A hamburger created from cow stem cells, priced at €250,000 euros (about $330,000), may be unveiled as early as October, said Maastricht University scientist Mark Post, who is developing the burger in his labs with funds from an anonymous financier.
Patrick Brown is taking a different approach, putting together meat substitutes from plant materials. He says he's starting with meat but could advance to dairy and other products, imbuing the food with a taste that he says will win over “the hardcore meat- and cheese-lovers who can’t imagine giving all this up.”
The scientists speaking at the AAAS Annual Meeting see modern meat production as an inefficient system that’s long overdue for a technological revolution. “Animal farming is by far the biggest ongoing environmental catastrophe,” said Brown, a biochemist at the Stanford University School of Medicine. Grazing cattle or raising pigs requires intensive energy and land use, he said.
Concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs, also are associated with human health risks such as deadly outbreaks of E. coli infection and, said University of Missouri geneticist Nicholas Genovese.
But people like their hamburger and steak dinners, Genovese said, noting that global meat consumption is expected to rise 60% by 2050. So scientists want to find ways to make meats that are more environmentally friendly, healthy, and in some cases less cruel to animals.
Even traditional meat producers are interested in the new technology, according to Genovese, who said large producers Tyson Foods and JBS have inquired about the possibilities of new meat substitutes.
There’s a significant amount of money to be made by the developers of synthetic meat. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service, the retail value of the U.S. beef industry in 2010 was $74 billion dollars.
Brown and Post hope to compete head-to-head with this multibillion dollar industry, and so for now their new products remain mystery meats, at least in terms of the exact science behind their creation and the financial backers supporting the research.
Brown’s process uses plant materials, since he believes plants will be a cheaper and more environmentally more beneficial pathway to a better meat. He said yields from the world’s four major food plant crops—corn, wheat, rice, and soybeans—already provide more than enough protein and amino acids for the world population. But only 4% of the world’s land surface is devoted to growing these crops, he said, compared to 30% for grazing and raising the crops for livestock feed.
Post‘s approach uses cow stem cells, gradually transforming them into tissues that resemble the skeletal muscle that makes up steak or hamburger. Building meat this way, he said, would use about 40% less energy than traditional livestock production.
At the moment, Post’s lab has created small strips of this tissue; he’ll need thousands of these small strips to assemble into a hamburger that will meet the objective of his anonymous financial backer.
The original plan was to develop a sausage, Post said, but with all the fillers in a typical recipe, “it was hardly recognizable as a meat product.”
