🧫 From Lab to Plate: The case for cultivated meat #18
Part 1 of a 3 part series about cultivated meat
Hey there 🤗
Welcome to the first of a three-part series all about lab grown meat, which is also commonly referred to as cultivated meat, cultured meat, clean meat, and cell-based meat. I think clean meat definitely sounds the most appetizing out of the bunch but to stay true to what it is, we will go by cultivated meat in this series.
In this first part, we will have a look at our obsession with meat and the potential of cultivated meat to reduce our impact. In the second part we will look at how it is actually made and in the final part of the series we will have a look at the state of the industry.
I would love to hear what questions you have about cultivated meat. Just respond to this email or leave a comment on the post. The goal is to answer these at the end of the series in a bonus edition of the newsletter.
🥩 We, humans, are obsessed with meat.
Meat has been a key staple of our diet since the hunter-gatherer days and we have since taken it to the point where we now slaughter over 70 billion animals per year for our consumption. Meat production has grown nearly twice as fast as the world population since the 1960s and is showing no signs of slowing down. Our collective meat consumption is largely driven by wealth, so, as countries and individuals in Asia and Africa are getting wealthier, we can expect the demand for meat to grow even more.
We are often told to eat local foods to reduce our impact, and although this is good in terms of supporting your local economy, it has little impact on the actual sustainability of your food. What you eat is far more important than where your food is from. In Germany, the average person consumes 101kg of meat per year, which emits more than 1,400kg of CO2e. This number is so large that if you were to buy and ship all of this meat from Australia to Berlin you would only increase the total emissions by 4%. I’m not trying to convince you to stop buying local food, but using it to showcase the enormous scale of emissions caused by meat production.
Image: emissions caused by meat production vs. emissions caused by shipping it from Australia to Berlin. Each item (meat or ship) represents 57kg of CO2e.
Reducing or replacing our meat consumption will be a key part in unfucking our planet, but something so engrained in many cultures will be difficult to change. To see just how difficult eliminating meat consumption is, I spent the whole of May eating a vegetarian diet. It was definitely not as hard as I expected it to be, but avoiding meat entirely in the long-run will be difficult as meat replacements do not offer the same level of satisfaction.
This lack of satisfaction is not just my opinion, in a study across three nations (Germany, France, and the Netherlands) the taste of plant-based alternatives was the key factor inhibiting consumption. Participants associated plant based burgers with the terms disappointed, distrust, and discontented, while meat burgers were associated with contented, happy, and pleasant. Cultivated meats will, naturally, be able to resemble animal proteins much closer than plant-based meats as they are grown from animal stem cells (we will look at how this is done in the next part). Experts described some samples of cultivated meat as having “a pleasant meaty flavor” and “a typical meat bite and texture”. This pleasant meaty flavor and typical meat bite will be key to tackle the emissions caused by our collective meat consumption. In the Netherlands, more than half of respondents to a consumer acceptance study were willing to pay a 37% premium for cultivated beef compared to conventional beef. A key strategy to increase customer acceptance will be to focus on the societal and environmental benefits of cultivated meat and focusing on the final product itself rather than on how it was produced.
🙋♂️ How much better is cultivated meat compared to normal meat?
It is more humane. You don’t need to kill 70 billion animals per year.
It is less destructive. You don’t need to clear forests to make space to grow animal feed.
It produces less waste. There are no hooves, feathers, or organs to discard.
It grows quicker. Cultivated meat grows in a matter of 2-3 weeks compared to the 2+ years it takes for a cow to reach maturity.
It emits fewer greenhouse gases. Cultivated meat releases just 25% of the emissions that beef does.
The only area where cultivated meat exceeds beef production is in energy use. Cultivated meat requires 135% of the energy that beef production does, however as long as the energy comes from renewable sources this is not an issue.
Plant-based meat does outperform cultivated meat in terms of energy use, emissions, and land use, but the fact that it under-delivers on customer expectations means it can’t replace meat entirely.
Image: comparison of the impact of beef, plant-based meat, and cultivated meat. Source.
In the next part we’ll look at how cultivated meat is actually grown and how the cost has progressed over the years.
Until next time, much love,
Pascal 🖤
🌍 How did you enjoy this 'tings?
Love | Like | Ok | Meh | Bad (Vote by clicking on the word)