Meat Re-imagined… as the Same Old Thing
“There’s no way to produce enough meat for 9 billion people.” — Bill Gates
Some of the hardest problems to solve aren’t the most abstract, but the most familiar. Take our agricultural and food industry today. About 7 billion people across the world rely on the production and processing of meat for their meals every day, however, most never acknowledge the darker side of this lifestyle.
Unsustainable Agriculture:
Globally, we face many issues due to our production of food that are only getting worse. These include:
- High usage of freshwater;
- Destruction of natural environments;
- Production of greenhouse gases.
To try to pretend that we can solve any of these by simply innovating new solutions in the distant future is naive; we WILL need to change our lifestyle today as we know it… and that change starts with meat.
Currently, growing meat is stupidly inefficient. It is self-evident that when you give 20 times as much grain to animals as you need to feed the entire world, you are doing something wrong. To get a single cut of conveniently pre-packaged beef at the local supermarket, we use:
- Enough water to support a person in a developing country for almost a year.
- 38 pounds of feed for a single pound of meat.
- 28 times as much energy to acquire the meat as we receive back.
As can be seen, our current manner of meat production is not only hurting the environment, but also hurting us.
From Farms to Labs:
This is where cellular agriculture comes in. Basically, the process skips the raising and slaughtering of the animal, moving straight into getting meat. Instead of waiting years for cattle to grow and expending energy to slaughter them in inhumane factories, cellular agriculture grows ‘in vitro’ (in a dish) meat cells in the lab. These are then gathered together into layers of meat which can be shaped into various products.
‘In vitro’ meat IS real meat. Depending on the process, certain lab-grown meats taste the same as conventional meats for consumers. The process also is much more environmentally friendly:
- ‘In vitro’ meat production uses about 50% less energy than raising livestock.
- Labs take about 99% less land than livestock farms.
- ‘In vitro’ meat production uses 80–95% less water than conventional production.
The Process:
Getting meat from mere cells can involve quite daunting vocabulary that is virtually unpronounceable for anyone except biologists with their mysterious ways…
Here is a simple overview instead:
- Muscle cells are taken from animals.
- These cells grow into tube-like structures.
- The tubes are arranged into rings or other structures.
- Lastly, the large cellular structures are compacted into meat.
Of course, there are many technical details and procedures involved in these simple steps. Many of them differ from company to company and are completely proprietary. The key goals, however, are still to have environmentally-friendly production that resembles conventional meat.
Changing the Future… with the Past:
As can be seen, lab-grown meats offer the same meat-eating lifestyle as the past, but in drastically more efficient manners. We do not need to reinvent the wheel to fix our unsustainable lifestyle with this technology. In a world full of emerging innovations and futuristic technologies, it is easy to forget that we need to fix what we have before we can build something new. ‘In vitro’ meat is that solution, changing our foundation to allow us to build a sustainable, new future.
To learn more about the details of cellular agriculture, be sure to check out this resource written by an actual biologist working in the field:
http://elliot-swartz.squarespace.com/science-related/invitromeat
