No animals harmed in the making of this sausage. Cultured synthetic meat coming soon.

The ability to grow sausage meat in the lab could be a close as six months away, according to the New Scientist. Although actually bringing a product to consumers is still a way off, now is the time to start considering public acceptance.

I think in vitro meat is a fantastic idea, but apparently it’s hard to get funding for this research. Who can blame companies for being wary of funding new food technologies after the debacle that was GM food? Unlike other scientific developments in food production that are vociferously opposed by activist groups (like GM food and Greenpeace), cultured meat is being backed by the infamous animal rights activist group PETA.

The technological hurdles

Researchers at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, lead by Professor Mark Post, have used muscle stem cells from a pig that can multiply into billion of cells. They’ve been grown into muscle-like strips 2.5 cm long and 0.7 cm wide. Their size is limited by the surface area for oxygen and nutrient absorption.

Currently they’re being grown in lab tissue culture media, called foetal calf serum, which obviously defeats the purpose of not killing animals and is also not suitable for human consumption. Ideally the cells could be fed on something that’s not animal based, and the researchers are trying to develop a feed based on photosynthetic cyanobacteria, which produce extracts rich in amino acids, sugars and fats.

The other problem they have to overcome is that there’s no blood in the tissue and the cells have low levels myoglobin (the muscle equivalent of haemoglobin), which means that the meat is white. It doesn’t say in the article, but presumably this also means it’s low in iron? I would have thought that it being white meat, like chicken or fish, would be less of a problem than it lacking in iron.

Also, an important part of how cells in our body grow is the mechanical stresses that are placed on them – so the muscle cells need to be exercised. The scientists growing the muscle strips are anchoring them to Velcro and stretching the cells away from the surface.

Initially the meat is likely to be used in settings where form and texture don’t matter so much, like sausages and hamburgers.

Science communication and the lessons of GM food

There is a very strong environmental argument for cultured meat – it could use 99% less land, 82–96% less water and produce 78–96% lower greenhouse gas emissions.

Environmental impacts of cultured meat production (compared to conventionally produced European meat). GHG = greenhouse gas. Image: J Environ Sci Technol. DOI: 10.1021/es200130u

But if GM food has taught us anything, it’s that arguments about environment benefits (such as reduced pesticide use), or benefits for others (eg. farmers), or even evidence-based arguments that studies show GM food isn’t inherently a health risk will fall before the fear generated by phrases like ‘frakenfood’. Us scientists might like to think that if we explain the science, and risks and probabilities, of technologies then public understanding will rationally follow, but that’s too optimistic and simplistic. [More than half of Europeans surveyed thought that normal tomatoes don’t contain genes and that eating them could genetically modify your own genes.]

Perceived risk is often high for new technologies and is influenced by factors such as: potential fatal consequences; that the potential negative effects are unknown, not directly observable or delayed in their manifestation; a perceived lack of control (eg. especially if GM foods aren’t labelled); and an inequitable distribution of risks and benefits (eg. the profits go to multinational corporations). These factors influence risk perception for nuclear power, GM food and potentially lab grown meat.

It’s not only about how the technology is framed in the media – there is also a school of thought that suggests that something is perceived as more risky if it’s getting a greater volume of media coverage, whether or not that coverage is positive or negative [untangling cause and effect is difficult].

So how could we genuinely address these issues with factory grown meat?

I think one important factor in public acceptance would be a big emphasis on product safety and testing. It may be that the regulatory environment in a country does not require rigorous safety testing so it may seem like overkill, but it would be beneficial for confidence in the emerging technology to be able to point to well designed published peer-reviewed safety trials. (Yes, GM food has shown this doesn’t work on its own, but I think you need to be seen to be concerned, and not blasé, about public safety before putting it in supermarkets.) Especially since the most likely consumers are those who already think about their food.

Otherwise even from university ‘experts’, not just militant activist groups, you’ll get opinions like this:

But for Monash University philosopher and ethicist Dr Robert Sparrow, growing petri-dish meat would be the “ultimate end-point of the process of denaturalising food”.
“It removes people from any contact with food production … and the safety of this technology for human consumption remains unproved – we will be essentially be conducting an experiment on ourselves.”

Right, because it’s really natural to take sentient animals capable of experiencing pain and suffering, pack them into feedlots, pump them full of antibiotics, hormones and goodness knows what else, grow them unnaturally large, kill them so we can eat them, and then in factories mix their meat with preservatives, emulsifiers and flavour enhancers to make them into sausages. No one conducted safety trials on all the unnatural things we already put in our food. And people pop vitamin pills and untested natural remedies all the time. And it’s not like us city folk have any contact with killing our own meat – and many of us would be far too squeamish to actually do it. Anyway…

Cultured pig.

I think companies producing cultured meat would need to be seen to be co-operating with the development of standards, regulations and labelling if they want to avoid scare stories about how do you know if there are Frakenfoods hidden in your beef patties? It might sound unrealistic that companies would encourage government safety regulation and labelling, but if they want to avoid the fate of GM foods, with government moratoriums and wholesale consumer rejection, then it might be the best option. Of course, politicians don’t tend to act until there is a public clamour, so maybe it could initially be a voluntary industry labelling agreement.

The rejection of GM food following public controversy in Europe, UK and Australia also showed that taking such an approach would be especially important in these regions, while in the US where GM food was accepted without labelling such caution may be less necessary.

Marketable?

For consumers to eat it they need to see benefits for them – large benefits – not as it currently may be “chewy and tasteless”. Think about how much fuss there was five to ten years ago about whether mobile phones would cause scary brain tumours. Yet mobile phones were a technology consumers wanted, so even though those concerns were getting a lot of media play, consumers still took the technology up in droves.  Yes, what we eat is a bit more of a sticking point for consumers, but the idea that meat produced in factories is less natural than eating battery hen eggs, McDonalds, potato chips, or jelly beans is daft, although no one ever said consumer sentiment was logical.

Culture burgers wouldn't be any worse than what we already eat from McDonalds & co., plus you'll know it's muscle tissue, not offal!

The problem is the “yuck factor”: “the instinctive visceral revulsion many people feel when scientists appear to go against nature” or that it’s “ghoulish”. I know I’m not representative of the general public in that I don’t get this yuck factor – personally I find the idea of killing an animal for meat far yuckier than growing some cells.

I’m not so sure that, as the New Scientist editorial asserts, the ethical issues are unimportant to consumers. Many people already choose to be vegetarians for ethical reasons, causing inconvenience at dinner parties and restaurants across the nation. It has become normal at BBQs with friends or colleagues for someone to need tofu sausages or burgers. So surely there’s already a market out there for food based on the ethics of not killing animals? (Let’s face it; you don’t eating tofu for its taste or texture.)

While the tofu-burger eating crowd might seem like a logical primary market, they’re already accustomed to not eating meat, and some of them are probably more likely to be resistant to things that are ‘unnatural’. Although, I know vegetarians who would still like to eat meat. And I suspect there are plenty of people like me who have some moral qualms about killing animals to eat, but despite the niggling hypocrisy, eat their chicken green curry anyway (mmmmm…).

There’s one major way the introduction of this technology could differ from GM food – if there was the activist power of animal welfare/rights organisations behind it. They’ve already convinced plenty of people to go vegetarian, buy more expensive free range eggs, prefer products that say ‘not animal tested’ and not to buy fur. Imagine vegetarian celebrities eating culture-burgers and backing not killing lambs to make sausages any more. Can the appeal of meat without the revolting fact of killing something provide enough of a bonus to win over at least a subset of the market?

At least you'll be able to righteously watch 4 Corners again. Image: AnimalsAustralia.org.au

I like the idea that one day amongst us city folk the idea of raising a whole animal and killing it for us to eat will be slightly revolting and medieval. Yes, eating meat is natural, but then again so is cannibalism or silverback gorillas killing babies they didn’t father – it doesn’t mean we should do it. But if the New Scientist‘s predictions are correct and we could see the first lab-grown sausage in six months (although there’s a big difference between 1 lab grown sausage using FCS and industrial scale production with appropriate health & safety testing), then anyone planning on selling cultured meet needs to starting developing the science communication side now in parallel to the technology.

Otherwise the public will have frightening Frakenfoods with a mandatory overblown cancer-causing-health-scare suddenly launched on them by evil multinationals and we’ll have a GM food-style backlash on our hands. And it would be a tragedy if the enormous potential benefits for feeding the world’s population with far less environmental destruction and for boosting animal welfare, fell because of poor PR.

Tagged: Animal rights, biotechnology, In vitro meat, New Scientist, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, public relations, science, science communication, vegetarian

Posted in: biology