What is lab-grown meat and what did the U.S. recently approve?

Subject : Science and technology

Section: Biotechnology

Context:

The two companies, Good Meat and Upside Foods have received the U.S. government’s approval to make and sell their cell-cultivated chicken.

Details:

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration was involved in the regulatory process but didn’t technically approve the products because the process doesn’t require approval.
The step is being hailed by stakeholders in the concept as a major step forward for reducing the carbon emissions associated with the food industry worldwide.
The first country to approve the sale of alternative meat was Singapore in 2020.

Cell-cultivated chicken:

“Cell-cultivated chicken” – that’s the official name of chicken meat that is grown in a laboratory for human consumption.
Process of cultivation:
- First, isolate the cells that make up this meat (the meat that we consume), and put them in a setting where they have all the resources they need to grow and make more copies of themselves.
- These resources are typically nutrients, fats, carbohydrates, amino acids, the right temperature, etc.
- The ‘setting’ in which this process transpires is often a bioreactor (also known as a ‘cultivator’), a sensor-fit device – like a container – that has been designed to support a particular biological environment.
- Because of the techniques involved, producing meat in this way is also called cellular agriculture.
- Once these cells have become sufficiently large in number, which takes around two to three weeks in Upside’s process, they resemble a mass of minced meat.
- They are collected and then processed, with additives to improve their texture and/or appearance, and are destined for various recipes.
Researchers are also developing cell-cultivated versions of sea bass, tuna, shrimp, and pork.

Why was cell-cultivated meat created?

Reasons include reduced emissions, land use, prevention of animal slaughter, food security, and customisation.
Global livestock is responsible for 14.5% of all anthropogenic greenhouse-gas emissions.
The lab-cultivated meat would use 63% less land in the case of chicken and 72% in the case of pork.

Challenges include:

Perfectly substituting animal meat with alternative meat requires the latter to match the former’s taste, texture, and appearance, and cost.
The cost of cell-cultivated meat is expected to remain high in the near future.
For the cellular cultivation process, researchers require high-quality cells to begin with (plus information about how different cell types contribute to the ‘meat’), a suitable growth medium in which the cells can be cultured, plus other resources required to maintain the quality of the final product.
The research found that if cell cultivation requires a “highly refined growth medium”, akin to that used in the pharmaceutical industry, then the “environmental impact of near-term [cell-cultivated meat] production is likely to be orders of magnitude higher than median beef production.”