the new meat

The other night I had a bit of Hungarian salami as a starter to a creative dinner. The sausage came in red chunks, soft and warm, and it tasted marvelous. It had been cooked up on a hog farm in the puszta only days before landing on my plate, by the father of a friend. It was the kind of meat I'd like to eat – produced lovingly and with care for the animals involved.

For various reasons but mostly to avoid the worst food industry abominations, I have decreased my meat consumption dramatically this year. Meat is cut from animals, and as long as animals are not treated as such but considered meat-production facilities, I want nothing to do with it. I will stay away from meat whose origins and peri-slaughter I cannot assess. The gobs of sausage on my plate were only the forth bit of meat I've eaten this year, and my body soaked up the B12 with immediacy of an addict on withdrawal.

I don't curtail my meat intake because of health or environmental reasons, but I can see how this could be important to others. In fact, the discussion about the perceived unsustainability of an omnivorous diet has been waged with increasing intensity. Thirty percent of all landmass is apparently dedicated to raising livestock, either by using it as pasture or to produce animal feed. And more greenhouse gases are emitted in the process than by all means of transportation combined.

At the same time, more and more people start eating meat, mostly in developing countries where people can finally afford a bit more than beans and rice. This bit more is often a chicken, and on lucky occasions a steak. As a scientist, you have to wonder what happened to those dreams of the futuristic fifties that meat would soon be prepared synthetically, without the time- and energy-wasting detour through the animal. It turns out that there is still no viable artificial meat, but researchers all over the world are working on it.

I found out about this by chance, when I happened upon an article in the journal of Trends in Food Science and Technology that reviewed the current state of the art in tissue engineering of skeletal muscle, as artificial meat production is called among the in-crowd. As not many will hold a subscription to this journal, I'll take the time to briefly summarize the article, to review the review if you will.

What we like to eat is muscle, slowly matured and well-exercised. How hard can it be to grow it up in gigantic petri dishes and do away with the hoofs and heels and the skin and bones, and also with the farts? Very difficult, it turns out. It begins with a good starting material. One needs stem cells of a sort that live long enough and can be triggered to differentiate into muscle cells. No one has a golden bullet yet, but if that were the only problem, things would look bright indeed.

However, there are more obstacles to growing meat in-vitro. Here's a list of considerations: Meat is not only muscle cells, but intact muscle fiber. Muscle fiber needs connective tissue and fat cells. Growing three different cell types at precise relative rates in culture is a veritable nightmare. But three cell types might not be all it takes.

At some point, a cultured tissue reaches a thickness where diffusion isn't sufficient anymore for the delivery of nutrients to the center-most cells. Blood vessels are necessary. Inducing their growth and assuring their correct function is not trivial.

Developing the right culture medium is another challenge. Besides energy and simple nutrients, which suffice for bacterial cultures, growth factors and hormones are required to grow mammalian cells. These factors are currently derived from bovine serum, for which alternatives have to be found. Otherwise the entire scheme would be self-defeating. It has been suggested that bacteria or fungi could produce the growth factors, but this would add another layer of complexity.

Illustrating just how far from reality any dreams of artificial meat are, even if all the problems above were resolved, we still wouldn't be assured that what's harvested from the incubator is a tasty, juicy steak. The color might be off. The flavor might be distinctly artificial. Both can be helped by the food additive industry, but what about texture? What you feel between your teeth is muscle that has been worked out for years. How do you work something out that floats languidly in an enormous stainless-steel vat?

There are quite clearly countless stumbling blocks on the road to artificial meat, but the biggest will only be faced (if and) once such meat is actually produced. Will people eat it? In light of the unending hysteria about genetically modified food it is baffling to me that the article ends by claiming cheerfully that "the idea that people would eat meat originating from the lab does not seem so farfetched". This sounds wildly over-optimistic to me, and I know that I rather have the real stuff, even if it's less of it.