasks like heating or cooling culture tanks and
pumping cells from place to place. If that electricity comes from
renewables, the overall carbon footprint of cell-based meat will be
much less than if it comes from fossil fuels, says Swartz.

Assuming a relatively green electric grid, though, one careful study
of cell-based meat’s potential, by the Dutch consulting company CE
Delft, suggests that its environmental footprint is likely to be
roughly the same as that of conventional pork or poultry
[[link removed]]—
among the greener conventional meats, by most reckonings — and far
less than that of beef.

So far, however, companies and academic researchers have only taken
baby steps toward cellular agriculture. If the industry is ever to
grow big enough to change the face of global agriculture, it would
need to overcome several major hurdles, says David Block, a chemical
engineer at the University of California, Davis, who works on the
technology behind cultured meat.

One of the biggest challenges, most experts agree, is finding an
inexpensive way to supply the nutrients and growth factors the growing
cells need. Existing culture media are far too costly and often depend
on calves’ blood for molecules such as fibroblast growth factor and
insulin-like growth factor 1, which are essential for cell growth and
maintenance. Researchers are hoping that relatively unprocessed
sources like plant or yeast extract can eventually provide most of the
nutrients and vitamins they need, and that they can find a cheaper way
to produce the growth factors.

As a step in that direction, Dutch researchers have developed a growth
medium using no serum — just off-the-shelf chemicals — to which
they add more than a dozen growth factors and other nutrients. Their
new medium allowed cow muscle cells to grow almost as well as on calf
serum
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they reported recently.

Scaling up from research-sized cultures to big commercial operations
— an essential step to keeping costs down — may also present
problems. The larger the bioreactor, the more difficult it is to
ensure that waste products like ammonia are removed, says Ricardo San
Martin, a chemical engineer who directs the Alternative Meats Lab at
the University of California, Berkeley. Even merely stirring extremely
large bioreactors can subject the cells to damaging shear forces, he
notes.

The nutrient-supply problem gets even tougher for whole-muscle meats
such as steaks or whole chicken breasts. In the animal, such thick
slabs of muscle have networks of blood vessels snaking through them,
so that every muscle cell is close to a blood supply. Many researchers
in the field think replicating that 3D structure in culture poses
serious challenges that have yet to be overcome. “I don’t think we
are close to growing a steak, and I don’t see it in the next 10 or
15 years,” says San Martin.

Still, proponents remain optimistic that those problems will be
settled soon. “Technologically, we’re not concerned,” says
Schulze. “With enough time and scientific ingenuity, somebody,
somewhere, will find a way to make this work. The cost is the main
issue for everyone.”

But cost remains a big stumbling block. The first lab-grown burger
patty, produced by a Dutch team in 2013, cost an estimated 250,000
euros (about $330,000). And while costs have fallen since then, they
remain much higher than for conventional meat. In a study that has not
yet been peer-reviewed, Block and his colleagues estimated that
producing a ground-beef product in a 42,000-liter bioreactor —
almost twice as big as the largest in use today for mammalian cells
— would cost about $13.80 per pound
[[link removed]]. To bring the cost down under
$6 per pound, only a little pricier than conventional ground beef,
would require a much larger, 260,000-liter bioreactor.

But cultured meat may not have to match the price of ground beef or
chicken to be commercially viable. Some consumers will probably pay
higher prices to avoid the ethical and environmental costs of
conventional meat, just as they do today for plant-based meat
substitutes
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like Impossible and Beyond Meat. And some conventional products such
as caviar, foie gras or bluefin tuna are so expensive that cultured
versions could probably be cost-competitive pretty soon, says Swartz.
That would give manufacturers a way to bring in some profits even as
they work to bring costs down further.

Another intermediate step could be to use cultured meats to enhance
the flavor of plant-based products, as Good Meat is doing now with the
part-cultured-meat, part-plant-based meat patties they sell in
Singapore. Manufacturers could also add cultured animal fat cells to
give a meatier flavor to a plant-based product. “You only need maybe
5 percent animal fat to achieve that,” says Swartz. Such hybrid
products, he thinks, are likely to be the dominant role for cellular
meat in the next decade.

Similar first steps could help cultured-milk companies generate
revenue before they can match cow’s milk in price. Breast milk
offers enough advantages over infant formula, says Swartz, that many
consumers are likely to pay high prices for cultured human milk from
BioMilq and other companies. “There are a variety of proteins and
fatty acids and sugars that are simply not there if you don’t have
breast milk,” says Nurit Argov-Argaman, a lactation physiologist at
the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Argov-Argaman is also chief
scientist at Wilk, an Israeli company that is culturing human breast
cells to extract high-value components such as fatty acids and
lactoferrin, a protein essential to iron uptake, to enrich infant
formula.

A few of these cell-cultured meat and milk products should make it to
supermarket shelves within the next few years, experts say. But as
promising as these first steps are, no one really knows whether
cellular meat and milk will eventually grab a significant share of the
global market for animal-based foods.

“There are certainly immense challenges — no one’s denying
that,” says Schulze. “But our plan is to work on that as an
industry. It’s effectively a space race for food. The difference
here is we will attempt to rationally solve these challenges one by
one in a reasonable time frame — and do it safely, of course, since
it’s food.”

10.1146/knowable-122122-2

BOB HOLMES is a science writer in Edmonton, Alberta, who likes meat
but is open-minded about whether or not it comes from an animal.

This article originally appeared in _Knowable Magazine_
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endeavor from Annual Reviews. Sign up for the newsletter
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[Knowable Magazine | Annual Reviews]

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