In Vitro Meat

Everyone’s talking about in vitro meat, otherwise known as cultured meat, test tube meat, lab meat, or Franken-meat (I think I made that last one up all by myself, but it's probably been done)...

So what is it? Put simply, in vitro meat is meat that’s been grown on a rack, not on a living animal. Nicola Jones’ article for Nature, entitled A Taste of Things to Come ?, has a diagram which sums it up as follows. A small biopsy is taken from a live animal (let’s say, a pig). From this biopsy, cells called mysosatellite cells can be extracted. A growth serum is then added to the cells, which are applied to a rack or scaffold, where byofibres bind them together to form muscle. The rack is repeatedly stretched to build the muscle tissue and boost protein, and the resulting meat is ground into strips which can then be formed into, for example, a sausage.

Advocates of in vitro meat say that it will reduce the suffering of factory-farmed animals (one small biopsy can theoretically generate a billion pounds of meat), reduce deforestation and global warming (no need for grazing space, and less cows equals less methane), and feed the world’s poor. Critics of in vitro meat say that meat that doesn’t come from an animal is unnatural (of course, compared to what comes out of a battery farm this argument is shonky at best), that the taste of ‘real’ meat can never be replicated, and that there are already meat substitutes out there for the anaemic little vegetarians to feast upon. Interestingly, certain animal activists are also critical of in vitro meat, because of the initial process of extracting cells from a living animal, and the fact that some (but not all) of the current growth serums being used also contain animal extracts.

This puts animal advocates in a tricky position. Can saving the pain of thousands, possibly millions of farmed animals be worth the pain of hundreds, possibly thousands of farmed animals? Activist Jeff Perz has written a lengthy ‘Case Against Test Tube Meat’ centred around the premise that causing the suffering of even a single animal is unethical, and it therefore follows that the legacy of in vitro meat will be suffering and sorrow, and true animal advocates should have nothing to do with it. I’m not a utilitarian, but in this case, I would say that more suffering will be saved than will be caused, and dude, that’s about as good as we’re going to get. Plus, the biopsy is allegedly painless, and there are serums available that have no animal content whatsoever, utilising mushroom extracts instead.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals have a competition running for the first person who can bring in vitro chicken to market by June 30^th 2012. The prize, a million dollars, is probably peanuts to the cost of actually achieving this in the first place, but it shows that by and large the activist establishment is on board.

So is this actually going to come off? There’s a minor glitch in that, due to lab regulations, none of the scientists so far have been able to taste the fruits of their labours. If they can get past that (and personally I would be happy to volunteer my taste buds, and gag reflexes, in the name of science) and get the taste right, it could be marketable. Above all, though, like everything else, this will come down to the bottom line – money. Dirty, dirty money. If they can make it cheaper than the factory farm alternative – and that’s going to take some doing – there will be a market for it.

Here, then, are my suggestions for the first products of surreptitious replacement: spam, corned beef, fish fingers, sausage rolls, chicken nuggets, chicken dippers, chicken swizzlers, ground beef pizza topping, and of course, you’ve got to have your Franken-meat frankfurters. Yum.