Scientists are developing a new tube steak — a test-tube steak:
In five to 10 years, supermarkets might have some new products in the meat counter: packs of vat-grown meat that are cheaper to produce than livestock and have less impact on the environment.According to a new economic analysis (.pdf) presented at this week’s In Vitro Meat Symposium in Ås, Norway, meat grown in giant tanks known as bioreactors would cost between $5,200-$5,500 a ton (3,300 to 3,500 euros), which the analysis claims is cost competitive with European beef prices.
With a rising global middle class projected by the UN to double meat consumption (.pdf) by 2050, and livestock already responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gases, the symposium is drawing a variety of scientists, environmentalists and food industry experts.
“We’re looking to see if there are other technologies which can produce food for all the people on the planet,” said Anthony Bennett of the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization. “Not only today but over the next 10, 20, 30 years.”
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“To produce the meat we eat now, 75 to 95 percent of what we feed an animal is lost because of metabolism and inedible structures like skeleton or neurological tissue,” Jason Matheny, a researcher at Johns Hopkins and co-founder of New Harvest, a nonprofit that promotes research on in vitro meat, told Wired.com. “With cultured meat, there’s no body to support; you’re only building the meat that eventually gets eaten.”
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Scientists are working on a variety of cell culture procedures. The cutting edge of in vitro meat engineering is the attempt to get cells to grow as if they were inside a living animal. Meat like steak is a complex combination of muscle, fat and other connective tissue. Reproducing the complexity of muscle is proving difficult.“An actual whole muscle organ is not technically impossible,” said Bob Dennis, a biomedical engineer at both North Carolina State University and the University of North Carolina, who attended the conference. “But of all the tissue engineering applications it is by far the most difficult one.”
While scientists are struggling to recreate filet mignon, they anticipate less trouble growing hamburger.
“The general consensus is that minced meat or ground meat products — sausage, chicken nuggets, hamburgers — those are within technical reach,” Matheny said. “We have the technology to make those things at scale with existing technology.”
At scale, in this case, would be thousands of tons per year, Dennis said.