It was Winston Churchill, of all people, who predicted the ultimate culinary revolution. Way back in 1932, he stated that: “Fifty years hence, we shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order eat the breast or the wing, by growing these parts separately in a suitable medium.”
It has taken a few decades longer than Churchill imagined, but his prediction might just be coming true – and not before time. Humans now kill about 1,600 birds and mammals every second for food, and that number will grow hugely as the global population – currently 7.1 billion – rises to more than nine billion by mid-century.
It is not just the cruelty that grates, but the huge environmental cost: the space needed to keep and feed all those cows and sheep, pigs and chickens is more than seven times the land we use to grow crops. And with climate change set to make drought and heatwaves more common, added pressure will be put on pastoral farmers, making feeding a growing population ever harder. Indeed, this week the president of the National Farmers’ Union said extreme weather was the greatest threat to British food security.
Of course, the synthetic meat revolution is one of those things, like flying cars, nuclear fusion or holidays on the Moon, that has always been just around the corner, but never quite arrived. People have tried, but the results have been both disgusting and expensive: think of those fungus-based concoctions, veggie burgers and fake sausages.
But now something new and very interesting is in the air. Prof Mark Post, a doctor and scientist at the University of Maastricht, will next week unveil what he claims is the first truly convincing synthesised meat product – a hamburger created in the lab from cultured tissue. It will be brought to London on Monday, cooked – possibly – by a celebrity chef (Heston Blumenthal was once mooted), and then eaten by a mysterious special guest.
When I met Prof Post at his laboratory last year, he talked me through his procedure, which involves taking skeletal-muscle stem cells from a cow, sheep or chicken and growing them in vitro into thin sheets of muscle. They put on bulk partly through stimulation by electricity – a nice Mary Shelley touch. Take these little strips of meat, weave them together and you have a lump of beef.
The world’s first test-tube burger will not come cheap – the figure of £250,000 has been mooted. But, as Prof Post tells me, next week’s publicity stunt “is just a proof of concept”. Certainly, he seems much more confident now about his project; whereas last year he confessed that his family thought him mad, they have now come around to his vision. As for the event itself, he has been ordered by his publicists to stay shtum: he won’t say who the celebrity chef will be, nor who his backer is, nor if they will be the same person tasting the meat – although I am told they are both famous and not British. My best guess would be the flamboyant techno-pioneer Elon Musk, of PayPal, the Tesla electric sports car and the SpaceX private rocket programme, although we shall just have to wait and see.
The real question is, will this work? After all, real meat is both cheap and widely available. Why would anyone choose to buy something that costs vastly more?
The answer boils down to that growing population. Twenty years ago, the Chinese ate less than a 10th of the amount of meat per head that Americans did. Now, as living standards rise, they are catching up fast. If 9.5 billion people (the UN’s mid-range estimate for “peak humanity”, to be reached between 2060 and 2080) want to eat meat in the same quantities as we do now, then just about every acre of land will have to be turned over to keeping animals and growing their food. The net result will be that meat will double in price, then double again.
Such an agricultural expansion would serve to degrade the environment, increase carbon emissions and raise the cost of living (especially food prices) for billions. Then there is the growing disquiet in America and, especially, Europe about the iniquities and cruelties involved in meat production. The fact that products sold in mainstream supermarkets were found to contain flesh from animals of a different species to that on the label – most notoriously in horse lasagne – hardly builds confidence. The market for “ethical meat” might be small, but it is growing.
As for how to make the fake meat, there are two diametrically opposed philosophies. One, as espoused by Dr Post, involves taking real animal tissue and using it to grow meat in a vat, much as Churchill envisaged. In theory, cells taken from a single bullock could provide the seed for decades’ worth of meat production, and several teams in Europe (of which Post’s is the most advanced) are working on this approach.
The alternative is to make meat out of plants. This has been the traditional approach taken by the big meat-substitute concerns: to create a facsimile using vegetable or fungal protein that will satisfy the “meat hunger” of vegetarian converts. The problem is that I have never tried any commercially produced pretend-meat product that I would happily eat again, which will be the case for most committed carnivores.
In Silicon Valley, California, a brilliant geneticist called Pat Brown is approaching the fake meat project from another angle. His ambition is nothing less than to “change the way the Earth looks from space”, by creating so much cheap, healthy fake meat of such high quality that millions of burger-hungry Americans will happily buy it – causing the world’s livestock industry to collapse, and pastures to be either abandoned or given over to crops.
Brown, an intense, vegan, marathon-running genius, is secretive about his work – and perhaps fearful about what the meat industry, which can be a hard-bitten concern, will do to his enterprise if he is successful. But his approach is clear: to take plant tissue and re-engineer it to look, smell and taste like real meat. He has, he says, “no interest in making products for vegans”.
The problem – which goes for the in vitro approach as well – is that what we call “meat” is not a single substance, but more like a piece of biological architecture. Meat is mostly muscle, made up of fibres of protein held together with connective tissue and fats and infused with blood vessels, nerves and gristle. The flavour comes not from the blood, as is commonly supposed, but something called the Maillard reaction, which partially converts proteins into caramelised sugars.
A steak, therefore, is a complex piece of machinery – and duplicating it is not easy. That is why fake-meat pioneers are starting with what is effectively mince. Get that right, at a decent cost, and the money will start to flow in. That could enable more sophisticated techniques that would allow, say, the growing of plausible “fillets” on some sort of scaffold, complete with bioengineered fats.
It may sound far-fetched, but we shouldn’t bet against it. Talk about fake meat, and most people say “yuck”. They, like almost everyone, have never set foot in an abattoir. There is a “yuck factor” in real meat that we simply choose to ignore, just as we will choose to ignore the baths of serum and pulsating, disembodied fillets in a fake-meat vat if the stuff is tasty, cheap and healthy enough. Those who disdain the fake-meat revolution assume that consumers will reject bioengineered plant matter, or something grown in a vat like a headless chicken. But if it’s cheap enough and tasty enough, why give it a go? It can hardly be worse than horses from the knacker’s yard.
