Cultivated Meats and Alternative Proteins Part 1
During a week where a particular meat takes center stage in the United States, it’s time to reflect on the cost of meat – not just the supermarket cost to the consumer, but the environmental cost to the planet.
Meat comes at a great cost – in land.?According to the US Department of Agriculture, 41% of the acreage of the continental United States is used for grazing or to grow food for livestock.??About a fifth of the landmass of the US is devoted to cropland – and some of that gets used for livestock- corn for livestock, soy for livestock.?And you can project that intensive land usage to other countries, especially to Brazil and countries in Africa, and there’s a magnified worldwide impact.?This brings the negative impacts like a contribution to climate change, the risk of increased antimicrobial resistance, and environmental degradation – especially the loss of wildlands.?
Meat production responsible for a huge amount of methane emissions, which is one of the most potent greenhouse gases, and provides the main motivation for deforestation of the rainforest.?
The destructive pursuit of meat isn’t limited to terrestrial environments.?There’s no crab fishery this year in Alaska.?Of the 17 great fisheries in the world, 15 are endangered.?There are almost no cod on Cape Cod.?You cannot buy wild salmon in Scotland – any salmon that you eat has been farmed.?The trend in my local seafood markets is the disappearance of local fish and the dominance of Asian caught species.?It isn’t clear that if everyone just stopped fishing entirely, to give the fish stocks a break, that these fisheries would recover.?Certainly we can’t keep on doing what we are doing.?
And the worldwide demand for meat is projected to double by 2050 due to increased population pressure and increased worldwide standard of living.
And too much meat, especially red meat, degrades the health of an individual.?My “American diet” of hamburgers led to bypass operation in 2019.?My surgeon told me, “don’t worry, I perform a lot of these surgeries.?I do bypass surgeries all day every day.?We live in the United States, after all.”?I have been emphasizing plant based meats in my own diet since.?I still have Burger King Whoppers, but now they are Impossible Whoppers.??????
Often trends sneak up on me, and this is another example.?Many of the graduates of the Solano College Industrial Biotechnology program started working at cultivated meat and alternative protein companies.?So I became aware of the companies, the organizations, and the academics working on the production of alternative sources of protein.?Let me outline a few that have emerged as important in my home base of the San Francisco Bay area and that have made the news recently.?
First, let me spotlight the work of the Good Food Institute. https://gfi.org ?I’ve been going to conferences on Cultivated Meats and Alternative Proteins, and a representative of this amazing non-profit organization usually attends.?They sponsor these conferences and workshops and have emerged as a major advocate in this space.?What do they do??I’ll let their webpage explain.?????
Their webpage states:?
At GFI, we’re building a world where alternative proteins are no longer alternative.
“A primary motivation for GFI's founding was to address the negative impacts of global animal agriculture… GFI works to "make alternative proteins accessible, affordable, and delicious" since plant- and cell-based animal product alternatives contribute significantly less to the …[climate change, antimicrobial resistance, and environmental degradation.]”
They advocate for
·??????Cellular agriculture [its synonym that is the most common descriptor is cultivated meats]
·???????Fermentation – growing protein producing cells in tanks
·???????Plant-based protein
They advocate for synthetic meat production.?The companies in this space have idealistic names like the familiar Impossible Foods, but also Upside Foods and its subsidiary Cultured Decadence, Beyond Meat, GOOD Meat, Innocent Meat, Finless Foods, Future Meat Technologies, Because Animals, BioFood Systems, Meatable, Avant Meats, New Age Meats, Change Foods, Eat Just, Good Chicken, Climax Foods, Tattooed Chef, and Peace of Meat.?We send students to San Francisco’s Mission Barns that adds cultivated fat cells to plant chorizo to make it more savory.?The Bay Area also gave rise to Wild Earth that makes dog food; they pitched their product on Shark Tank and Mark Cuban was so impressed that he bought a stake in the company.?The alt protein companies Perfect Day Foods and TurtleTree make milk protein; Perfect Day makes proteins for cow free ice cream and TurtleTree makes proteins to supplement baby formula to make it closer to the real thing.
The idealistic names of the companies reflect the idealism of the young workers in those companies when you speak with them; they unfailingly believe in their mission of reducing the impact of protein production on the planet.??
Each component of the alt protein triad is interesting, and each deserves its own treatment, but we will start with cultivated meats.?
Cultivated Meats
The industry has been discussing what to call meat that consists of cells that have been grown using the techniques of growing animal cells that have been perfected by pharmaceutical biotech companies.?I think that “Lab grown meats” has been rejected; they aren’t really grown in a lab, and it doesn’t sound appetizing.?I doubt that the term “synthetic meats” will gain much traction either; they are synthesized by natural processes, but not really synthetic – and that term is likely to turn off the consumer. The annual San Francisco conference for this industry uses “cultured meats” as its term; this sounds more appetizing, but does not seem descriptive enough.?The field seems to be settling on the term “cultivated meats.”??Each company has an exclusive chef, and each interacts with high end grocers.?
Our neighbors, the University of California, Davis, has emerged as the national academic leader in this field.?With funding from a multi-million National Science Foundation grant they established the Cultivated Meat Consortium.?
They hold summits and have developed curriculum for classes in Cultivated Meats and Alt Proteins.?Nationally they are joined by UCLA and Tufts University as leaders in this space.?
领英推荐
The GFI advocates for an industry that is exploding in the San Francisco Bay area and in the San Francisco-Sacramento Corridor.?
Let me emphasize a few that have been in the news this month.?
Upside Foods
Last week the cultivated meat company Upside Foods received good news from the Food and Drug Administration.?Although the FDA did not give final approval, the “no further questions” indicate moved Upside Foods closer to regulatory approval:?
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) completed its first pre-market consultation for a human food made from cultured animal cells. We evaluated the information UPSIDE Foods submitted to the agency and have no further questions at this time about the firm’s safety conclusion. The firm will use animal cell culture technology to take living cells from chickens and grow the cells in a controlled environment to make the cultured animal cell food.
The details on Upside’s submission and the FDA’s detailed response can be found here:?
Because the cell type is poultry, the company must complete a similar filing with the US Department of Agriculture.?The Bay Area’s Finless Foods and other companies pursuing non-poultry and non-beef, do not have this additional requirement.?Upside Foods acquired the Madison, Wisconsin company Cultured Decadence that is pursuing cultured seafood that will not have this requirement.
The FDA went on to say:?
The FDA is ready to work with additional firms developing cultured animal cell food and production processes to ensure their food is safe and lawful under the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. We encourage firms to have these conversations with us often and early in their product and process development phase, well ahead of making any submission to us. We are already engaged in discussions with multiple firms about various types of food made from cultured animal cells, including food made from seafood cells that will be overseen solely by the FDA. Our goal is to support innovation in food technologies while always maintaining as our priority the production of safe food. Human food made with cultured animal cells must meet the same stringent requirements, including safety requirements, as all other food.
Although Upside generated the first cultured beef meatball, and have also cultured duck cells, they are currently concentrating on chicken.?By clearing this key regulatory hurdle, Upside Foods is in a position to be the first cultivated meat company to reach the US market – unless they are beaten by a fish cellular meat product that solely needs the FDA approval.?
Singapore is currently sole place where cultivated meat is being served.?GOOD meat makes the chicken served there at a particular fine restaurant. ?https://www.goodmeat.co
This company was featured on a National Public Radio story that underscored the environmental preservation element of this effort, cultivated chicken was served at the most recent United Nations Climate Change conference in Egypt.?
For the NPR story GOOD Meat's in-house chef Chris Jones prepared a grilled chicken dish with a umami-style mushroom glaze in a clay pot and served for the reporter Allison Aubrey.?He served it with asparagus, brown rice, and quinoa.
Allision Aubrey:?“This is really delicious - tastes like chicken.”
Chris Jones:?“It is chicken.”
???????????The impact of meat production on a planet that just reached the 8 billionth person milestone and importance of alternate meats of reducing the impact of this exploding population has not be lost on the United Nations.?But “cultivated meats” have other benefits.?
???????????Since they are grown sterilely they are not subject to the common food-borne illnesses like Salmonella.?A chef suggested to me at a conference that she was considered chicken-based sushi. Cultivated meats are meant to be cooked - upstream culture technique is sterile, but the large scale downstream processing is not. Since I've taught microbiology for decades, I'm still going to char my meats. ????
???????????Cultivated liver cells could be grown to produce foie gras, and mammary cell glands could be used for milk production.?
???????????With the right interaction with religious authorities, some foods whose counterparts in nature would never be able to pass religious muster might be declared kosher or be authorized to be used in a halal diet.?
???????????If you got inventive any animal could be used as a source of cells.?You could make tiger tacos or panda patties.?You could serve cheetah and Cheetos.?The resurrection of extinct animals could allow mammoth masala, or in a stretch of the imagination and some Jurassic Park science, a Fred Flintstone Bronto Burger. ??We are really, really good at growing Chinese Hamster Ovary cells, the standard cell in pharmaceutical manufacturing, so how about hamster hamburgers??And I won’t mention the icky Netflix horror film Fresh, but that would be possible too.?
Now that we know why – why are people pursuing cultivated meats and alt protein, the next installment will be the how – how are these grown??And how will the companies overcome the regulatory challenges???????????