Make your own meat with open-source cells – no animals necessary

IMAGINE producing meat at home without killing animals. With a few cells and a keg, the process could be no more complicated than brewing your own beer or pickling vegetables. That’s the vision of Isha Datar, the CEO of New Harvest, a non-profit organisation aiming to create everything from burgers to silk from cell cultures. “It’s like designing a new universe,” she told Hello Tomorrow, an event that brought together technology entrepreneurs in Paris last year.

Cultured meat isn’t a new idea but it has largely focused on mass-producing beef and pork. In 2013, the first tasting of a lab-grown burger in London grabbed headlines, but the showpiece cost €300,000 and took a year to create. The taste of the burger was described as intense, “close to meat but not as juicy“. Growing large quantities of meat from cells in a sustainable way is still far off. As Datar says, “there are so many breakthroughs required”.

One of the biggest problems is producing a thick enough piece of meat. The hamburger created for the press event was made by combining several small lab-grown pieces. Since meat is predominantly made of muscle, the process currently involves harvesting muscle stem cells from an animal’s body. These are the self-renewing cells that are activated after an injury to repair the damage. They are then coaxed to multiply in the lab by mimicking the job of blood vessels, feeding them with nutrients and oxygen. Although scaffolds are typically used, they struggle to supply every cell as the tissue gets thicker.

Some types of meat may be easier to scale up than others, though. Paul Mozdziak from North Carolina State University and his colleagues, who are working on producing cultured turkey meat, have found that avian muscle cells may not need a scaffold to grow. Instead, they could be cultured in a vessel like a keg or bioreactor, which would allow larger samples to form. Avian cells seem to be able to adjust to different environments more easily than bovine cells, says Datar, so they would be more conducive to home culturing.

Last year, New Harvest started funding Mozdziak’s turkey-meat work. Although many enthusiasts of lab-grown meat are driven by animal welfare, Mozdziak is simply motivated to advance food science. He is excited to get to the stage where he has edible pieces of meat to sample. “I’m curious about what it will taste like and how tender it will be,” he says. “It should have almost the same texture as existing meat but we don’t know for sure.”

Taste is a complicated issue for researchers trying to engineer meat because all different kinds of tissue contribute to flavour. Meat isn’t pure muscle: its fat content is responsible for much of its culinary appeal. But Mozdziak and his team found that certain turkey cell cultures could be coaxed to form fat along with muscle when subjected to specific conditions. And the process could be tweaked to combine the muscle and fat into a desired consistency. However, it will probably be easier to replicate the texture of a nugget than to apply the technique to try to replicate a tender prime fillet of beef.

“Taste is a complicated issue because all different kinds of tissue contribute to the flavour”

Experimentation will be key. But the first hurdle often faced by enthusiasts is obtaining cells to start the process. At the moment, muscle stem cells are most easily obtained from fresh meat at a slaughterhouse or from live animals – preferably young ones since their stem cells are more plentiful. But harvesting them is hard work.

Datar hopes to change that by making cell lines available for order from lab supply catalogues or by linking up researchers so those with cultures can share them with others, much as people share sourdough starters to make bread. For Datar, “it would be like open-source software. The cells are the code.”

Mozdziak thinks that a scaled-up cultured meat prototype could be available in three to five years, but would take longer to appear on supermarket shelves or to join the ranks of DIY food. But once the process is refined, meat as we know it can be reinvented, for example, by creating novel flavours and consistencies. “It’s absolutely possible to tweak taste and texture,” says Mozdziak.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Make your own meat”