What is cultured meat | How is cultured meat made?

What is Cultured Meat?

Cultured meat or lab-grown meat or also known as artificial meat is meat produced by culturing animal cells in vitro using tissue engineering techniques. Cultured meat is a miracle of modern science. Scientists can harvest a small sample of cells from a living animal and cultivate the sample to grow outside of the animal’s body and shape this sample into a fully formed piece of meat. Fish fillets, hamburgers, and bacon all are indistinguishable and have the same taste consumers know and love.

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Brief History of Cultured Meat

During the second world war in 1950, a Dutch researcher  Willem van Eelen independently came up with the idea for artificial meat. He was a prisoner of war at that time and suffered from starvation which made him passionate about food production and food security.

In 1971, pathologist Russel Ross was successful in culturing muscle fiber in-vitro from guinea pig aorta. Later in 1991, Jon F. Vein performed the production of tissue-engineered meat for human consumption. In 2001, dermatologist Wiete Westerhof together with Van Eelen and businessperson Willem van Kooten filed for a worldwide patent on a process to produce cultured meat. On the same year NASA also experimented cultured meat for the purpose of growing meat instead of transporting for the astronauts. They cultivated goldfish and turkey. In November 2009, Dutch scientists announced that they had managed to grow meat from cells of a live pig.

The first public trial was done in London on 5^th August 2013 using the first cultured beef burger patty which was created by Mark Post at Maastricht University. It was tested on live television. After that many startups were launched around the world to industrially develop the concept of cultured meat.

What is the purpose behind Cultured meat?

As the human population is growing, so is the demand for food also increasing. To meet the need of meat consumption, 70 billion land animals, and possibly trillions of marine animals, are killed each year. A vast majority of these animals are raised in factory farms, where they are brutally abused in severely overcrowded and putrid conditions for the entirety of their short lives. These factories are producing huge amount of livestock wastes as well as the methane emissions, which are recognized as a leading cause of climate change. So, the purpose of cultured meat is to satisfy the increasing demand for food and that it has the potential to spare millions of animals from lifetimes of suffering and inhumane deaths in factory farms. It also has the potential to hugely reduce environmental pollution. cultured meat will be a good alternative for the consumers who want to be responsible and kind towards animals but do not want to change their diet.

How is cultured meat made?

It starts with the careful removal of a small number of muscle cells from a living animal using local anesthesia to provide relief from pain. The muscle cells will be cut to liberate stem cells, a special type of cells that have the ability to proliferate and transform into other types of cells. The animal will experience a moment of discomfort. This process is much less harmful than the lifetime of pain and terror animals experience in the factory farms.

After that, a lab technician places the harvested cells in an appropriate culture medium where nutrients, hormones, growth factors etc. are added to them and allowed to grow and multiply, producing real muscle tissue which are then shaped into edible scaffoldings. Then using these scaffoldings, cultured cells can be transformed into steak, hamburger patties, chicken nuggets etc.

Advantages of Cultured Meat

(1) Cultured meat is a real animal flesh, the difference is that it is grown in a lab, not on a factory farm. People can enjoy meat products knowing that no animals were brutally abused and slaughtered for their meal.

(2) Natural meat contains high level of cholesterol and saturated fat which can lead to chronic diseases. But Cultured meat has the potential to reduce the negative health impacts and control the harmful cholesterol and saturated fat in each cut.

(3) This biotechnological process can also be used in repairing injuries by re-growing damaged cells in humans or animals – for example growing skin cells to be grafted onto burn victims.

(4) Cultured meat can reduce the threat of antibiotic resistance. In the factory farms, animals were treated with high amounts of antibiotics to keep them alive in that filthy environment. By overusing antibiotics, it makes the surviving bacteria stronger and ineffective against antibiotic. In the long run, people are the sufferer of antibiotic resistant infections. On the other hand, artificial meat is free of antibiotics which can play a role in reducing the growing threat of antibiotic resistant infections.

(5) Unlike factory farms, artificial meat contains no growth hormones which reduces developmental neurobiological effect as well as carcinogenic effects in human.

(6) According to the United Nations, livestock production contributes around 14.5% of world’s green house gas emission and the emission from factory farms could be even higher. But lab-grown meats can reduce livestock waste generation as well as green-house gas emission.

Disadvantages of Cultured Meat

(1) There is an ethical issue regarding the using of fetal bovine serum (FBS) as the culture medium. Because FBS is made from the blood of unborn calves of pregnant cows after they are killed. However, companies are trying to find alternatives of FBS.

(2) Vegetarians still may not eat it because it is made from animal cells. 

(3) Another thing is that if the cells are taken from dead animals how will we general people know?

Conclusion

Since the first cultured beef burger patty was created by Mark Post at Maastricht University in 2013, it gained media attention. A number of companies, such as Just Eat, are now planning on launching their own cultured meat onto the market, and 2022 could be the year that it starts to become widely available. But we can’t be exactly sure how it will impact the world until it is available in the stores.

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Reference

What is lab-grown meat?

The myth of cultured meat

Cultured meat – Wikipedia

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