A Dutch start-up announces it has raised $8.8 million to commercialise its lab-grown meat. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, the US meat industry is gearing up for a scuffle with the new kids on the block.
Mark Post, CEO of Maastricht-based Mosa Meat, predicts he can get the cost of its burger down to $10 by 2021, at which point he hopes to bring it to a restaurant near you. This is substantially cheaper than the world’s first cultured beef patty, which Post fried up as a media stunt in 2013, at a cost of $300,000.
It bodes well for the economic viability of cellular agriculture – the production of cultured meat, fish and dairy products in vats – and the pace of change; one of Mosa’s US competitors, , claims it will put lab-grown meat in restaurants by the end of 2018.
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Which is why conventional farmers are now worrying about what this technology will mean for them. While Post was trumpeting his plans, meat industry lobbyists were gearing up in Washington DC to battle over the labelling and regulation of lab-grown meat. They were especially focused on what the new product will be allowed to call itself, perhaps sensing a means to frustrate consumer acceptance.
Lab-grown meat
Fears and power struggles over new technologies often express themselves in strange ways and the impending naming fight is no different. While journalists and readers of US magazine Consumer Reports , some advocates prefer “clean meat”. That’s because they see the technology as a way of dispensing with the problematic ethics of slaughtering animals and degrading our environment to produce meat conventionally (and, they argue, inefficiently). For now, though, the flesh is grown in fetal bovine serum, which poses problems for both vegetarians and ethical meat eaters.
Detractors, such as the editor of Beef magazine, on the other hand, . The US Cattlemen’s Association has tried to head off its cellular competition by lobbying the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) to define meat as “the tissue or flesh of animals that have been harvested in the traditional manner”. By “traditional manner” it means slaughtered, as if an animal must be killed to make a meat-eating experience authentic.
Attempting to limit what can be defined and labelled as meat is reminiscent of US dairy farmers’ – except that lab-grown meat is indistinguishable from conventionally produced muscle tissue, in both biological and chemical terms.
Who will referee this debate will depend in part on whether we think of lab-grown meat as a food or a biotechnology product. It is hard to tell right now. For example, Mosa’s biggest investors come from both sectors. While the USDA inspects the quality of meat, poultry and egg products, the US Food and Drug Administration oversees therapies involving human cells and tissues. That includes genetically engineered AquaBounty salmon.
Frankenfoods
For all the talk of Frankenfoods, those salmon swam into Canada’s food chain in 2017 with barely a peep from consumers, who now eat them unknowingly since the Canadian government does not require it to be labelled.
Those who insist on limiting the definition of meat are hoping to continue a long-standing trend. Historian Benjamin Wurgaft, who is working on a book about the culture of cultured meat, points out that the definition of “meat” has changed and narrowed significantly over the past millennium.
When people first used the word, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, they simply meant food (as opposed to drink). It wasn’t until the 1300s that it began to refer to the flesh of animals. And the definition has arguably narrowed from there – today for a lot of people meat equates to the three animal proteins that dominate the industrial food system: poultry, beef and pork.
Maybe the debate over what to call flesh grown in a vat will upend that trend. Maybe it will narrow it further. What is certain is that a war of words lies ahead.
Let’s hope that future conversations also include a broader discussion of the growing reliance on meat – and whether any technology can sustain such growth indefinitely on a planet of limited resources.
