Is lab-grown meat the future of food?

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Well, hello from the hills of Greater Manchester, you lovely curious-minded people.

Today, you join me and my dog, Herbert, on a stroll close to where I live.

We are currently right next to a field of quite contented looking cows, grazing away, making the most of what is quite a rare dry day.

Now this is what I picture when I think of livestock farming.

Cows or sheep wandering around munching grass in a field.

But today we're focusing on a very different kind of meat production, something that looks nothing like this familiar scene.

We're going to take an in-depth look at lab-grown meat, real animal meat that's grown outside of an animal.

It actually goes by a few different names.

Cultivated meat, cultured meat, in vitro meat, even synthetic meat.

Whatever you call it, the industry claims it could be a game changer, not just economically, but for feeding the planet in a sustainable way.

But are the claims too good to be true?

That's what we're going to try to figure out on Inside Science.

Now the UK has recently become the first European country to approve the use of lab-grown meat specifically for pet food.

Did you hear that, Hibbert?

But how much of an appetite do human consumers in the UK have for this edible innovation, if it does eventually reach our plates?

We turned to the rather unscientific approach of Vox Pops in the streets of Cardiff to ask people, would you try lab-grown meat?

Oh, that sounds obscene.

We want the proper thing.

I would probably try it because I'm curious about food.

Definitely, I won't.

Why do you go for lab-grown meat when we have like the meat which is available to us?

I don't really like the idea of it.

I I think there's enough chemicals in our food.

I do understand the problems with cows, but no, thank you.

Yeah, I try it, I like my food, but it's not meat.

Yeah, my daughter's been vegan, and we've tried lots of different things like tofu and corn and things, so it's not too far a step along, really, is it?

I don't think I would eat it.

I don't know why, it just feels not right.

I'd be scared too, in case there's loads of chemicals and stuff in it.

Many people we talked to were worried about what kind of chemicals might go into the meat.

Some didn't even consider it real meat.

So we wanted to find out exactly how it's made in a facility right here in the UK.

Producer Ella Hubbert and I visited Ivy Farm Technologies in Oxford to find out how the company turns a single cell from a cow into a meatball.

We started with a chat with CEO Richard Dylan, asking him why he got into the business of growing meat.

There's three things we want to get out of this business.

One is meat's not very sustainable, so we can do this in a much more sustainable way.

The second one is food security.

The UK actually imports more meat than it exports, and so we believe that we can work with the best of British farming to help shore up the meat production for our own use.

And then the third one is animal welfare.

I think industrially farmed animals, when you look in, it's just not a nice way to live.

We've been referring to this as lab-growing meat, but that's not what you call it here, is it?

We refer to it as cultivated meat because that's the process of growing cells in a cultivator.

I think that in people's minds, you have a laboratory and they don't think food normally.

So, I think labeling it lab-grown just gives a perception of franken food.

They think that there's something unnatural going on, and that's not the case.

Okay, so can we go and have a look around how this is actually produced then?

Yeah, absolutely.

I'll take you downstairs to our chief scientific officer, Harsh Amin.

He will show you around.

So the lab that you are seeing now is essentially the food clean room.

So let's start with this TC4.

So TC meaning tissue culture.

Okay.

So it all starts with essentially getting one to two centimeter tissue from an animal that typically is a mixture of muscle and fat and we break them into a single cell.

Now usually this biopsy has about 40 to 100 million cells of which about 1% of the cells are of our interest, where you have the muscle cells, fat cells, and the stem cell that can make more muscle and fat.

For this stage of things, why does it need to be so secure and so very, very clean?

Safety is very important when you work in the lab.

We make sure that we are fully PPE geared and we do the test on these cells before we bring them in our manufacturing pipeline, ensuring there is no virus, there are no pathogens, there are no bacteria.

Once they are safe, then we take them forward for the cell line development.

Do you have to start with a dead animal?

Do you have to kill an animal in order to get your raw ingredients to culture your meat?

That is right, so that is the regulation at the moment.

But once we take that cell out, then we don't have to keep going back to more animals.

Because typically we store our cells in liquid nitrogen, we keep small whiles, and that can produce tons of cultivated meat from that one while.

And we've got hundreds of those vials.

So that's kind of stage two, if I'm being really simplistic.

So if we go in the other lab.

This is a very busy lab.

There's about eight people working away, so we won't interrupt them for too long, but what happens in here, Hersch?

So this is where the team, as you can see, they are either prepping their cells to grow them and ultimately produce the cultivated meat, but part of it is also they are making the cell culture media.

Making the food for the cells.

Food for the cells.

And it's a complex process.

You know, you have about 60 to 70 different components as a nutrient.

When you talk about that media, what goes into that?

Just the way we eat our food and that has nutritional elements.

Cells also require similar nutritional elements.

For example, you've got sugar, carbohydrates, we have vitamins.

And can you actually adjust the different vitamins or the levels of protein that are going to be in that cultivated meat by feeding it different things?

Absolutely.

So we can control whether they are close match to the commercially available meat or even better nutritionally.

What about flavour?

Can you kind of tune that with the media as well?

And you can tune the flavours, you can tune what textures it gets, what kind of assault levels you've got.

It's almost like corn-fed chicken or feeding Guinness to your waggy cows.

Absolutely.

So now we are going in the direction of

bioreactors scale up.

We're talking meat production.

Meat production, that's right.

So you see a lot of processing units here.

We're standing in front of a bench with kind of scaled down fermentation tanks almost.

There's kind of tubes going in, lots of gauges, bottles around them, and they're all attached to these units where everything can be very tightly controlled.

So you've essentially got a very complicated beaker that is absolutely controllable, every parameter.

These are called the bioreactors.

These bioreactors are basically purposed to grow cells.

So essentially, this is kind of your cultivated meats animal analogy.

Like muscle would grow in an animal, you need to create the right conditions in this beaker.

Absolutely.

So just the way an animal grows, this bioreactor grows cells.

And this is Europe's largest pilot plant.

There's a very different feeling to this, isn't there?

We were very much in research.

We're now looking at quite a lot of big vats.

So what we are looking here is a variety of different fermenters.

Like fermenters from breweries?

Craft breweries, for example.

That allow us to utilize or repurpose some of the retired or old fermenters to produce cultivated meat keeping it sustainable.

So here in Oxford site we are geared to produce up to three tons a year.

We cannot sell it yet because we are still waiting for the regulatory approval.

Is anything being produced?

Yeah so we are currently producing Aberdeen angus.

The tissue came from an Aberdeen Angus cow.

That's right.

You selected that cell, you fed it and it's now in

the fermenter.

It comes as a paste.

Now it's perfectly healthy to eat.

It doesn't have the texture.

So from that point we utilize plant-based protein, typically pea protein.

And that then essentially starts to give us the texture, the shape and the size that we want.

I guess people might be concerned that then

rather than it being a sort of raw just meat product that comes from an animal and they know exactly what they're getting, that there's a lot of processes that that has to go through.

You know, how do you kind of measure the quality of that and the kind of the nutritional value of that?

So any steps that is following the minced cells that is coming out of the bioreactor is focused on keeping it as less processed as possible so that you get a fine taste, texture, but at the same time there's a high nutritional value to it.

So that's where the cultivated meat comes out.

And where are we going to next, Hash?

So we are now going to go to Ivy Farm's kitchen.

Oh we're going to cook.

That's right.

So, what you're going to be doing is smelling when it cooks, how the texture looks.

I mean, that seems cruel because it's nearly lunchtime and we're not allowed to eat it, are we?

No, unfortunately, not.

Back for lunch after that, but let's go and have a look.

Oh, I can smell it.

I can smell it already.

I'm quite hungry as well.

Hello, we have a chef here.

What's your name, sorry?

Emmanuela.

Hi, Emmanuela.

What are you up to?

So, I'm preparing now three types of meatballs: one with cultivated meat, one with standard meat, and one vegetarian.

Okay, to sort of do the comparison.

Can I have a smell?

I think this one's the plant-based one just because of the colour without even sniffing it.

But I can't, I don't know which one's the cultivated meat.

They smell kind of the same, don't they?

Gosh, that's really strange.

Am I right about the plant-based one?

Yes, right.

Okay.

I'm going to say the one on the left is cultivated meat.

Yeah, so actually this is the standard meat.

So that's the one I thought was...

wow, it smells like beef.

Well, Khash, thank you for the guided tour.

If you have any commercial questions around the cultivated meat business, you can go upstairs to our CEO, Rich Dylan.

Oh, perfect.

I think you're doing.

We've worked around the facility.

There's a lot that has to be sort of powered and then there's a production process.

How do you measure just how sustainable this is and how intensive is this process when you want to scale it up and you know produce a lot of this meat and put it on the market?

Well, we've done a life cycle analysis and actually the way that we would produce meat, it only takes two weeks versus a traditionally farmed cow could take up to two years or more.

So when you take all that into consideration, we can produce the same amount of meat for 92% less greenhouse gas.

And I guess the term that gets used quite widely is lab-grown meat.

People are maybe a little bit uncomfortable with that.

They don't quite know what it is.

They think it's very kind of highly processed.

Like, how would you respond to that?

The yuck factor, I suppose.

Yeah,

they're very inefficient animals at converting plant calories in to flesh calories out.

And simply, all we've done at a biological level is understood the equation and are able to feed those same cells from an animal, the same food that it gets from eating in a field, but in a much more efficient way in tanks.

So yeah, it feels a bit sci-fi, but I think all transitions are.

I just think that farming hasn't really had much innovation driven through it for the last few thousand years.

So how soon do you think we could see these products on the shelves?

Well, we're in the last mile of a marathon race.

So it's now up to the regulatory bodies to assess and

put a timeframe on how quickly they can say yes to sales.

We want to first start off in, I think, restaurants and then at some point go to supermarkets and hopefully in everyone's fridge in the next few years.

So, lab-grown meatballs might soon be available for us to buy.

But what would the success of this industry mean for traditional livestock farming?

That's the source of a Europe-wide controversy about the potential impact on the livelihoods of farmers.

Last year, Italy banned the production, sale, and import of lab-grown meat to protect its agricultural sector.

The right-wing Italian government called the ban a defence of Italian tradition.

Here, though, one research project has set out to measure the views of British farmers about this novel way of producing meat.

And it's a discussion that raised some unexpected concerns and some potential benefits for farmers.

I spoke to Lisa Morgans from the Royal Agricultural University, which led the project.

Yeah, the biggest concerns probably could be split into two topics.

First one was consolidation of power in the food system.

And that was quite a surprise for me, actually, how acceptive the farms were about that imbalance of power that currently exists.

So, who decides who eats what and at what price point?

And then, like, who benefits from that whole production system?

Just to pick you up on that, in terms of who decides, does that mean the producers of products, things like sausages, burgers, meatballs?

So, where does the sort of power lie in terms of where traditional meat and cultured meat goes?

Exactly, yeah.

So, lots of livestock farms will sell their animals to an agent or an abattoir and they don't really know where their animals will go and into which products.

And could cultured meat change that, or will it just consolidate and intensify the intensification, as one farm partner put it?

And what about any positive feedback about the potential for traditional agriculture to benefit from cultured meat production?

What farmers did notice was if there was societal rejection of cultured meat, particularly if there was some kind of food scandal or health scandal, it might increase demand for their traditional pasture-based kind of meat systems and therefore be beneficial for livestock farms.

So

if this is a terrible failure for some people

that could benefit them.

Yeah.

But one of our farms actually coined the phrase game changer and many of the farms we worked with could see that the food system needed game changers.

With the global demand for protein going up and up and up, could cultured meat meet that demand with a smaller environmental footprint?

And then there's the opportunity for new working relationships between the people in cultured meat sector and primary producers.

So farmers, so like arable farms, could have waste material that could go into supplying cultured meat production.

They could supply glucose from waste fruit materials or even making cultured meat on farm, like in sort of modular production systems, but having a fair price for those things.

Whereas in some situations now, farmers don't get a fair price for their product.

Oh, that's interesting.

So some farmers saw the possibility of having like a new supply chain.

Exactly.

Interesting, because you talked about like the produce that could go into supplying like the nutrients for culturing meat.

But we went to a cultured meat producer that needs a tissue biopsy and needs some really good beef cells, right, from a cow.

Did they see any prospect of that, any of the livestock farmers?

Yeah, we discussed that with all of the livestock farms and they could see that being a potential business like scenario, but they had lots of questions about, as you can imagine the practicalities of it very practical people like how were the sales sourced how often do they need to be taken and is it like a one-off transaction so there's all these big questions still remaining right um but it's kind of

there was a lot of ethics i think raised actually by the farmers would it mean that the companies who need the source sales just bought their own livestock and kept it all in-house or would it be something that they would work more collaboratively with existing farmers?

Yeah, which is an unknown question.

So, obviously, lots of things need answering before farmers really have an idea of how this will impact them both positively and negatively.

What would you say was the main message in terms of engaging with farmers and a you know a fair and sort of transparent transition, if you like, into a new way of producing meat?

To make it simple, I suppose I'd say it's about ongoing dialogue and communication.

So, if Cultured Meat can get those relationships going with farmers and build contracts, contractual relationships that are fair for both parties, then I think that's a good first step.

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Thank you, Lisa Morgan's there.

Now, we've tackled a lot already in this program, conflicting public opinion, farmers' precarious position in this burgeoning industry, and the process of making a real meatball from a single cell.

But if we're going to be eating this stuff in the future, we need to talk about the yuck factor.

This is not the first time consumers have encountered a novel, scientifically engineered food, and we are not always hungry for innovation.

So, are there lessons that the cultivated meat sector can learn from the failings of the past?

Here's Stuart Farrimond.

Feeding the world in a sustainable way is a meaty issue that scientists have been sinking their teeth into for decades.

Yet we often turn our noses up at foods served to us by people in lab coats.

Take genetically modified or GM foods, for example, a technology held in the 1990s as a miracle solution to feed the world's growing population.

By tweaking plant genetics, it became possible to make crops more productive, pest-resistant and nutritious.

But fears, often whipped up by the media and environmental groups, of health risks, environmental harms and worries over tampering with nature soon soured any optimism.

Branded Frankenfood, first in a 1992 New York Times article, the wave of anti-GM activism that soon followed caught scientists and companies completely off guard.

Not anticipating a backlash, GM companies were often defensive, secretive and dismissive.

It didn't go down well with the public and most GM products have been roundly rejected by shoppers, although it has been a success story for farming and the meat sector in North America, where 55% of US cropland is devoted to GM crops, mostly corn and soy for animal feed.

Last year, a law was passed in the UK allowing GM crops to be grown here for the first time, although most countries across Europe forbid it.

Enter stage stage left, the next edible hope for our struggling planet, lab-grown meat, or more accurately cultivated meat.

With meat consumption set to rise 60 to 70% by 2050, it is being billed as an environmentally friendly alternative to satisfy the world's insatiable appetite for beef, poultry, pork and seafood.

This meat is animal tissue grown in a bioreactor then flavoured and pressed into meat shaped pieces or patties.

It doesn't sound appetizing, but the potential environmental gains could be mammoth.

But what can stop this technological marvel going the way of GM foods and becoming the franken meat skewered into the pitchforks of the worried hordes?

If cultivated meat is ever to make a showing on our menus, then a rethink is needed.

GM Foods illustrates a fundamental failure in how these foods were framed, with scientists playing catch-up as negative perceptions solidified.

Scientific facts and figures simply weren't enough, and telling people not to worry simply made people more suspicious.

The key difference this time around may lie in how the story is told.

With cultivating meat, there's an opportunity to be proactive, to engage public in the conversation early, to be transparent about the process and to focus on the benefits without shying away from addressing people's concerns head-on, such as the fear that this unnatural food will cause cancer or other health problems.

The omens don't bode well for this fledgling industry however.

Singapore was the first country to approve cultivated meat for human consumption in 2020, yet funding for this technology there has plummeted 78% last year in response to shoppers' lukewarm reception and difficulties in scaling up and getting costs of production down.

Some products, such as a thin-cut beef steak recently approved in Israel, which contains fat and sinews, does actually look and taste like the real thing.

But whether cultivated meat sizzles or ends up in the slaughterhouse will hinge on whether they can convince people to try it at all.

The proof of the pudding, as they say, will be in the tasting.

Lab meat burger, anyone?

Thanks, Stuart.

And finally, we heard a lot while we were making this programme about the environmental credentials of cultivated meat.

The production of meat from livestock is estimated to be responsible for well over a tenth of our global greenhouse gas emissions, and that's only set to increase as demand for meat rises.

And because lab-growing meat doesn't need the herds of livestock and land for grazing it, advocates say it's an alternative with a much lighter environmental footprint.

But can moving protein production from cows and sheep to large-scale cellular brewing devices really help fight climate change?

To get to the bottom of that, I spoke to the University of Oxford's John Lynch, whose research focuses on the climate impacts of meat and dairy production.

He started by telling me exactly where livestock farming's emissions come from.

So, the challenge for conventional meat production, and especially beef, is that you have to feed the animals.

Growing crops requires energy use, it requires fertilizers and land to grow the crops, and then they're only converting some of the energy to meat, so it ends up being quite wasteful.

Land use is a key environmental concern because if you're using land for agriculture, you're kind of not using it for carbon sequestration or for biodiversity support.

The argument behind cultured meat is that you can streamline that process so you're converting your nutrient input, which may still be crops, but converting that to the kind of human consumable meat more directly.

I see, so there'd be land use associated with growing feed for the media to feed the cells.

Almost certainly, yes.

But you might need less crops and less land, less fertiliser use to get the same amount of meat out.

And it will come down to how effectively can you convert that to meat.

The trade-off that it looks like at the moment is that you will need to use some extra energy to maintain the cell growth conditions,'cause you need to have them stirred and heated because you don't have the animal's body maintaining those conditions through homeostasis.

You have to produce that heat where the animal would...

Exactly, yeah.

You essentially have to replace all of the animal's metabolic processes that allow the cells to grow with some kind of engineered alternative.

The question is, can we do that in a way that is actually significantly more efficient than an animal?

And even among different animals, there's quite a big difference there.

So cows and sheep are not particularly efficient at converting feed into meat, but pigs and especially chickens already are.

So if we're looking at how efficient cultivated meat will be, it probably will be able to be more efficient than kind of beef.

But will it actually be more environmentally beneficial than chicken production in terms of pure efficiency?

Potentially not.

You know, it's an industry in its early stages, but there was a pre-print paper last year that made some some headlines that talked about the global warming potential, the climate cost of lab-based meat using these purified media, these nutrients that are needed to cultivate it being four to even 25 times greater than producing traditional beef.

Is there anything in that?

Can we say that at this stage?

What are the costs there?

So, I think it's a bit early to anticipate exactly what the costs are going to be because we don't really have real large-scale production data to point to.

And I think we should keep that in mind that as and when these companies do start selling it, then we will want some kind of actual data to back up some of the environmental claims.

But I think it's fair enough to expect that the impacts will reduce as these things are scaled up and the technology develops.

Right.

But there's another kind of interesting thing to consider here, which is that it's not like the cultivated meat is sort of actively good for the climate on the environment.

It's just hopefully lower impact than conventional agricultural production.

Interesting.

So it sounds like the classic, properly interrogated scientific response to the question, is this better or worse?

Which is, it depends and we don't quite know yet.

Is that right?

You know, if we're to ask you the question, well, is cultivated beef more environmentally sustainable than traditionally produced beef?

How would you answer that question?

Yeah, you've given me the get out of jail free card there.

It depends.

I think that I wouldn't go for the kind of worst case that you outlined earlier i think the papers kind of showing how very high impact the current production is is useful in showing where we need to improve the supply chain if we are going to scale it up and sell it but i also think some of the messaging around that has been a bit overly negative because i don't think it's likely that companies are going to be trying to sell it in this way, partly just because it won't make sense for their own bottom line if they're having to source everything at the kind of extremely premium pharmaceutical end of the scale.

Will people want to eat it more than beef, or would people just be able to decrease their beef consumption anyway without shifting to cultivated meat?

These are the real kind of sustainability concerns that it comes down to.

Thank you to John Lynch there and to all of our cultivated meat contributors because that is all we have time for.

We have had a good deal of food for thought today.

The cultivated meat industry has achieved some impressive scientific feats, recreating the life cycle of an animal without the animal.

Some bold environmental claims from the industry remain to be proven as it scales up.

Ultimately, though, its place in our agricultural ecosystem and in our food culture hinges on the question: will people want to eat cultivated meat?

Do let us know what you think by email at insidescience at bbc.co.uk.

But for now, from the northern hills where the skies have turned threateningly grey and the wind is really getting up, thank you for listening.

Come on, Herbert, let's leave the cows in peace and go home.

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