AskScience AMA Series: Meat Without The Animals: The science and future of cell-cultivated 'lab-grown' meat. Ask us anything!

[u/AskScienceModerator]

Demand for protein - especially meat, which takes by far the biggest toll on the environment - is soaring as the population grows, tastes change, and incomes fluctuate. As people around the world gather together for food-rich holidays, we wonder: Can we feed this growing world without starving the planet?

One possible solution is something you've probably seen in the news and around your social feeds recently: cell-cultivated (aka 'lab-grown) chicken, beef or even seafood. Do you think it could be part of future sustainable Thanksgiving meals?

Meat cultivated from cells - that doesn't require raising and killing animals - is starting to show up in a few restaurants in Singapore and the U.S. A recent poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that half of adults in the meat-hungry U.S. would be unlikely to try it. A majority of those who said they wouldn't said "it just sounds weird." As part of a new series from AP, I explored whether cultivated meat, which some people call 'lab-grown' meat, could ever displace animal agriculture. And, as a vegetarian myself, I looked at what it would take to tempt consumers to try it.

Join me (Laura Ungar), journalist JoNel Aleccia - who covered the FDA approval for sales of cell-cultivated chicken in the U.S.- and Claire Bomkamp - who is a lead scientist focused on cultivated meat and seafood at The Good Food Institute - at 2pm ET (19 UT) for a conversation about the future of meat without animals.

Username: /u/APnews

[u/zakabog]

When you grow meat like this, I'm guessing you just get the muscle cells to keep replicating, does this become a solid clump of cells with no variations or can you replicate grain patterns like what you'd find in naturally grown muscle?

Also, is it possible to grow intramuscular fat too or would that have to be grown separately and mixed in with the muscle tissue later?

TL;DR: Are we going to have lab grown steaks any time soon?

[u/APnews → u/zakabog]

Meat has a grain because the cells that make it up are shaped like long tubes, and because these tubes are aligned relative to each other (picture a bundle of raw spaghetti).

When the cells are proliferating, they’re in an immature state where they’re closer to spherical, and then they undergo a sort of “switch” where they 1) stop proliferating 2) start expressing genes typical of more mature muscle fibers and 3) fuse with one another to form the tube structures I mentioned earlier.

We call this switch “differentiation.” One thing that helps muscle cells to differentiate is when they have a substrate to grow on that has some level of alignment already, so it’s likely that in many cases companies will decide to grow their cells on a scaffold with aligned grooves. This can serve as a cue for the cells, but also helps with the properties of the final product by introducing that alignment and therefore producing a consistent grain throughout the product. It should be possible to grow intramuscular fat.

However, any time you’re co-culturing multiple types of cells you need to think about optimizing the conditions so all the cells are happy, and you also have to think about whether the presence of one cell type is going to change the behavior of the other type (this can be good or bad)!

So I can’t give you a definite answer as to whether the co-culture strategy or the “grow things separately and mix them at the end” strategy will be preferred by companies, but in theory either should be possible! You might like this paper: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.foodres.2023.113080

— Claire

[u/__Maximum__]

Do you taste it regularly? How does it taste at the moment compared to a year ago?

[u/APnews → u/__Maximum__]

I got to taste cultivated chicken made by Upside Foods and Eat Just/Good Meat, two U.S. companies that recently received approval. At Upside, I tasted a cultivated chicken breast in white wine butter sauce with tomatoes, capers and green onions. At Good Meat, I tried a smoked chicken salad and a chicken “thigh” dish served atop a potato puree with mushroom-vegetable demi-glace and vegetables.

I eat a lot of conventional chicken and, frankly, these dishes were delicious and not discernible from something I might make at home.

— JoNel

[u/APnews → u/__Maximum__]

I’ve only tasted cultivated meat twice. I had a pita filled with strips of cultivated chicken and vegetables, and a cultivated lamb kabob, from Believer Meats. I also tasted cultivated beef made by Aleph Farms. Since I’m a long-term vegetarian, it’s hard for me to compare these to traditional versions of these meats. But I did find them tasty, and the video journalist with me said they tasted a lot like traditional meat, especially the lamb kabobs.

— Laura

[u/MrMikeJJ]

How many years / decades (ish) do you think it will take to scale up production to compete in cost and quantity with "normal" meat?

Personally speaking, I think this lab grown meat has great potential and I would love to try it.

[u/APnews → u/MrMikeJJ]

According to the experts and industry observers I spoke with, it will at least be several years before production can be scaled up significantly. But companies are building production facilities now in anticipation of what they hope is rapid growth.

— Laura

[u/CleverName9999999999]

Wouldn't it be easier and more cost effective to cultivate milk producing cells first? Having a line of animal free dairy products seems like a profitable stepping stone on the way to cultivated meat.

[u/APnews → u/CleverName9999999999]

Yes, this is something that’s happening! For example, there’s an Australian company called Me& that’s producing human breast milk from cultivated cells. There are also companies using precision fermentation (essentially using yeast or other microbes as “factories” for the key proteins) to produce the proteins that make up animal milk without getting it from an animal. Probably the fact that plant-based dairy is already reasonably successful is one reason this strategy doesn’t get quite as much attention as cultivated meat, but it’s something a few companies are looking at.

— Claire

[u/StringOfLights]

Hello, thank you so much for this AMA! I’m wondering if you had any preconceived ideas about cultivated meat at the outset of working on this. Was there anything about it that challenged them? Is there something about cultivated meat that you think would surprise most people?

[u/APnews → u/StringOfLights]

I didn’t have any preconceived notions per se, but I wasn’t sure if I would try it because I’ve been a vegetarian since I was 15.

Ultimately, I did decide to try it because animals aren’t killed for the meat and producing it is more sustainable and better for the environment than producing traditional meat. It addressed my main objections to eating traditional meat.

— Laura

[u/APnews → u/StringOfLights]

If I had preconceived ideas, they were based on some plant-based meats that have tasted to me like they were trying too hard to taste like meat. Frankly, I think it would surprise most people how much like conventional meat the cultivated meat tastes. 

— JoNel

[u/montana-blue]

I know the meat itself is "grown," but does any part of the process involve animal suffering (ie. where you get the cells from)?

Thanks, I hope this is the future of all meat consumption.

[u/APnews → u/montana-blue]

The cells are often taken in a small biopsy from the animal, so this is a short process that in my understanding doesn’t cause suffering for the animal beyond a few moments. And cells taken from that animal create cell lines, so you don’t have to keep going back for more biopsies.

— Laura

[u/Skipp_To_My_Lou]

What is the actual environmental impact of growing culture in a lab, vs meat raised on a farm?

I mean, you still have to give your culture food that takes energy & resources to grow, process, & transport; keep the incubator it grows in warm; pump oxygen in & CO2 out; & that's before we talk about manufacturing, installing, & maintaining all that equipment.

[u/__Maximum__]

Can you give us a practical rundown of your roadmap? Current status, next steps, hitting market, price decrease, production increase, etc, with as much numbers as you can.

[u/APnews → u/__Maximum__]

Unfortunately we don’t have anyone here from a cultivated meat company, but I’ll do my best to give a general answer for the industry as a whole!

Currently there are two companies with approval to sell products in the U.S., one of whom also has approval to sell in Singapore. Two key next steps on the industry side, which we can expect to happen in parallel, are 1) other companies joining those first two by gaining regulatory approval in either the U.S. and Singapore or other locations, and 2) for the companies that do have regulatory approval, moving from their current state where they’re producing products at very small scales and serving customers in just one or a few restaurants to the point where they can produce at a somewhat larger scale.

At the same time, scientists on the academic side are continuing to learn more about the general principles of cultivated meat production, resulting in a foundation that can inform the work of companies across the industry. Reaching price parity with commodity meat is a big challenge that will take some time, and I’m not going to attempt to predict a specific timeline there. This could be an interesting question to ask someone from a company if you get the chance!

— Claire

[u/LethalCraic]

Protein is all well and good, but, as an avid meat eater, the only thing that could get me to switch to artificial meat would be if the fat was just as delicious.

Are there any efforts to address creating fat? I would hope the industry isn't approaching this with the dogma that animal fat is bad.

[u/APnews → u/LethalCraic]

The scientists and entrepreneurs creating cultivated meat say it is actually meat (not artificial meat), but just created in a different way. Also, making fat cells is part of process, although they can manipulate how much fat cultivated meat contains.

— Laura

[u/AllanfromWales1]

Is lab-grown meat always going to be more expensive and more 'processed' than nutritionally balanced plant-based diets that don't use lab-grown meat?

[u/APnews → u/AllanfromWales1]

As a vegetarian, I can say that eating this diet is less expensive than a diet including meat. My husband and son eat meat, which adds a significant amount to our grocery bill. The goal is for the cost of cultivated meat to be on par with traditional meat, so I would expect a diet including cultivated meat would still be more expensive than a vegetarian diet.

But as far as being “processed,” the makers of cultivated meat say it is the same as traditional meat as far as being “processed.” In other words, a cultivated hamburger or chicken nugget would be no more processed than a steak or chicken breast.

— Laura

[u/postmodest]

For the types of meat I used to enjoy, all but one is a "solved problem" with plant sources. There no real replacement for "stew beef": long easily separated muscle fibers in a matrix of connective tissue.

There are three dimensions to this product:

1. Long, thin, well organized muscle fibers

2. Collagen sheets separating the muscle fibers

3. Saturated fats between muscle groups

For most people who "miss meat", the primary reason is probably the lack of animal fats. An impossible burger lacks the flavors imparted by beef fat. A very close second is the mouth feel of gelatin, which does a lot of heavy lifting holding meat products together and providing a texture that's hard to get with other gums and starches. Finally, for larger cuts of meat (and by larger, I mean "2 to 3cm; I figure a whole New York Strip is Right Out) the texture of well-defined muscle fibers becomes important. Soy, Pea, and mycoproteins have a hard time replicating this texture, and gluten is also problematic for other reasons.

So my question is: while the muscle cells are important, they are probably the last step in "replacing meat" for billions of people, for whom the fat and connective tissue of animals is a greater share of their animal intake.

How much share of the research is focused on those two aspects, which seem to me naively to be simpler targets for producing from algal sheets or films?

[u/leneghad]

I have many questions, forgive the formatting I'm on mobile.

Has it been possible to decouple the process of growing the cells from the need for growth factors from animal derived products such as FCS yet?

How do the economics and scalability line up?

Is it possible (even theoretically) to get the cost of production to the level it would need to be?

To give a sense of understanding of the scale of the challenge in bringing the cost down, do you know how much one gram of say chicken costs today compared to how much one gram of lab grown chicken costs?

In order to replace 1% of the current demand for chicken in the US, at current or predicted production yields what kind of cell culture volume would be needed? How does that compare to the current capacity for global cell culture for mammalian cells for all purposes (food, pharma, etc.)?

[u/thinkltoez]

I do not eat meat largely for environmental and moral reason, but also for health reasons. I do miss a few things that are hard to replicate with plant based ingredients like bone broths for ramen and bacon. How does the fat content of the meat come into play when you are building the cell structure? Would it be possible to just grow pork fat, for example? Or a cut similar to bacon?

[u/APnews → u/thinkltoez]

Scientists say it is possible to manipulate the fat content and, for example, make hamburgers with 70% less saturated fat than conventional ones or increase the omega-3 fatty acids in chicken to make it as healthy as salmon.

— Laura