On the surface, lab-grown meat is a noble story.
Save all the poor defenseless cows from cruel factory farms and inhuman slaughterhouses. Protect the environment from all kinds of cow farts, burps and emissions associated with livestock farming. Handcrafted meat processing to be healthy, nutritious and good for the environment. Optimization of fatty acids. Eliminates the possibility of zoonotic diseases or antibiotic-resistant bacteria. No raw cattle manure, unhygienic. No blood or intestines. It’s clean, safe, clinical. We might even call it “clean meat” or “cultivated meat”.
Except it doesn’t have those. So what is the measurement?
How is lab-grown meat made?
Lab-grown meat starts with extracting stem cells from live animals. To grow “beef” in the lab, they extract bovine stem cells. “Chicken”, chicken stem cells. And such.
Cells are bathed in growth medium — a mixture of amino acids, glucose, salts (minerals), vitamins, antioxidants, growth factors, hormones, and other ingredients necessary for the growth of cells. cells, such as buffers to control pH balance. The most common viable growth medium is fetal bovine serum (extracted from pregnant cows), but several companies have developed other growth media that do not appear to involve live animals. .
They are placed on “scaffolding” to promote differentiation into fat, muscle, blood, and other types of cells. Scaffolding can be based on gelatin, corn starch fibers, mushrooms and many other substances.
It’s a really complicated job. It is trying to replicate an organic process that is constantly changing. When this happens in an animal, it has a basic level of “intelligence”. It’s just type 0f… happening. It emerged. The laboratory medium cannot reproduce the organic medium. That’s why in vitro Studies rarely translate perfectly into in vivo Research: environmental issues. Terroir has a problem.
They might have created something the lab equivalent of a steak, which looks and tastes a bit like it, but who dares to say what’s lost in translation? Could it be something important? Could it be something important to the ultimate health effects of eating it?
The most recent company I saw was an Israeli company that grew a 3.67-ounce steak. Let’s look at that. To be frank, it’s horrible. They have a long way to go. What is lab-grown meat really?
Lab-grown meat is not healthy
Lab-grown meats are ultimately about control and money. If farmed meat replaces traditional livestock, as the stated goal, the ability to provide animal protein will become an intellectual property controlled by a few and those in power. It becomes an asset, an industry, a technology. Two of the biggest donors to lab-grown meat include Tyson and Cargill, some of the biggest meat producers in the world. Are they doing it out of kindness or to have more control over meat production?
What will eventually happen is the conversion of one of the oldest and most democratic of human technologies — livestock farming — into patentable, intellectual property. In the past, if a family had several goats or a dairy cow, they were destined. They may not be rich, but they can produce their own food (and sell it in the market if they want to). Having animals is freedom and wealth. In fact, some of the oldest words for wealth or money are derived from the word cattle or livestock. For example, Latin pecunia (money) comes from the word pecus (cattle).
In addition, animal food is highly portable and rich in energy. The Indo-European expansions that would shape Europe, South Asia, and Central Asia for millennia to come were made possible by livestock and the mobile milk, meat and blood it provided. Small but powerful groups of nomad herders swept through grasslands with their horses and herds, dumping waste into the settlements of Neolithic farmers, eating grain, all even because their food source is on their hooves. Supply chain? Surname to be supply chain.
Are those expansions violent and ugly? Of course. That is history. But the point is that animal food gives great power. Traditional ways to produce animal feed spread power and democratize it. You don’t have to be a giant multinational corporation; you can be a homeowner, or subsistence farmer in a developing country, or a member of the CSA. Or just a consumer at the farmers market.
Lab-grown animal foods promise to concentrate power. If meat becomes intellectual property, someone will own that IP. Someone will have the ability to provide animal protein, and the traditional way of raising will become cramped and regulated.
The difference between industrial lab meat and other industrial foods
Although I make mayo at a large workshop, you can still make your own mayo at home. Nothing stops you. Get a whisk, some oil, some yolk, some vinegar, and you’re good to go.
If lab-grown meat replaces traditional livestock, you won’t have any other choice but to buy meat. No one but the owners of these companies will have the money to buy equipment and circumvent regulations. There will be no lab-grown meat in the backyard. In the utopian meat lab proposed. Instead, there will be four or five companies controlling the “meat” industry. The technological, financial, and regulatory hurdles to becoming a lab meat producer would be extraordinary.
It’s not a perfect world by any means now, but you can still visit Craigslist in any town in the US and find someone willing to sell you a quarter of a cow in 50 miles round. There are hundreds of thousands of beef producers, some large, some small. That will change.
How clean is lab-grown meat?
Muscle cells “grow” to produce by-products, metabolites, many of them toxins. In normally growing animals, these toxins are excreted in the urine and feces so they are not concentrated in tissues and cells. How does lab meat remove these toxins? How do they avoid focusing on the very tissues they will sell like steaks and kebabs?
Animals have immune systems to fight bacteria, viruses, fungi. They’re not perfect by any means—that’s why we’re turning to antibiotics and antiparasitics—but they do have a pretty solid layer of defense. It wouldn’t be pretty without an immune system. Lab meat doesn’t have an immune system. They are just cells sitting in a barrel.
So what happens in the lab?? These are honest questions. Maybe they have an answer, but I haven’t seen one.
Can meat really be optimized?
One of the “features” of lab-grown meat is that producers can micro-manage the nutrient, fatty acid and vitamin content of their products. They can “optimize” it to be more sane.
If lab-grown meat allows manufacturers to micro-manage the fatty acid and nutrient content of their products to be healthier, then you think they’d be following the idea of ”healthy”. ” whose? Will they follow ancestral health guidelines or USDA guidelines? Just imagine the damage they can cause:
- Eliminate all saturated fats and replace them with polyunsaturated fats.
- Canola stem cells alternate with bovine stem cells to promote more “healthy” fats.
- Infusion of statins into meat.
- Replace gelatin in meat with “fiber” to lower your cholesterol.
- Remove heme iron from all farmed red meat.
According to most official “expert” accounts, these are improvements to traditional red meat. But they would be total disasters.
The ick coefficient
I can’t quantify the ick factor. There is no real science that “justifies” that. But it’s there, and it may have a reason. At least that’s my bias: that instinctive urges and tendencies have evolutionary purposes that we must discover. Sometimes we find out what the purpose is and it no longer applies. Sometimes we find purpose and find it right.
But you can’t deny that it feels really weird to grow meat in a lab. It may not feel that way to everyone, but it happens to enough notable people. We should probably respect that instinct.
If lab-grown meat was always just a small exotic product, a niche product that people could choose to enjoy, that wouldn’t be a problem. But there are billions of dollars dedicated to the industry with the clear goal of replace traditional livestock farming. No compromises are allowed here — they don’t want you to eat regular meat, they want a “meat-free future” —and I ask you to refuse lab meat with all your heart and mind. and your wallet.
Caring for people. I’d love to hear what you think of the lab-grown meat below.
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