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Cultivated meat is meat grown directly from cells. This method of production is called cellular agriculture. Meat cultivation is the process of producing meat by cultivating cells without breeding, raising, and slaughtering an animal. The end product is real meat - it looks, cooks, tastes, and nourishes the same as conventional meat.
For more detailed information, see New Harvest’s Cellular Agriculture 101, Elliot Swartz’ Clean Meat 301, and GFI’s Meat Cultivation Project Report.
Cultivated meat is made through three main steps: obtaining a sample, cultivating the cells in a cultivator with growth media and scaffolding, and harvesting.
First, a sample of starter cells is collected from an animal. The cell sample (or the “starter cells”) can be harvested without causing harm to the animal.
Next, those cells are placed in a cultivator (also called a bioreactor). Cultivators have a heating and cooling system to control temperature, piping to deliver nutrients and oxygen, and sensor systems to monitor the environment and to measure things like pH.
Inside a cultivator, cells repeatedly duplicate, quickly increasing the number of cells. Cells quickly grow when in a liquid medium and then mature into muscle and fat when attached to a solid structure or surface (called scaffolding). Piping from outside the cultivator carries growth media (containing nutrients and signalling molecules) inside to the cells.
Growth media is a nutrient-rich liquid that feeds the cells so they can grow. Inside a cultivator, growth media contains the same components used to help cells grow within an animal, such as carbohydrates and proteins.
Scaffolding provides a structure and surface for the cells to mature into muscle and fat, and to grow into the desired texture and form. Scaffolding can be made of many types of edible biomaterial, such as gelatin, plants, algae, or fungi. Scaffolding also provides environmental cues to encourage the cells to grow in a specific way.
The final step is to harvest the meat and process it into meat products, like burgers, chicken nuggets, and steak.
The main difference between conventional meat and cultivated meat is the production method. Conventional meat is harvested from animals, and cultivated meat is harvested directly from cultivators. Both kinds of meat are made of proteins, fats, water, vitamins and minerals.
In conventional animal agriculture, animals are bred and fed so that the cells in their bodies grow and multiply into meat. The animal is slaughtered in order to harvest the meat.
In cellular agriculture, a cell sample is taken from an animal, and the cells are given nutrients to grow and multiply into meat. Instead of growing inside an animal, the cells are housed in “cultivators” which provide optimal conditions for cell growth. Cultivated meat is harvested from these cultivators.
Using scaffolding in the production process gives cultivated meat the shape and texture of conventional meat. In the final steps of meat cultivation, the cells attach to a scaffold, which provides a structure similar to the “extracellular matrix” that organizes cells inside of an animal. Scaffolding can be made of different types of biomaterials such as gelatin and derivatives from plants, algae or fungi. Some producers are testing 3D bioprinting for developing scaffolding.
For more details, see Elliot Swartz’ Clean Meat 301.
Fetal bovine serum (FBS) has been used in early research and development for cultivated meat, but wide scale cultivated meat production will not use FBS.
FBS is blood serum that is drawn from a fetal calf. It is a potent source of proteins and molecules called “growth factors.” FBS is widely used in medical research and tissue engineering. It was used in early-stage research and development for cultivated meat because viable alternatives did not yet exist.
However, using FBS for large-scale meat cultivation is not viable. FBS is too costly for large-scale production, does not have a consistent composition, and carries the risk of viral contamination. Additionally, using FBS defeats the purpose of developing “slaughter-free” meat. Developing an alternative to FBS has been a top priority for cultivated meat producers. At least 10 companies have stated they have developed serum-free alternatives.
For more details, see Elliot Swartz’ list of companies not using FBS.
Some companies have stated that a single cell sample could produce as much as 20,000 pounds of meat, but this would require significant technological advancement over the next decade. The amount of meat that a single cell sample can produce depends on the type of cell, the feed, the growing conditions, and other factors. Further, this measure is likely to change as researchers improve their meat cultivation methods.
Cultivated meat is also called cultured meat, cell-cultured meat, lab-grown meat, slaughter-free meat, cell-based meat, clean meat and more.
Differentiating the production process from conventional meat’s production process is important for transparency and informed consumer choice. To highlight this production difference, various stakeholders have given a number of different names to the product.
The three most common terms used by scientists and entrepreneurs in this space are cultivated meat, cultured meat, and cell-based meat. For this website, we use the name cultivated meat, as it is a neutral term that consumer research has found to be both accurately descriptive and appealing. This term is also linguistically flexible, as it allows us to talk about the process of “meat cultivation,” the act of “cultivating meat,” the product of “cultivated meat,” and the production apparatus “cultivator” which is a common name for the bioreactors used in this form of meat production.
For more detail, see GFI’s Meat Cultivation: Embracing the Science of Nature and GFI’s Consumer Response to Cellular Agriculture Messaging and Nomenclature: A Focus Group Pilot Study.
In 1931, Winston Churchill wrote an essay called “Fifty Years Hence” in which he posited the concept of growing meat without farming animals. He wrote, “We shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium.”
In 2004, a Dutch entrepreneur named Willem van Eelen and a research team launched the InVitro Meat Project with government funding. Two of the researchers in that program, Professor Mark Post and Peter Verstrate cultivated the world’s first no-cow hamburger at Maastricht University in 2013 (82 years hence). Since this breakthrough, more than 75 startups in 19 different countries have been publicly announced.
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