Lab-grown meat is worth its weight in research funding

By: Ahmed Ali

Humanity has been eating meat for tens of thousands of years. Globally, this year we’ve consumed over 230 million metric tons of meat so far. As of 2013, about 30% of Earth’s landmass — which is about how large Africa is — was used to produce meat, according to Time Magazine.

Pretty soon, farming won’t be able to produce enough meat to feed the world. So what can we do? One solution I support is to use meat created in a lab.

The world’s first fully lab-grown burger was eaten in London, back in 2013. This kind of meat (also called in vitro meat, cultured meat, test tube meat, etc.) is grown by taking stem cells from animals, and nurturing them in Petri dishes with nutrients, amino acids, and proteins. The cells are attached to collagen scaffolds to organize them. As they grow, scientists electrically stimulate the muscles to keep them from atrophying.

Supposedly, if you keep doing that, you will grow edible strips of muscle: no steroids, hormones, or antibiotics required. Personally, I feel pursuing this research and marketing lab-grown meat in the future is a great idea, especially with the continued growth of the human population.

Lab-grown meat is also more ethical than conventional ways of meat production, as less animal cruelty is involved. It doesn’t require an entire continent’s worth of land and water. The meat produced wouldn’t have to have hormones and antibiotics added to it, and if we wished, we could theoretically optimize the meat by adding extra omega-3 acids during the growth process. This methodology would also produce significantly less greenhouse emissions and antibiotic resistant bacteria.

Now, there are some challenges holding back lab-grown meat. Controlling the cell division to get the correct arrangements for meat is difficult, and artificially-induced cell division is a slow process.Some are worried about the loss of income and jobs for farmers, and about the fact that the meat isn’t “natural.”

It is also expensive to produce meat this way. In 2013, scientists in the Netherlands extrapolated that creating a full hamburger using their technique would take up to 6 weeks and US$250,000. To assist in this area, organizations pursuing animal welfare offered to contribute large sums of money to people that could solve these problems. For instance, PETA offered a $1,000,000 reward to the team that successfully creates marketable in vitro chicken meat.

However, by 2017, even the barrier of expense has reportedly been massively reduced. Sources such as BigThink and Next Big Future claim that, currently, the cost of a pound of lab-grown meat has dropped from several hundred thousand dollars to just $11.36 US, and it’s likely to keep dropping.

SciShow, a science-centric YouTube channel, brought up a Winston Churchill quote that I consider food for thought: “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.”