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In recent years there has been a significant shift in how
Americans consider and purchase their food. Sometime around 2000 it seems
generic grocery shoppers began to care more about the quality and sourcing of
the ingredients, than the convenience or the price point. The rise of specialty
foods and stores like Whole Foods or Trader Joe's speaks to this, and no matter
your or my opinion on the subject, the industry is growing significantly (22%
sales growth between 2012 and 2014).
 So of course this cultural shift in food attitudes is going
to also affect how food is grown or produced. More sustainable agricultural
processes inspired and sparked indoor farming. Vegans and animal cruelty advocates
are the main market for laboratory synthesized meat, which also benefits from a
significantly reduced greenhouse footprint. For our purposes, we'll call it
shmeat.
The idea of shmeat has existed since 1931,
and the first in vitro cultivation of specific tissues occurred in 1971. In the
1990s, these techniques were parlayed into the development of stem cell
tissues, which could be eaten, but were not used for that purpose. Instead,
that distinction goes to a
fish fillet grown from goldfish cells by BioScience Research Consortium in
2002.
 Fast forward another 11 years, and we have the first
lab-growth burger. Professor Mark Post, of Maastricht University, took cow muscle stem
cells and cultured them with nutrients and growth chemicals. A few weeks
later millions of stem cells had developed, and were then placed into petri
dishes to coalesce into strips of muscle just a centimeter long and a few
millimeters thick. These muscle strips were frozen until about 20,000 were grown,
which was enough to be compacted into the burger.
The burger was white, so researchers added beetroot juice to
provide a more natural color. After being prepared by a professional chef, the
burger was given to an Austrian food critic, who noted: "I was expecting the
texture to be more soft... there is quite some intense taste; it's close to
meat, but it's not that juicy. The mouthfeel is like meat. I miss the fat,
there's a leanness to it, but the general bite feels like a hamburger. What was
consistently different was flavor."
Does that glowing review have you craving a lab-growth
burger yet? Likely not, but development on the product continues. Notably, that original lab burger was
manufactured at a cost of $325,000, but today
costs just $11, and Professor Post expects it to be commercially
competitive within a decade.
Of course there are questions. What will shmeat look, smell,
and taste like? If it can't compete with in these key properties, it will never
be a meat alternative. How healthy will it be?
Well the meat could
be doped with nutrients, and would be processed in a facility cleaner than
a slaughterhouse, for sure. Is it all-natural or genetically engineered? Who
knows! Could we grow people meat to consume? Sure.
While I'm not professing my desire for an all-meat
diet, I can safely say that my diet for the immediate future will be a no
shmeat diet.
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Re: Will You Eat Synthesized Meat?
