The No Kill Carnivore

In a 1932 essay about the future, Winston Churchill predicted: “Fifty years hence we shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium.” He was wildly optimistic about the date, but basically correct about everything else.

In 2000, scientists working on a NASA-funded project coaxed extracted fish cells to grow into something that resembled fish fillets in vitro. NASA was looking for ways to feed a crew during an extended space expedition, but as it turns out it’s not just astronauts who are interested in the technology. There are also vegetarians. So-called “vegetarian meat” technology could someday supply animal flesh to the table without the messy business of actually slaughtering them. Last year PETA offered $1 million to the first scientist who brings cultured chicken meat to the market.

“Once you grow meat in a lab, you’re no longer talking about individuals with interest, you’re talking about a slab of flesh no more sentient than tofu,” PETA spokesman Bruce Friedrich said. “This would be the best thing for vegetarians since sliced bread.”

Environmentalists and the health-conscious may also be drawn to the technology.  Lab-grown animal tissue doesn’t emit greenhouse gases in the way a belching cow does. “And a hamburger produced in vitro can have the fatty acid composition of salmon,” said Jason Matheny, director of New Harvest, a five-year-old nonprofit organization devoted to promoting cultured meat and funding further research.

The basic technique behind in vitro meats is relatively straightforward. Stem cells are suspended on plastic or silicon sheets and bathed in a nutrient-rich soup; as they grow, the material is stretched to mimic the flexing that gives in vitro meat its texture. The result is creamy in color with a texture that falls somewhere between Jell-O and SPAM.

Before the meat can move from petri dish to the dinner plate, however, there’s much that must still be learned. Firstly, researchers are still unsure which type of starter cell will prove most efficient: myoblasts that already form muscle tissues but have limited ability to proliferate, or embryonic stem cells that multiply abundantly but must be nudged into producing muscle.

Then there’s the question of cost, which boils down to the nutritive broth. The NASA study employed fetal bovine serum, which aside from being frowned upon by PETA members, is also highly expensive. There are vegetarian alternatives, but they are similarly costly. A study last year by the In Vitro Meat Consortium surveyed all the available broths and concluded that producing cultured meat, even after it’s ramped up to an industrial scale, would be nearly twice as expensive as unsubsidized chicken. One option is using genetically engineered E. coli bacteria to produce the protein needed to make the broth.

Once the manufacturing issues are sorted out, there are still the questions of texture and taste. Independent of other advances, in vitro technology will never produce filet mignon or a pork chop. The mouth feel in traditional cuts has as much to do with intermixed blood vessels and fat, as the muscle itself. Adding vascular structures to engineered tissue is certainly a goal of scientists, particularly among medical researchers looking to grow transplant organs, but it’s a long way away.

As for taste? Officially, researchers can’t sample any food that hasn’t been OK’d by regulators, but off-the-record it’s clear some have taken a nibble and didn’t exactly rush back for seconds. Yet bland taste and mushy mouth feel may not matter. Matheny notes that the slurry that becomes chicken nuggets doesn’t taste very good either. But give the technology five to 10 years, he says, and in vitro meats will reach the supermarket. Vegetarian meats will be flavored and molded into shapes that resemble today’s McNuggets, ground beef, and—in a form that echoes cultured meat’s test-tube origins —the hot dog.