Lab-grown meat (probably) won't save us

I'm sure you've seen the news we are growing meat in labs and that meat is getting ever closer to your plate this is an incredible feat of science but I want to look past the headlines is meat grown in a big silver vat actually going to replace the meat we've been eating for basically our entire existence and is it any good there was only one way to find that out this is minute food so meat sucks most of the meat that's commercially available is terrible for the animals it comes from and terrible for the environment I know all this but I also know that meat is really freaking delicious so I do still eat it although it comes with a hefty side of guilt and I'm not alone this internal conflict is so common that scientists have given it a name the meat Paradox the good news for us conflicted carnivores is that there are a lot of people working on ways to make eating meat a less crappy choice we're gonna devote a few different videos to some of these Alternatives because I want to understand the science they're based on and whether they're actually able to produce food that's sustainable and delicious and we're starting with the one I'm most curious about cultivated meat AKA cell cultured or clean or lab-grown meat here in the US the first cultivated meat products both chicken have just been approved by the USDA you can't buy them in stores yet they're different from the alternative meat products that are already out there because those are vegetarian products that imitate meat cultivated meat is an animal product here's how it works first scientists take a tiny sample from an animal or something from an animal like an egg a feather even a cut of actual meat to harvest a specific type of cell different companies use different kinds of cells and the industry as a whole is still figuring out what kinds work best but the idea is that given the right conditions the right temperature the right pH the right nutrients the right amount of oxygen and agitation these cells can grow and replicate outside an animal basically endlessly this happens in huge Vats called bioreactors this the cells multiply that gets shuttled between bigger and bigger bioreactors until they're ready to harvest usually in just a few weeks growing cells in Vats isn't a brand new technique we've been doing it for years to produce certain Pharmaceuticals and for even longer to make booze but there's a ton of additional complexity when it comes to Growing cells for meat for one meat isn't just cells it's tissue a highly complex highly organized arrangement of cells coaxing cultivated cells which are basically mushed into something resembling a chicken breast or steak requires some serious Innovation and this is where things get a bit fuzzy partly because different cultivated meat companies are tackling the mush to meet transition in different ways but also because a lot of this is proprietary none of the companies I visited were willing to go into much detail about how they actually do it some companies put the cells into a machine that extrudes the mixture into fibrous bundles others add so-called scaffolding that helps the cells gas into muscle-like groups still others are working on 3D printing layers of cells to mimic that highly organized structure no matter the exact process though the end product is meat it's chicken beef tuna whatever because these are animal cells they just grew and replicated outside that animal and if that matters in some big ways first it's better for animals than conventional meat cultivated meat only fleetingly involves an animal since sampling those initial cells only has to happen once to initiate the cell line and that sampling generally doesn't kill the animal quick side note early versions of cultivated meat did require FSB a mixture rich in nutrients and growth hormones acquired by slaughtering cows but virtually all companies now use plant-based substitutes anyway a second big implication of growing meat outside animals is that it bypasses some of the environmental problems at least potentially but hold up is meat grown in a vat any good because I'll admit I was skeptical and kind of icked out at the idea and based on the overwhelming sentiment online lots of other people are too so in the name of science I took a little road trip to try the stuff and I want to be clear that I approach this company that makes cultivated chicken good meat and they're not sponsoring us or anything so you are getting my unvarnished opinions here but the truth is that companies like this one have a lot to prove and their success rests at least partly on making tasters like me and viewers like you impressed by cultivated meat so I was very conscious throughout the whole tasting that I was being sold a product here and even after the first dish a smoked chicken salad I remain skeptical I mean it was delicious but virtually any protein would be if it was sliced up and smothered in a delightfully Smoky Mayo for me it was the next dish a whole piece of cultivated chicken that we was the real test and it was good like shockingly good I'm picky about me about its texture in particular and I didn't have high hopes for this chicken's texture considering the difficulties of that mush to meet transition I assumed it would be like those processed nuggets kind of homogeneous and spongy but it wasn't this stuff had bundles of fibers running in different directions that pulled away from each other in a way that was remarkably similar to chicken I'd eaten my whole life it wasn't quite as juicy or springy as a perfectly cooked piece of conventional meat but it was way closer than I was expecting and it tasted like well chicken the ick Factor ahead going in is gone culinarily I have no qualms about cultivated chicken especially since what I ate is basically a prototype that's only going to get better that doesn't mean I don't have qualms about other aspects of cultivated meat first it's not actually a given that cultivated meat will be better for the environment than conventionally produced meat it almost certainly will use less water less land and fewer chemicals but one of the biggest environmental problems with meat is its greenhouse gas emissions and the emissions estimates for cultivated meat are all over the place I found claims that ranged from a 96 reduction in emissions compared to Conventional meat to a 2 400 percent increase part of the reason for this discrepancy is that different companies are using different production methods but a bigger reason is that in order for cultivated meat to actually be a viable alternative to Conventional meat companies would have to produce it at a totally different scale than they currently are and we just don't know what that would look like or if it's even possible say we want cultivated meat to replace even just one percent of the meat eaten worldwide we'd need millions of tons of the stuff each year so companies are going to need much bigger bioreactors on the ones they're currently using but it's unclear whether the process will actually work and that's that large whether cells can get the oxygen they need and avoid being poisoned by their own poop and even if it does work all that enormous equipment will be ridiculously expensive to produce and maintain in fact basically everything about producing cultivated meat is expensive from the nutrients required to feed the cells to the measures required to avoid contamination it's remarkably hard to pin down the cost of cultivated meat but it's currently many many times more expensive than conventional meat that price would have to come way way down before it even makes it to stores in the first place the bottom line is that a lot needs to go right for cultivated meat to actually be a viable alternative so this chicken is surprisingly delicious as it is isn't the future of meat in the short term and there are enough question marks that nobody can really say if it's even possible long term my take is that when it comes to cultivated meat we need to be careful not to count our chickens before they're extruded foreign [Music]

Channel: MinuteFood

Views: 161,452

Keywords: sustainability, meat, beef, chicken, lab-grown, cultivated, cultured, alternatives, sustainable, environment, technology, bioreactor, scaffolding, extrusion, clean, FSB

Id: 45t_93xpGE4

Length: 8min 19sec (499 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 03 2023