What's the beef? Cultured meat remains a distant dream

“It’s an intense taste, close to meat but not as juicy,” says Hanni Rützler between mouthfuls. “Perfect consistency, but I miss salt and pepper.”

Rützler, an Austrian nutrition scientist, is the first person in history to tuck into a burger made by turning cells from live animals into meat in the lab. She was part of a tasting panel convened in London yesterday for the cooking and eating of the world’s first lab-grown burger. The consensus was that the burger tasted of meat, but lacked meat’s delectable fatty juiciness.

It took five years of research and a charitable donation of €250,000 from Google co-founder Sergey Brin to get to yesterday’s demonstration, but turning lab-grown meat into a commercial proposition still seems a distant dream. Two years ago, Mark Post from Maastricht University in the Netherlands, the researcher behind the prototype burger, predicted it would possible to produce a sausage or burger within six months to a year. Now he reckons it will take 10 to 20 years to make it commercially viable.

If that does happen, aside from the obvious boon of producing slaughter-free meat, there could also be huge environmental benefits.

A study published two years ago by Hanna Tuomisto of the University of Oxford and M. Joost Teixeira de Mattos of the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands compared the environmental costs of producing 1000 kilograms of farmed and lab-grown beef. It concluded that cultured meat would require less than 1 per cent of the land needed to produce the equivalent amount of beef. What’s more, producing lab beef would consume about 4 per cent of the water and about half the energy needed for the same amount of farmed beef, and would produce only 4 per cent of the greenhouse emissions.

Replication cycles

To make the burger eaten yesterday, Post needed 20,000 slivers of muscle grown over three months, each 1 millimetre thick by 2.5 centimetres long. These slivers are grown from a type of “satellite” stem cell that occurs naturally in the muscle of cattle, repairing damaged tissue by generating new muscle cells. With the help of a “growth gel” cocktail of bovine fetal serum and antibiotics, the cells replicate 50 times in the lab before they stall, and then a new batch is required from an animal. This is better than the 30 cycles Post achieved with the pig cells he was working with two years ago.

“At 50 cycles, we can theoretically produce 10 metric tonnes of meat from one biopsy,” says Post. That’s enough for 90,000 quarter-pounder burgers. “With usual doubling times of 24 to 30 hours, it takes only around 7 weeks to go from 1 cell to 10 tonnes,” says Post.

Post has also improved the process he uses to convert the cells into muscle by stretching them. Previously, he stretched the cells by attaching them to moving surfaces using Velcro. Now, he grows them around a central column of growth gel. As the cells multiply and attach to each other to form a ring around the column, the surface tension between them stretches them out. Once the cells have thickened enough, they are stripped off the ring as 2.5-centimetre-long strands of muscle fibre.

A little bland

Yesterday’s event was “mostly to prove we can do it”, Post told the audience, but he knows future incarnations will have to be tastier to get consumers on board. The burger presented was made mostly of muscle cells, with beet juice and saffron added to impart a pinkish colour, and breadcrumbs to improve the consistency. But with no fat or bone cells to provide flavour, it left some of the tasters feeling it was a little bland.

To that end, Post is developing ways to culture fat cells from cattle so that they can be present alongside the muscle tissue. And by growing the muscle cells under low-oxygen conditions, he has managed to increase the amount of the red-coloured oxygen-carrier myoglobin in each cell, which will give the meat a more natural colour.

A lack of research funding is one major reason for the slow progress. So far, cash for such projects has come mostly from wealthy individuals like Brin or animal advocacy organisations like People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). The only public funding for cultured meat has come from the Dutch government, between 2005 and 2009, and from NASA, which supported a small-scale project.

“The only thing it will take to move things forward from the burger is money,” says Isha Datar, director of New Harvest, a charity based in Toronto, Canada, that was set up in 2004 to promote and fund the development of cultured meat. It has helped to fund almost all the projects currently under way, including Post’s (see “No abattoir required”, below).

New cottage industry

Ultimately Datar hopes that cultured meat technology will reach a point where it becomes easy to manage and widely available, spawning cottage industries akin to those that produce wine, beer and cheese. “I would like to see it continue as a grass-roots movement,” she says.

Datar does not see it replacing existing farming practice. “It’s not going to ruin and take over the meat industry.” She says cultured meat will “just be another product in the meat portfolio” and a niche product at that because it will be expensive, at least to begin with. Its ethical credentials will help attract rich and influential backers, she argues. “It’s about values and beliefs and a solution for our planet, so it’s much more than just the product itself,” she says.

And at the moment, that product is the lone burger. But Post is confident that commercialisation is simply a matter of time. “We’ve managed it up to the hamburger with just four people in two years,” he told the audience. “That we could do this in such a short time attests to the claim that we can come up with a viable solution to scale up within 10 years.”