Is Lab-Grown Meat Good for Your Health and the Planet?

A CNN report shows the possibility of eating meat without farming, slaughter and the risk of high cholesterol levels. But here’s a question – is lab grown meat good for you? 

Uma Valeti, the founder-CEO of Upside Foods, said that cultivated meat is real meat grown directly from animal cells. These products are not vegan, vegetarian, or plant-based. They are authentic meat made without the animal.

“Cultivating meat is similar to brewing beer. Rather that growing microbes or yeast, we grow animal cells,” Valeti said. 

Scientists conducted the study by taking a small cell sample from livestock animals such as a cow or chicken, then identifying cells that can multiply. Then, they put these cells in a clean and controlled environment. After which, they nourish them with essential nutrients they need to replicate naturally. With that, the scientist can mimic the conditions inside an animal’s body. 

“It is getting meat minus the slaughter,” Christiana Musk, founder of Flourish*ink, said at the Life Itself conference. Flourish*ink is a platform for curating and catalyzing conversations on the future of food.

Mosa Meat, a Netherlands-based food technology company, revealed that some companies are moving away from “lab-grown meat.” These companies call this cultivated meat, cultured meat, cell-based or cell-grown meat, or non-slaughter meat.

Aside from mitigating animal slaughter, cultivated meat could also help slow climate change. 

Related Article: Lab-grown chicken to be sold for the first time ever

How It Works

Source: CNN

Making cultivated meat is based on the field of tissue engineering or growing human tissues in a lab for medical repairs and regeneration. 

Here are the steps of cultivating meat, as Josh Tetrick, CEO of Eat Just, Inc, discussed.

1. Scientists get animal cell samples by getting a small amount of tissue through biopsy. Then isolates cells from eggs or traditionally grown meat or obtains cells from cell banks. 
2. Next is identifying nutrients for the cells to consume vitamins, minerals, and amino acids. It’s fed like a traditionally grown chicken with cells that gets nutrients from soy and corn. Isolated cells can absorb the nutrients provided in a lab or facility.
3. The cells are processed in their nutrient bath in a bioreactor, a large stainless steel vessel “that has an internal process by which it agitates cells under a particular pressure to create an environment that allows cells to grow efficiently and safely. This process is making raw meat. 
4. The cell sample takes more or less two weeks to grow into the desired size, which is “about half the amount that a chicken would take.

1. The final step is converting the meat into the finished product, whether that’s a chicken breast or nugget, or beef burger or steak.

Is Lab-Grown Meat Good for You?

Source: CNN

“Whether it’s animal welfare, climate, biodiversity or food safety, there are many important reasons to change how we eat meat,” Tetrick said.

For instance, few to no animals would have to be farmed and used for cultivated meat, and a vast area of land wouldn’t be needed to grow feed for them. Also, a single cell could make hundreds of billions of pounds of meat, Tetrick added. There’s no limit. 

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2022 assessment report said that cultivated meat is an emerging food technology that could help substantially reduce global emissions from food production because of its “lower land, water, and nutrient footprints.”

Whether cultivated meat will require less water is debatable and remains to be seen, Kaplan said, “because you still need a lot of water for cellular agriculture.”

And cellular agriculture may or may not result in a substantial reduction in energy use, according to the IPCC.

Nutritional quality and impacts on human health are areas where “cultivated meat can shine, because the process is much more controlled than traditional agriculture,” David Kaplan, a professor of biomedical engineering, said. 

Conclusion 

Is lab grown meat good for you? The topic of meat is quite challenging because it is culturally connected. It has all the tradeoffs between access, health, sustainability, animal welfare, and taste. It’s a topic of significant debate. However, if lab-grown meat ends up ticking off all the essential elements, it could be considered a great success. Upside Foods’ Uma Valeti said it is when people can eat the meat they want with slaughter.