March 4, 2014 6:45 pm
Man-made meat will nourish the body and soul
Humanity needs a synthetic diet for reasons of both health and conscience, says Anjana Ahuja
When Herbert Hoover ran for president in 1928, one of his campaign slogans appealed to American stomachs: “Republican prosperity has ... put the proverbial ‘chicken in every pot’. And a car in every backyard, to boot.”
Pledging universal chicken coverage was always going to be risky, and so it proved. Despite Hoover’s important writings on American individualism, it was his chicken vow that stuck. In 2008 his fowl assertion found renewed fame as the inspiration for a $1m prize put up by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, a charity, “for the first scientist to put an in vitro chicken in every pot or at least in your local supermarket”.
On Tuesday, Peta announced it was abandoning the effort. Not a single scientist had stepped forward brandishing a bird grown entirely in the laboratory. Yet in a statement to the journal Science, the charity insisted that the stunt had been worthwhile. In vitro meat, the group said, had come a long way since the announcement of the prize. But it turned out that beef hamburgers and pork sausages, rather than anything involving chicken, were proving more amenable to reproduction in the laboratory.
The race to produce synthetic meat is indeed already under way. In August, at a press conference in London, the world’s first lab-grown beef burger was hesitantly sampled. “Close to meat. Not that juicy,” was the underwhelming verdict of the Austrian food trend researcher Hanni Rützler. The scientists devised the following recipe: extract the stem cells from the muscle tissue of two dead cows, cultivate them in a medium with foetal bovine serum (contained in the blood of slaughtered animals) and add antibiotics. Then, grow the cells using Velcro scaffolds. Shred the resulting discs of artificial beef muscle, mix in some breadcrumbs and other ingredients so it all sticks together and, for colour, throw in beetroot juice, saffron and caramel (the artificial meat lacks myoglobin so it comes out white). Voilà! Your fake burger is ready for the grill.Evidently, challenges remain. The next ones are to introduce fat cells into the mix, to increase juiciness, and do without the foetal bovine serum. Even then, the public’s palate remains reluctant: a 2012 survey suggested that 62 per cent of Britons would not eat artificial meat.
What made journalists salivate was not so much the burger itself as the unmasking of the person who wrote a $330,000 cheque to pay for it: Google co-founder Sergey Brin. He predicts the world will need to turn to lab-grown meat – or vegetarianism – to reconcile growing food demands with environmental sustainability.
Indeed, global meat demand is creeping ever upwards, as prospering countries become more carnivorous. The Meat Atlas published in January by Friends of the Earth and the Heinrich Böll Foundation, a German environmental group, calculates that 58bn chickens are slaughtered each year. Americans eat on average 50kg of chicken a year, compared with 23kg for Europeans, 14kg for the Chinese and 2kg for Indians. In India especially, poultry demand is expected to rise.
If fake meat cannot satisfy demand, what then? Let us return to the culinary thoughts of Hoover. Before he held his country’s highest office, Hoover had good reason to ruminate on the contents of his nation’s stomach: he was head of the US Food Administration. During the first world war, he urged Americans to observe Meatless Mondays and Wheatless Wednesdays, so that precious food could be sent to the front line. Millions of global citizens could make the same pledge today – not out of patriotism but for reasons of health and conscience.
The writer was named best science commentator at the 2013 Comment Awards
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2014
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