LAB GROWN MEAT I MEG

For as long as we’ve looked back in history, we have been eating meat and many people take the fact that it comes from an animal for granted. However, science has come up with a way that could change this; a meat that is identical to normal meat but grown in a lab completely outside of the animal’s body. This is called lab meat or cultured meat and it could be in our burgers and on our barbecues sooner than we think. The cellular agriculture industry is only getting greater and projections show that by 2021 lab meat production could be introduced and by 2040 it will be customary for it to be part of our meals.

How is it made?

The meat is first made by taking a muscle sample of an animal. Scientists then multiply them dramatically by leaving the cells in a nutrient-rich solution, called a growth medium, in a controlled cultivator. This allows them to differentiate into primitive fibres which bulk up to form muscle tissue like they would in the animal’s body. Mosa Meat, a company starting to develop lab meat, has said that one tissue sample from a cow can form enough muscle tissue to make 80,000 quarter-pounders. Just think of all those McDonald’s meals you could have knowing that not a single cow has been killed.

The result of this process is a product that looks like meat, smells like meat and tastes exactly like meat. Although it has been formed in a lab, it is biologically still meat with the only difference being that no animals are harmed in the process of its production. This does mean that lab meat is actually not vegan as some people may have thought at first. But since it doesn’t include the slaughter of animals, the concept of it isn’t so bad.

The Benefits and Problems

Lab meat doesn’t only cut down on animal slaughter but it also greatly reduces greenhouse emissions which could aid in the problem of climate change that our planet is facing. This is because cattle take a lot of energy to raise, butcher then ship, and not to mention their digestive systems which release a lot of methane into the atmosphere. Raising cattle pumps out large quantities of CO2 and methane into our atmosphere whereas the production of lab meat does not release nearly as much methane - a more potent gas than CO2. At first glance, it sounds like lab-meat is in for the win on being more sustainable. But what many people seem to forget is that CO2 takes longer to dissipate than methane. So, if cultured meat production starts to pump out lots of CO2 into the atmosphere, the accumulated greenhouse effect of it could be worse than methane’s short lived effect.

In addition to this, the long term effects of consuming lab grown meat is not known to man. It is not certain that lab grown meat will act identically to meat from animals in the human body. And ofcourse there is the question of whether consumers will even be willing to eat artificial meat processed in a lab. All of this has to be thoroughly considered before lab meat can be introduced into supermarkets.

Meg

Sources used:

Schaefer, G.O. (2018). Lab-Grown Meat. Available at: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/lab-grown-meat/ [Assessed 2nd Feb 2020]

Webber, J. (2019). What Is Lab Meat and Is It Vegan? Available at: https://www.livekindly.co/lab-meat-vegan/ [Assessed 2nd Feb 2020]